Sunday, December 31, 2017

"Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. That’s what’s wrenching society apart"



"human beings, the ultrasocial mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other people, are being peeled apart. Economic and technological change play a major role, but so does ideology. Though our wellbeing is inextricably linked to the lives of others, everywhere we are told that we will prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.

In Britain, men who have spent their entire lives in quadrangles – at school, at college, at the bar, in parliament – instruct us to stand on our own two feet. The education system becomes more brutally competitive by the year. Employment is a fight to the near-death with a multitude of other desperate people chasing ever fewer jobs. The modern overseers of the poor ascribe individual blame to economic circumstance. Endless competitions on television feed impossible aspirations as real opportunities contract... 

If social rupture is not treated as seriously as broken limbs, it is because we cannot see it. But neuroscientists can. A series of fascinating papers suggest that social pain and physical pain are processed by the same neural circuits. This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to describe the impact of breaking social bonds without the words we use to denote physical pain and injury. In both humans and other social mammals, social contact reduces physical pain. This is why we hug our children when they hurt themselves: affection is a powerful analgesic. Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress of separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation and drug addiction."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/12/neoliberalism-creating-loneliness-wrenching-society-apart

I am a much better person,  all around, when I am in community with people I can rely on and who can rely on me. Qe can achieve so nice note than the sum if our parts if we were to emphasize healthy models of support and reliance instead of fearing re bogeyman of toxic codependency (except of course within your state-sanctioned nuclear-family). 

Individualism seems like a particular piece of the project of white-masculinity. I'm really intrigued by the argument that this particular social identity was intentionally socially crafted and designed by European enlightenment thinkers. It's based on various false assumptions about what it means to be human and what it means to be superior. 

I also wonder if this is a reason why it's much easier for white men than others to stay in "high success" positions - this idea that you have to be really independent in order to be successful. It's going to trigger stereotype threat (given that basically everyone besides white men is stereotyped as groupish and interdependent, while we ignore the ways that successful white men have relied on the labor of white women and people of color to tend to their physical and emotional needs), and it's going to make it hard to seek the support and community that is necessary to feel social belongingness because seeking support will feel like a violation of the rules of the identity you are trying to build. 

Related: why animals do drugs; another loneliness article; no more work friends; pull something on social touch?; how lone genius myth creates imposter syndrome; the enlightenment project 


FB: "Of all the fantasies human beings entertain, the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd and perhaps the most dangerous. We stand together or we fall apart." 

Saturday, December 30, 2017

"What Are the Lessons of the Post-Weinstein Moment?"



"RT: This is such the Rorschach test, because for me what it hammers home, the masturbatory stuff, is that it’s not about sex or contact or the other person at all —
RD: It’s about power, right?
RT: And humiliation. All of the details of these stories, the ass-grabbing while a photograph is being taken or while your wife is right next to you. The brazenness of some of it. Stuff that you’re like, Okay, it doesn’t rationally comport with desire. It conveys that the thrill is not in the contact, but in getting away with domination or humiliation and thus affirming your power.
RD: I think women shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which male sexual desire is distinctive and strange and (to women) irrational-seeming.
Saying “It’s power, not sex” excludes too much.
RT: That some sex is about power?
RD: That it’s always about sex. It might be about power in 17 different ways … but there’s still sex there at the heart of it. The masturbation in the plant is just not the same thing as Harvey Weinstein humiliating a male assistant. There’s a sex thing at the bottom of almost every case where someone says, “It’s about power, not sex.”
RT: This may be splitting hairs. I’ve heard that from a lot of men over the past few weeks. But women are saying this is about power. And as the people who don’t have the power, it’s very clear that it’s about power. It suggests to me that maybe a male sexual brain understands sex to be about power to begin with —
RD: Or the male sexual brain understands power to be about sex, to be a means to sex. Like the line from Scarface, the Tony Montana line: “First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.” That’s not every male sexual brain … but that is a very male sexual brain, a very male way to think."


