According to this salon.com post by Bill Maher, the worst menace isn't Mark Foley. Not by a long shot. Focus, instead on legions of corporate and government predators. Though this was written in October 2006, I didn't notice it until today. As always, Maher doesn't pull any punches: [Foley] was…
Take a look at the front page of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
You can see the photo of an Iraqi man grieving over the body of his three-year-old daughter outside of the Baghdad hospital. According to the paper, “the girl was killed and three other family members injured when they were caught in crossfire as clashes erupted between gunmen and US forces.”
The lead story starts with this assertion:
The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. The current approach is not working, and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing.
This story line and this photograph clearly impugn the integrity of the United States. Publishing such information is unpatriotic. Or, at least, those are the sorts of things we’ve been told, until recently.
It was always OK to publish pictures of our proud soldiers and our high-tech missiles taking off, of course. It was up to Al Jazeera and the Europeans to publish pictures of what happened when those missiles exploded on the ground, however. And when those non-American media sources published those photos of Iraqi civilian carnage, it infuriated “America.” It’s not that American soldiers weren’t also credible witnesses to the civilian killings on the ground. The evidence was there to be published, if anyone cared to know.
For most of the past 3 1/2 years, the Post-Dispatch (along with most mainstream newspapers across the United States) did not publish pictures like this, certainly not in prominent places. It simply wasn’t deemed news …
We've heard a lot about the alleged attack on Christmas (and Christianity), especially from Bill O'Reilly. Here's a site that suggests what it would really be like if there were a war on Chistianity in the U.S.
Americans work a lot. According to this chart, we work 400 hours more per year than workers in many European countries. In fact, we work the equivalent of 10 workweeks per year more. What would you say if your boss walked into your office and asked you whether you would like to have an additional 10 weeks of vacation per year?
According to Juliet Schor, author of the overworked American (1991), American productivity has more than doubled since 1948. We could thus produce our 1948 standard of living in less than half the time that it took in 1948. The average worker could now be taking off every other year with pay. We do not use any of this increase in productivity to reduce our hours, however. Instead, we have continued to work harder and harder (many of us work two jobs) in order to have or maintain higher material standard of living.
Schor raises this question: “what if satisfaction depends, not on absolute levels of consumption, but on one’s level relative to others?” She suggests that our “consumerist treadmill” and hour-long our jobs have combined to form in “insidious cycle of work and spend.”
We often work hard only after commuting long distances. And we have to pay for those expensive cars and the fuel goes in them. The net result is another decrease in leisure time. According to Schor, between 1960 and 1986, the time parents actually had available to do with children fell at least 10 hours …
Dangerous idea, that.
If you were in charge–if you were King–what would do? What would fix? What would you ignore?
The Socratic ideal is the philosopher king, whose first act upon accession to the throne is to abdicate. The idea being that a truly ethical thinker would refuse to accept the responsibility to rule a nation.
Pity the world doesn’t work that way.
The problem with such systems–and there are many, including those proposed by certain self-proclaimed Libertarians–is that human nature refuses to cooperate. There’s a kind of Malthusian coefficient involved–population growth always outstrips the potential for ideal behavior. All such utopian systems are based on one fallacy that keeps gumming up all the works of any system anyone cares to name.
The fallacy is that We’re All Alike.
It’s a widely touted formula–the things that we have in common outnumber those that divide us; underneath we’re all the same; people are people. The Libertarians believe as an article of faith that if government got out of everybody’s way, we’d all be fine because people basically know what’s best for themselves and their immediate circle of intimates. Socialists believe (mostly) that without class structures, everyone would get along quite nicely. Communists like to assume avarice is an aberration that can somehow be bred out of the species.
If only.
It’s not so much that we’re so very different–but that we’re alike in such individualized ways.
The fact is, we come in all shapes, sizes, talents, capacities, points of view, …