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Elizabeth Plank: Why We Love Angry Men, But Hate Impassioned Women (PolicyMic)
Elizabeth Plank: Why We Love Angry Men, But Hate Impassioned Women (PolicyMic)
In other words, a man is angry because he cares, while a woman is angry because she's an emotional wreck. Men who are angry don't only get more respect, status, and better job titles — they also get higher pay Despite the fact that men can use anger to achieve status, women may need to be calm in order to come off as rational. You know, so that people don't think they're PMS-ing, or whatever.
·policymic.com·
Elizabeth Plank: Why We Love Angry Men, But Hate Impassioned Women (PolicyMic)
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Why 'Accidental Racist' Is Actually Just Racist (The Atlantic)
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Why 'Accidental Racist' Is Actually Just Racist (The Atlantic)
I wouldn't call up Talib Kweli to record a song about gang violence in L.A., and I wouldn't call up KRS-ONE to drop a verse on a love ballad. The only real reason to call up LL is that he is black and thus must have something insightful to say about the Confederate Flag. The assumption that there is no real difference among black people is exactly what racism is. Our differences, our right to our individuality, is what makes us human. The point of racism is to rob black people of that right.
·theatlantic.com·
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Why 'Accidental Racist' Is Actually Just Racist (The Atlantic)
It Is Time for the 'Welfare Queen' Myth to Die (Addicting Info)
It Is Time for the 'Welfare Queen' Myth to Die (Addicting Info)
Let’s get this one thing straight: there are no Welfare Queens out there driving Cadillacs, having five kids specifically to get extra financial benefits from the government, getting free iPhones, and somehow getting rich off “your” money. NONE. There never were.
·addictinginfo.org·
It Is Time for the 'Welfare Queen' Myth to Die (Addicting Info)
Anders Zanichkowsky: Why I Oppose Marriage Equality
Anders Zanichkowsky: Why I Oppose Marriage Equality
I have two main problems with the marriage equality movement: 1. That its operation takes a tremendous amount of money, energy, and attention away from far more pressing issues. (Sometimes this is clear and direct, such as California spending $43 million on Prop 8 while $85 million was being cut from HIV/AIDS services. Sometimes this is more subtle, the successes of which can be measured when every single straight person I know uses their approval for same-sex marriage to demonstrate their allyship to me.) 2. That its strategies actively work against movements for queer economic justice, by removing capitalism, meaningful immigration reform, and gender/sexual deviance from the discussion entirely.
·azanichkowsky.wordpress.com·
Anders Zanichkowsky: Why I Oppose Marriage Equality
Anil Dash: Zuckerberg's FWD: Making Sure They Get It Right
Anil Dash: Zuckerberg's FWD: Making Sure They Get It Right
It's already clear that with FWD.us, the tech industry is going to have to reckon with exactly how real the realpolitik is going to get. If we're finally moving past our innocent, naive and idealistic lack of engagement with the actual dirty dealings of legislation, then let's try to figure out how to do it without losing our souls.
·dashes.com·
Anil Dash: Zuckerberg's FWD: Making Sure They Get It Right
Jon Caramanica: Lil Wayne and Other Rappers Run Afoul of Propriety (NYTimes.com)
Jon Caramanica: Lil Wayne and Other Rappers Run Afoul of Propriety (NYTimes.com)
these reactions are also a signal of how expendable hip-hop culture — and, by extension, black culture and youth culture — is to mainstream, predominantly white-owned corporations. These companies have been happy to associate with hip-hop while turning a blind eye to some of the genre’s rougher edges, but at the same time they have remained at arm’s length, all the better to dispose of hip-hop artists once their liabilities outweighed their assets.
·nytimes.com·
Jon Caramanica: Lil Wayne and Other Rappers Run Afoul of Propriety (NYTimes.com)
Luke Winkle: We Should Be More Cynical About Albums Claiming to Change the World (Village Voice)
Luke Winkle: We Should Be More Cynical About Albums Claiming to Change the World (Village Voice)
The entirety of our conversation has been extracted from what essentially was Shaking the Habitual's PR campaign. The Knife talked about how thoroughly political the new album was, and a bunch of smart people patiently waited to see how those ideas were manifested. This is understandable, because The Knife seem like earnest people with important and indisputably unique perspectives. But it seems we've let Karin and Olof's rhetoric blend over into what we're hearing. There's nothing wrong with context, but we can't let the creative forces frame an album for our consumption.