This is a great conversation to read, two people being productive from very different perspectives on society.

(I just pulled a bit where there was a bunch of back and forth)

Friday, December 29, 2017

"'Products Of The Soil': Identity Crisis In An Indian Catholic Church"



"The Syro-Malabar community has been called Christian in faith, Syrian in worship, and Indian in culture, a fitting trichotomy for a religion whose center is the Holy Trinity. The term Syro-Malabar comes in part from the religion's binal roots: Syro-Malabar masses used to be held in Syriac, and Malabar is the name of India's lush, southwestern shore, where the community originated...

From the time I was young, I have heard and repeated the faith's origin story my parents passed down to me: that St. Thomas the Apostle visited Kerala in the first century A.D., bringing Christianity to a state whose tourist bureau has since labeled it "God's Own Country." There is no historical proof that St. Thomas actually visited south India, but there are records of Indian Christians in Kerala dating back to the third century. Syro-Malabar families believe they are descendants of high-caste Brahmin families who were converted by St. Thomas himself.

Jaisy Joseph, author of The Struggle for Identity Among Syro-Malabar Catholics, remembers being told by a Hindu classmate that she was the product of colonization. Her rebuttal was simple: "We are products of the soil."

Syro-Malabar Catholics, she said, were not created by conquerors or inorganic to India. Rather, the community takes pride in knowing it was Christian when the Vatican was still a pipe dream."



There were parts of Northern/Eastern Africa that has Jews, Christians, and Muslims before parts of Europe had been converted to Christianity at all. I learned this in a college history course and for some reason it has really stuck with me, something about how much we lose so much knowledge when we center Europe.

Thursday, December 28, 2017

"Political journalism has been profoundly shaped by men like Leon Wieseltier and Mark Halperin"



"What does it mean that these men — and so many others liked them — held the power to literally shape America’s political narrative? What does it mean, as New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister noted on Twitter, that the story of, say, Hillary Clinton’s public career was told by these sorts of men?

One does not need to dig very deep into Halperin and Wieseltier’s work to find echoes of their private behavior in their public comments. “For Leon, women fell on a spectrum ranging from Humorless Prig to Game Girl, based on how much of his sexual banter, innuendo, and advances she would put up with,” writes Cottle. It’s an observation that sheds considerable light on Wieseltier’s oft-expressed contempt for Clinton. In 2007, Wieseltier told the New York Times that she was “like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you about it until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone.”"




FB: "We routinely underestimate what it means that our political system has been constructed and interpreted by men, that our expectations for politicians have been set by generations of male politicians and shaped by generations of male pundits."

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

"Joyner Lucas’ “Im Not Racist” Addresses Racial Tension Within Trump’s America"

The first half of the video with more than 2.5 million views is dedicated to the white man who yells at the black male about how black people are lazy, black males are bad fathers and that there is a double standard when it comes to the N-word. 
It is pretty clear that the Trump supporter's anger is rooted in years of Fox News consumption and very little knowledge about black people. In the video, he insists after a blistering rant that he knows black people – about two black people – and that means that he isn't a racist.”

http://creators.blavity.com/joyner-lucas-im-not-racist-music-video


Wowowowow, watch the video really really.


On the face of it, it’s a dialogue between two people, but I think it’s also such a great representation of internalized racism. It can’t be just me who has a man like that in their head, saying those words whenever you make a mistake or feel inadequate or are feeling word down by systemic racism.  I am constantly imagining myself in scenes like the one in this video, except it’s in moments when I’m tired and I can’t imagine that my words would be convincing and the guy just gets to keep feeling like he’s right. So it’s cathartic and beautiful to see a different ending, to imagine a reality where I deliver a monologue and he guy listens and learns.

"When there are no good words for mental illness, how are we supposed to ask for help?"



"But, I didn’t have the language to actually say I need help. My mom needs help. I’m scared. I harbored feelings of confusion and fear for a long time. It was nearly impossible for me to explain to people why she rarely visited me in college. Only a few of my closest friends knew the details. But even when I wanted to share what was happening with someone, I didn’t have the right words.
“What do you mean your mom doesn’t leave the house?” close friends’ expressions seemed to ask me when I explained why my mom wasn’t at a swim meet or a school play. “So your mom is a shut-in?” another friend asked. And, “don’t say your mom is crazy,” when I let it out in frustration. “But she really is,” I had replied. I was wrong to stigmatize someone with a mental illness, and I know better than that now. But when I was younger, I was met with disbelief for what I was going through, and I had no other way to express what was a reality."


Tuesday, December 26, 2017

"Calibri is the new Comic Sans"



" A humanist sans-serif was appropriate for tech in the new millennium, where our Apple computers came in transparent shades of neon plastic and the first iPhone debuted in 2007. It represented modernity, sleek design, and a dramatic change from Times New Roman whose familiarity came from its ubiquity in traditional print media like newspapers, books, and other ancient artifacts...

Calibri has more in common with Comic Sans than it does with the classic chicness of Miedinger and Hoffmann’s neo-grotesque masterpiece. The design feature most offending to the senses is Calibri’s rounded terminals. As the three figures below illustrate, Calibri, like Comic Sans, is infantile and contradictory to the modern aesthetic essential to good sans-serif typefaces."


Monday, December 25, 2017

"Biotech, Meet Crowdfunding"



"The JOBS Act—or Jumpstart Our Business Startups—opened the door for U.S. companies to take advantage of equity-based crowdfunding. In the fall of 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rolled out proposed regulations on how these opportunities could take shape through online portals similar to WiSeed. The public comment period on these regulations ended earlier this month. If finalized, the regulations would, for the first time, allow private companies to reach out to the crowd for investments and tap into a potentially massive pool of wealth just waiting for the right pitch to come along—a possibility that’s particularly appealing to small, cash-strapped biotech startups.

“There’s a lot of talking in all biotech circles about crowdfunding,” said Lorenzo Pellegrini, a venture capitalist with Care Capital in Princeton, New Jersey. The biotech industry could benefit substantially from expanded crowdfunding opportunities. For one, early-stage firms often struggle to attract investors...

 “For us, crowdfunding this has a lot to do with raising our profile around the world,” said Elaine Warburton, the CEO and cofounder of QuantuMDx.
“For life sciences, I really like the idea of donation-based crowdfunding, because it allows people who might be doing charitable giving to put money into something they may feel will realize some true value more quickly or in a more focused fashion for something that’s pertinent to their life,” said Nelsen. And even small amounts of money raised from donations can help a startup appeal to serious investors."



This was from a few years ago, I'd be interested in an update on the ~state of crowdfunding~ in 

Sunday, December 24, 2017

"Facebook Could Be Associated With a Longer Life, Study Finds"



"The paper, published in the journal PNAS on Monday, asserts that the health effects of active online social lives largely mirror the benefits of busy offline social lives.

“We find that people with more friends online are less likely to die than their disconnected counterparts,” the paper says. “This evidence contradicts assertions that social media have had a net-negative impact on health.”

The study’s methods are detailed at length in the paper, and it was approved by three university and state review boards. But skeptics will note that Facebook itself was closely involved with the paper...

The study was based on 12 million social media profiles made available to the researchers by Facebook, as well as records from the California Department of Health.

It found that “moderate use” of Facebook was associated with the lowest mortality rate, and that receiving friend requests correlated with reduced mortality, but that sending friend requests did not.

Mr. Hobbs and the paper’s other authors matched records from California’s Department of Public Health with those of California Facebook users, preserving privacy by aggregating the data before analyzing it, the release said. All of the subjects of the study were born from 1945 to 1989...

"All of the conceptual and linguistic back flips being done here in trying to explain that the virtual world interacts with the real world could be circumvented by instead taking for granted that digital connection is new and different but that it’s also part of this one social reality,” Mr.Jurgenson wrote."