·blogs.villagevoice.com·
Luke Winkle: We Should Be More Cynical About Albums Claiming to Change the World (Village Voice)
Lindsay Zoladz: The Knife: Shaking the Habitual (Pitchfork)
Lindsay Zoladz: The Knife: Shaking the Habitual (Pitchfork)
Shaking the Habitual is, inarguably, an achievement. It is the Knife's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal: It provides a glimpse into the desires, intellectual enthusiasms and (unsurprisingly dense) reading list guiding one of music's most shadowy duos. At its most mesmerizing, its conceptual rigor and occasional inscrutability are overpowered by a disarming earnestness: It is a musical manifesto advocating for a better, fairer, weirder world. Shaking the Habitual feels not post-human but profoundly humanist, fueled by an unfashionable but profoundly refreshing faith in music's ability to hypnotize, to agitate, and to liberate.
·pitchfork.com·
Lindsay Zoladz: The Knife: Shaking the Habitual (Pitchfork)
Matthew Perpetua: The Knife Made the First Social Justice Goth Album (Buzzfeed Music)
Matthew Perpetua: The Knife Made the First Social Justice Goth Album (Buzzfeed Music)
Shaking the Habitual, like most of the music The Knife have made to date — along with singer Karin Dreijer Andersson's solo album as Fever Ray — is, at its core, very goth in its tone and themes. Relentlessly morbid, intentionally unsettling, and alluring in its romanticized bleakness. But despite this, it's pretty rare that you see anyone label The Knife as goth, perhaps because they've avoided the most obvious signifiers of the subculture every step of the way. The Knife aren't about goth as living in a permanent Halloween; they're about that connection between romance and horror. And those feelings are a big part of being engaged with social justice issues: the outrage directed at oppressors, the frustration with cultures that refuse to change, the unshakable fear that the world is only getting worse, the loneliness of feeling like a hated outsider, the thrill of finding a like-minded community. They've done this better than pretty much anyone else in music; it's just too bad that they went a bit too far in advertising it.
·buzzfeed.com·
Matthew Perpetua: The Knife Made the First Social Justice Goth Album (Buzzfeed Music)
Conrad Amenta: Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! (Cokemachineglow)
Conrad Amenta: Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! (Cokemachineglow)
Canada has a new subterranean truth, and that truth is that the majority of Canadians are conservative thinkers. I can think of no better time for one of Canada’s most respected protest bands, living in one of Canada’s most progressive cities, to talk about health care, taxation, First Nations and Aboriginal rights, women’s rights, fucking anything but how “The gatekeepers gazed upon their kingdom and declared that it was good.” Which: yeah. And?
·cokemachineglow.com·
Conrad Amenta: Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! (Cokemachineglow)
Ezra Klein: The most important issue of this election: Obamacare (Washington Post)
Ezra Klein: The most important issue of this election: Obamacare (Washington Post)
Which is all to say that, yes, this election matters more than most. It matters more politically because the party in power will likely see their agenda affirmed by a cyclical recovery. But it matters more to actual people because the Affordable Care Act is poised to reshape American health care in two years. A vote for Obama is a vote for the law to take effect and for 30 million Americans to get health insurance they won’t get otherwise. A vote for Romney is a vote for the law — and its spending and its taxes — to be repealed. There are few elections in which the stakes are so clear.
·washingtonpost.com·
Ezra Klein: The most important issue of this election: Obamacare (Washington Post)
Martha Raddatz and the faux objectivity of journalists | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Martha Raddatz and the faux objectivity of journalists | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Raddatz repeats big lies that are D.C. narrative—that Iran is a threat, that entitlement programs are ‘going broke’—during the debate as a showing of ‘objectivity’ as a journalist. Bullshit. These establishment journalists are creatures of the DC and corporate culture in which they spend their careers, and thus absorb and then regurgitate all of the assumptions of that culture. That may be inevitable, but having everyone indulge the ludicrous fantasy that they are "objective" and "neutral" most certainly is not.
·guardian.co.uk·
Martha Raddatz and the faux objectivity of journalists | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Andrew Cohen: No One in America Should Have to Wait 7 Hours to Vote (The Atlantic)
Andrew Cohen: No One in America Should Have to Wait 7 Hours to Vote (The Atlantic)
There is no hidden agenda here. The strategy and tactics are as far out in the open as those voters standing in line for hours waiting for their turn to vote. This transparency—of motive and of evidence—is also what distinguishes the complaints that Democrats have about Republican tricks on voting from Republican complaints about Democratic tricks on voting. Widespread "in-person" voter fraud or voting by illegal immigrants exists mostly in the minds of conspiracy theorists. Yet proof of voter suppression is visible to all of us with the naked eye. All we have to do is look. There is no political equivalence here—only more lamentable false equivalence.