I believe this; I feel like I keep on having conversations about how real and valid our online-based relationships are. It's not the 90s era friendships with people you javelin never met in person who you only know as a username, it's people you have met but who just aren't in your daily life enough for daily interactions to nourish a full friendship . (And, I'm sure that those 90s-style friendships can be nourishing too, I'm just irritated by the way that popular conception of the internet sometimes seems trapped in myths from 10+ years ago about how rewarding Internet was just predators and bullying ) . 

Saturday, December 23, 2017

"Native English speakers are the world’s worst communicators"

"When such misunderstandings happen, it’s usually the native speakers who are to blame. Ironically, they are worse at delivering their message than people who speak English as a second or third language, according to Chong.

“A lot of native speakers are happy that English has become the world’s global language. They feel they don’t have to spend time learning another language,” says Chong. “But… often you have a boardroom full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them.”...

At meetings, he adds, “typically, native English speakers dominate about 90% of the time. But the other people have been invited for a reason.”...

Nerriere devised Globish — a distilled form of English, stripped down to 1,500 words and simple but standard grammar. “It’s not a language, it’s a tool,” he says. Since launching Globish in 2004 he’s sold more than 200,000 Globish text books in 18 languages.

“If you can communicate efficiently with limited, simple language you save time, avoid misinterpretation and you don’t have errors in communication,” Nerriere says."

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20161028-native-english-speakers-are-the-worlds-worst-communicators



FB:  “English speakers with no other language often have a lack of awareness of how to speak English internationally.”

Friday, December 22, 2017

"A Wisconsin Republican Looks Back With Regret at Voter ID and Redistricting Fights"



"You need to understand, I come from the old school of the “Institution of the Senate.” When I was coming up through the ranks, and even when I was majority leader, I put great stock and respect into the chairmanship system. When you were given a chair of a committee, you were expected to put the good of the Senate above all else. So when the chair of the Senate elections committee says there’s a problem with voter fraud in the state, and the committee passes a bill out, you take them at their word.

But that’s on me... 

You know, I had, I think it’s fair to say, a reputation for challenging the thinking of our caucuses. But if you find yourself in a situation where you’re dissenting too often, pretty soon people go, “Well, he never agrees with us, he’s not really one of us. We’re not going to bother to listen.” So, you learn to pick your spots and try to make a difference where you can."


Thursday, December 21, 2017

"Why Millennial Pink Refuses to Go Away"



"For one thing, with Millennial Pink, gone is the girly-girl baggage; now it’s androgynous. (Interestingly, back in 1918, the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department published an article saying, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls.”) In these Instagram-filtered times, it doesn’t hurt that the color happens to be both flattering and generally pleasing to the eye, but it also speaks to an era in which trans models walk the runway, gender-neutral clothing lines are the thing, and man-buns abound. It’s been reported that at least 50 percent of millennials believe that gender runs on a spectrum — this pink is their genderless mascot... 

December 2014: Of all pink-related tags on Tumblr, #palepink becomes the most popular, used even more than #pink itself. Some take to calling the shade Tumblr Pink. Tumblr’s fashion and art lead, Valentine Uhovski, says, “Tumblr Pink is a tone that somehow merges the millennial futurism and mid-century idealism all at once.”... 

Natalie Diaz: Natives are not red any more than African or African-American people are black or Asians are yellow. Most white people, however, are pink, not white. A more accurate color than Millennial Pink might be: white. A shady white, as white can be so often."


There is definitely also this pairing with a pale mint green that is happening too. 

Related: article if the pink blue thing with color if the year last year


FB: "It’s fundamentally a great color that had been gendered to the point where it became obsolete, and now that maybe people can relax about that, it’s just a great color."