·theatlantic.com·
Andrew Cohen: No One in America Should Have to Wait 7 Hours to Vote (The Atlantic)
Glenn Greenwald: Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory? (The Guardian)
Glenn Greenwald: Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory? (The Guardian)
With last night's results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.
·guardian.co.uk·
Glenn Greenwald: Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory? (The Guardian)
occupy.here | distributed wifi occupation
occupy.here | distributed wifi occupation
The new focus is to create a distributed network of wifi locations, each running an instance of the forum software, each serving those in its immediate vicinity. The content from one location’s forum can also migrate to other locations through a syncing mechanism that takes advantage of users moving from node to node. The long term goal is to deploy a broad network of wifi hardware running the Occupy.here software. In the short term the focus is limited to deploying the network throughout New York City in a number of locations to be determined.
·occupyhere.org·
occupy.here | distributed wifi occupation
Rob Delaney: After Sandy
Rob Delaney: After Sandy
Wherein Rob Delaney makes the case for universal health care better than the Obama campaign. I am of the opinion, as a dad, a husband (of a woman with reproductive organs), a tax payer, a voter and an American living inside a human body, that improving the mechanisms for delivering health care in this nation is as high a priority as we will ever have. Why? When you unshackle good, hard-working, kind, enterprising Americans from the fear that health care costs could bankrupt them, you will unleash an intellectual and economic force that will knock your socks right off your feet, whether you bought them at Brooks Brothers or Goodwill.
·robdelaney.tumblr.com·
Rob Delaney: After Sandy
Doug Henwood: Why Obama lost the debate
Doug Henwood: Why Obama lost the debate
I don’t agree with this completely, but it’s a solid argument. More broadly, the political problem of the Democrats is that they’re a party of capital that has to pretend for electoral reasons sometimes that it’s not. All the complaints that liberals have about them—their weakness, tendency to compromise, the constantly lamented lack of a spine—emerge from this central contradiction. The Republicans have a coherent philosophy and use it to fire up a rabid base. The Dems are afraid of their base because it might cause them trouble with their funders. Romney believes in money. Obama believes in nothing. Most liberals want to write off Obama’s bad performance as a bad night. It’s not just that. It’s a structural problem.
·lbo-news.com·
Doug Henwood: Why Obama lost the debate
David Carr: The Puppetry of Quotation Approval (NYTimes.com)
David Carr: The Puppetry of Quotation Approval (NYTimes.com)
Journalism in its purest form is a transaction. But inch by inch, story by story, deal by deal, we are giving away our right to ask a simple question and expect a simple answer, one that can’t be taken back. It may seem obvious, but it is still worth stating: The first draft of history should not be rewritten by the people who make it.
·nytimes.com·
David Carr: The Puppetry of Quotation Approval (NYTimes.com)
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Occupy Wall Street: A Frenzy That Fizzled (NYTimes.com)
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Occupy Wall Street: A Frenzy That Fizzled (NYTimes.com)
Has the debate over breaking up the banks that were too big to fail, save for a change of heart by the former chairman of Citigroup, Sanford I. Weill, really changed or picked up steam as a result of Occupy Wall Street? No. Have any new regulations for banks or businesses been enacted as a result of Occupy Wall Street? No. Has there been any new meaningful push to put Wall Street executives behind bars as a result of Occupy Wall Street? No. And even on the issues of economic inequality and upward mobility — perhaps Occupy Wall Street’s strongest themes — has the movement changed the debate over executive compensation or education reform? It is not even a close call.
·dealbook.nytimes.com·
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Occupy Wall Street: A Frenzy That Fizzled (NYTimes.com)
Taylor Morris: Pussy Riot and Hashtag Activism
Taylor Morris: Pussy Riot and Hashtag Activism
There are jailed dissenters around the world, with harsher sentences for lesser crimes, wasting in silence. We shouldn’t forget them and we shouldn’t forget the message Pussy Riot was trying to spread. However, we should let rebellion and reform grow organically from within a country and then foster and support it with an outsider’s perspective; we shouldn’t place ourselves and our lives and our Twitter feeds directly into someone else’s story and someone else’s struggle. If it’s not about you, don’t make it about you.
·aylororris.tumblr.com·
Taylor Morris: Pussy Riot and Hashtag Activism