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

"The Biggest Loser in the Alabama Election"



"Our concern here is with a cabal of noisy conservatives, whom the press has apparently (and unjustly) appointed as spokesmen for all conservatives. This group pretends that the choice for someone like Moore represents unalloyed godliness and refuses to unmistakably criticize immorality in other leaders they admire. To justify or ignore the moral failings of a politician because he champions your favored policies—well, that is to step onto the path of self-deception and hypocrisy, which according to Jesus, leads to no less place than hell (Matt. 23:15).
Of course, this charge of hypocrisy cuts both ways. It has applied equally well to progressive and moderate Christians, who have in the past turned a blind eye to the moral failings and moral bankruptcy of liberal candidates they support and who have decided, at best, to whisper truth to power lest they delegitimize their candidate or office holder...

As recently as 2011, PRRI found that only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” But by late 2016, when Donald Trump was running for president, that number had risen sharply to 72 percent—the biggest shift of any US religious group.
The reason for the flip is not hard to discern. David Brody, a correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network, has noted the desperation and urgency felt throughout much of conservative Christianity. “The way evangelicals see the world, the culture is not only slipping away—it’s slipping away in all caps, with four exclamation points after that. It’s going to you-know-what in a handbasket.” The logic is then inexorable: “Where does that leave evangelicals? It leaves them with a choice. Do they sacrifice a little bit of that ethical guideline they’ve used in the past in exchange for what they believe is saving the culture?”"


This was a really informative read for gaining insight into the perspectives of conservative Christians. Particularly their perception of liberal Christians.


I want to sit down and have a long discussion about this.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

https://www.thecut.com/2017/11/rebecca-traister-on-the-post-weinstein-reckoning.html

"Your Reckoning. And Mine." 

"Because I used to work at The New Republic, though not with Leon Wieseltier, who recently lost his post at a new magazine after the exposure of his decades as a harasser, I’ve heard from many friends and former colleagues who are pained about the situation. “He was, really, my champion,” one woman told me. “All these things about him are true, but it is simultaneously true that if you were on his good side, you felt special — protected, cared for, like he believed in you and wanted you to succeed.” In a profession where far too few women find that kind of support from powerful men, Wieseltier’s mentorship felt like a prize.
But many of even his most conflicted former admirers admit that the stories about him — reportedly thanking women for wearing short skirts, kissing colleagues against their will, threatening to tell the rest of the company he was fucking a subordinate if she displeased him — have convinced them that sacking Wieseltier was the correct choice. They’re sad for him, for his family, but he should not be in charge of women. It has left some of them reexamining how they excused his conduct, worked around it: how they were, in the parlance of Michelle Cottle, who wrote with nuance about Wieseltier, “game girls,” and thus reaped the professional rewards. “I got so much from him intellectually and emotionally, but I wonder if part of it was because I was game,” says one woman, “and what’s the cost of that?”
Other women who played along with their bosses expressed a degree of shame, as well as pride. “Men have their fraternities and golf games to get ahead. Why shouldn’t I have used the advantage of my sexuality to my benefit? God, what else was I supposed to do?”"



FB: "Men have not succeeded in spite of their noxious behavior or disregard for women; in many instances, they’ve succeeded because of it. They’ve been patted on the back and winked along — their retro-machismo hailed as funny or edgy — at the same places that are now dramatically jettisoning them. “The incredible hypocrisy of the boards, employers, institutions, publicists, brothers, friends who have been protecting powerful men/harassers/rapists for years and are now suddenly dropping them,” says one of my colleagues at New York, livid and depressed. “What changed? Certainly not their beliefs about the behavior, right? Only their self-interest."

"maybe white pushback against the African American History Museum is about something more"



"I haven’t been to the museum yet, but I expect there are exhibits on slavery. My ancestors include white slave-owners in the South. That’s my history too.

I haven’t taken a deep breath while standing before this museum, but I expect to read about how our Constitution didn’t value black Americans as full people. My ancestors supported that. That’s my history too...

Actually, to spotlight Texas for a moment, I want to quote this too: “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.” I’m spending so much time pointing out the racist roots here because I’ve seen recent pushback against them and because I am dismayed by my own history here...
African American history is American history. It is. But as white people have historically gotten to write the history books and control the biases there, we have been able to rewrite stories to favor us a bit more. (One reason black homeschooling is on the rise, in fact, is this failure for public schools to teach history through anything but a Euro-centric lens.) . . . 

We might have to get comfortable with these stories on the lower levels of the museum, the stories of white people treating black people as subhuman, instead of camping out with the stories of those black stars we regard as superhuman in their exceptionality

Related: A "White History Month" project test addresses these parts of white history that only black people seem to know; slavery museum


FB: "When we, as white people in this country, say a museum of African American history doesn’t tell our stories too, we’re lying. It does. It just tells stories that don’t put us in the best light, stories that show our ancestors on the wrong side of history, stories that we’re simply not proud of."

Monday, December 18, 2017

"THE WHITE MEDIOCRITY OF “MINDHUNTER”"



"Ford’s mediocrity is increasingly apparent to everyone except, perhaps, the writer and director, who clearly envision him as a determined and dedicated individual hellbent on finding answers, but who the audience might peg as a white guy to whom white-guy things happen.
Opportunities for professional advancement fall in his lap and the “discoveries” he makes are coincidental and generally the result of the input of women far more intelligent than he is, including his grad student girlfriend Debbie Mitford (Hannah Gross) and his colleague Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv)

As for Mitford…well, you know it’s bad when you start developing theories that she’s a figment of Ford’s imagination since she doesn’t interact with anyone but him until halfway through the season. Predictably, Mindhunter falls back on time period to explain the dearth of both women and people of color. But what’s even more irritating is that the show considers these issues non-issues merely because they are (sort of) addressed with half-assed references to female empowerment that aren’t backed by actual opportunities for the show’s women. The same is true for the show’s treatment of Black Americans, with three striking references to Black folks that were as clumsy as they were offensive."

Sunday, December 17, 2017

"The Democrats Confront Monopoly"



"including proposals in the Better Deal to address consolidation, however light on details, could end up being a turning point. It marked the party’s first unified attempt to grapple with the structural economic barriers holding so many people back. Unlike Trump’s racio-economic populism, the story of monopolization isn’t a hoax, and it doesn’t pit ethnic groups against each other...

The idea that something’s got to be done about monopolies seemed to go from fringe argument to a pillar of the Democrats’ economic plan, at least rhetorically, overnight. But it didn’t really come out of nowhere. The Better Deal announcement, the New America dust-up—these were the bubblings of a movement that had been brewing for nearly a decade. The story of the Democrats becoming—maybe—the anti-monopoly party, the party of small business, is not just a politics story. It’s a story about how ideas win and lose and then, maybe, win again. And it’s the story of how a small group of political outsiders got the party establishment to adopt an idea that was essentially left for dead in 1978...

By the 1960s, it was understood that the federal government would intervene to keep firms from getting too big, period. In the 1961 case Brown Shoe Company v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a merger giving one company control over 2 percent of the nation’s shoe outlets violated the Clayton Act. But, perhaps because the movement was so successful, antitrust eventually came to lose its political cachet. It became “one of the faded passions of American reform,” wrote the historian Richard Hofstadter in 1964. Historians, he wrote, had come to “ignore antitrust for the same reason the public ignores it: it has become complex, difficult, and boring...

After the Reagan administration, following Bork’s lead, kicked off the era of lax antitrust enforcement and rampant mergers, the economy would begin a steady climb to levels of concentration not seen since before the original Progressive Era. The most intense wave of mergers has taken place in the years since the 2008 financial crash. According to an analysis by the Economist last year, two-thirds of all corporate sectors grew more concentrated between 1997 and 2012. Today, for example, three chains—Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid—control 99 percent of the nation’s pharmacies, and two of them tried to merge last year... 

That shout-out from Krugman, the first of several, was essentially an invitation to other economists to do research to test the hypothesis. Over the next few years, they would begin supplying the numbers to back up Lynn and Longman’s observations. But apart from Krugman, the reaction from prominent thinkers and writers was mostly silence. The dominant liberal worldview was still better captured by a 2005 paper written by a then up-and-coming liberal economist named Jason Furman. The title was “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story,” and it argued that liberals should celebrate Walmart for providing such cheap goods to poor people... 

Voters in 2016, unlike in 1936, weren’t used to hearing and thinking about the perils of monopoly. A recent piece in the Atlantic by Stacy Mitchell showed that use of the word “monopoly” in books peaked in 1949 and has since plummeted to 1880s—pre–Sherman Act—levels. Although Harper’s and the Washington Monthly had been raising the issue for years, more prominent elite media like the Economist and the Atlantic didn’t catch on until the 2016 primaries were under way. The mainstream press—major newspapers and network TV—still hasn’t. It’s a lot to ask of a political candidate, in the midst of a campaign, to simultaneously run on an issue and teach voters what it is.
“One of the things the Chicago School stole from us is the language,” said Zephyr Teachout, a law professor and member of Lynn’s post–New America group, the Open Markets Institute. “It sounds technical, but it’s actually deeply political, deeply moral. The loss of language was a central loss.”... 

But the pocketbook paradigm could be a trap. Voting is more an expression of tribal identity than a rational bet on the practical effects of policy. Promising to help voters’ bottom line only works if they trust you in the first place. And focusing just on prices ignores the issue of small business and regional competition. Cheap consumer goods can’t make up for the lost jobs and wages in the large swaths of the country denuded of local businesses by behemoths on the coasts... 

This will require angering some of the Democrats’ most important and deep-pocketed donors, something the party has not yet revealed an appetite for. The Better Deal, like the party platform before it, didn’t say a mumbling word about the new tech giants."

FB: This is long but enormously educational about not just monopolies but how political ideas develop and get turned into platforms "More broadly, an anti-monopoly, pro-competition agenda offers Democrats a way to make sense of what has gone so deeply wrong in our political and economic system without embracing either the revolutionary anti-capitalism of the far left or the anti-government nihilism of the right. Another way to say this is that anti-monopoly politics is a traditional American position—“the middle ground,” as Republican Senator Orrin Hatch recently put it, “between intrusive public management and corrosive private conduct.” "

"There’s An Elephant In Harvey Weinstein’s Hotel Room"



"In Hollywood, where both racism and sexism are rampant, what can look like a sort of mitigated blessing ends up highlighting another insidious problem in (the societal microcosm that is) Hollywood: Black women do not often come up for the kind of prestigious high-profile and award-winning roles that a producer with Weinstein’s power could offer.
Consider, for example, what Scottish film director Michael Caton-Jones told BuzzFeed News this week about a casting dispute with Weinstein. In 1998, he was in line to direct the Miramax-produced crime drama B. Monkey, and his first choice for the lead was black British actor Sophie Okonedo. Recalling a meeting between himself and Weinstein, Caton-Jones said: “Harvey kept saying to me, ‘Do you think she is fuckable?’” The frustrated director replied, “Don’t screw up the casting of this film because you want to get laid,” which apparently incensed Weinstein. After Caton-Jones was unceremoniously fired from the film following the conversation, Variety called him for a statement. He said he told the interviewer about harassment claims against Weinstein that he had heard about, ending the conversation with: “I don’t cast films according to Harvey Weinstein’s erection.” According to Caton-Jones, the reporter laughed. (In the end, Asia Argento, an Italian actor, got the role, and last week she was among the many women who publicly accused Weinstein of assaulting them.)... 

Sexual harassment is often predicated on a power differential, but life’s other isms complicate things further."



FB: it's so many layers of gross "If we are to discern a general message about black women (and other women of color) from the product churned out by Hollywood, it is that they are not seen as leading role material, and that is intertwined with the idea that they are not desirable “trophies.” At the very least, their near-absence in starring roles suggests a deep disinterest. After all, dominating and “winning” a trophy depends on the idea that other people want to win it too."