This One Picture of Telly Savalas Refutes All Fears That Progress Has Ended - The Daily Beast: "There is, of course, a lot of talk in the air these days about the end of progress large and small. We’re in The Great Stagnation, don’t you know, and technological and economic momentum has conked out like the engine on a 1977 Chevy Vega. What we really “need is more Apollo-like projects” but we’re too chicken-shit and beat-down to think BIG anymore. Or maybe we just need one of those bogus “alien invasions” that Paul Krugman is always flapping his gums about. The middle class can’t afford nothing no more, Amazon’s warehouse workers are “today’s coal miners,” and even bomb-crazy and jihad-suffering Middle Easterners are more optimistic about the future than Americans and Europeans. The Experts (with a capital E!) have spoken: We’ve reached The End of Progress...
So back to Savalas, and bear with me here. Cue up Telly’s incomparable semi-parlando rendering of If. Get lost in the Aegean-deep pools of Telly’s eyes and marvel at his gold-chain-and-bracelet set. As you contemplate a naked celebrity torso apparently unfamiliar with any form of exercise, let’s count the ways in which the world has not just gotten a little bit better but a whole fucking lot better since Kojak was on the case...
Medicine is better and more generally available. People live longer. They own more…stuff. Even low-income Americans have more access to more food, clothing, and shelter. This is all true even as the distance between standards of living in the United States and other developed countries has shrunk. Educational attainment proceeds apace and, as the Manhattan Institute’s Scott Winship has demonstrated, not only is income inequality routinely exaggerated, the ability of younger Americans to rise above their parents’ station is not in question. “Fully 84 percent of today’s forty-somethings have higher size-adjusted family incomes than their parents did at the same age,” Winship writes. Yes, we can and should have even more mobility and opportunity. But that’s very different from what doomsayers are arguing. How about what we might consider softer definitions of progress? On the technology front, there’s simply no way to recapture the primitive world that was 1974. This was a world without not simply the Internet and personal computers and widespread cable TV. It was a world without second TV sets and second telephones in the house and calculators in your pocket. Forget VCRs and binge-watching shows on your schedule. One of the reasons why Kojak and other broadcast shows pulled huge ratings was because there was nothing else to watch and nowhere else to watch it...
For most of his career, Savalas (1922-1994) could pass for a vaguely exciting yet essentially non-threatening “exotic ethnic.” He was Greek American, after all, and he hit it big in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the percentage of foreign-born people in the United States hit a historic low of just 4.7 percent. At such low numbers, we could afford to feel expansive toward foreigners. To be Greek American (his birth-name was Aristotelis!) was a slight variation on being Italian, Jewish, Polish, Slavic, or any number of acceptable white- ethnic types. In every possible way—and all to the good—we live in an infinitely more cosmopolitan world, one that is vastly more connected to every corner of the globe. The percent of foreign-born in the country is around 13 percent and inching back up toward where it was in the decade Savalas was born. Savalas was lucky to be born when he was, as it meant he didn’t have to suffer as much for his ethnicity the way previous generations had...
The cast of characters we expect to meet in our daily wanderings has vastly expanded to include every possible permutation of race and ethnicity imaginable. We may not exactly be post-racial, if that term means the elimination of all tribal-based prejudice and attitudes, but we’ve traveled a huge distance. In 1974, according to Gallup, only about 30 percent of Americans “approved” of interracial marriages. The current figure is 87 percent. Similarly, attitudes toward gays and other long-marginalized groups and behaviors (such as smoking dope) have shifted radically in favor of inclusion...
Take a look again at Savalas’ body there on that cover. Like virtually every other male sex symbol of the time—including even rock stars like Robert Plant and sex machines like Warren Beatty—he’s a piece of human veal. And yet he’s confident and unembarrassed despite sporting less definition than a spelling bee for illiterates. That body, I’d argue, is the essence of male privilege and it has largely disappeared not just from the covers of People but from most relationships. It’s not that men can’t still get by without having chiseled abs and contoured delts, but they can’t get away with thinking they are unambiguously the object of all female desire. Men who still think they will inherit a world in which they won’t be working hard as hell to please their partners sexually, economically, intellectually, and emotionally are men whose time has most definitely past."
Scott Adams Blog: Feedback for Feminists 10/30/2014: "I am a big fan of the feminist movement through history. A lot of brave people sacrificed and worked hard to move society toward greater equality. That was all good stuff. And the problem of sexism was so large a few decades ago that you really did need to approach it with a sledgehammer and not a scalpel. But in 2014, sexism is not so much the "can't vote" type of problem it once was. It's more of the "Someone is making me uncomfortable" or "I think my gender played a role in a decision" or "I can't tell if this is a business meeting or a date" sort of thing. I pause here to make a clarification for any folks who might have wandered over here from Jezebel.com, HuffingtonPost.com, or Slate.com. I will try to type slowly so you understand this next part: Scott...is...saying...there...is... still ...plenty... of ...spousal abuse...job discrimination ...sex crimes... and ...other ...horrors...perpetrated against...women. But in 2014 that stuff looks more like crime than sexism. All women and 98% of men are on the same side when it comes to the criminal stuff. Okay, back to the smart readers. So today we have pockets of sexism as opposed to universal sexism, at least in the United States. That is still bad, obviously, but the point is that in 2014 feminists need to use a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer. And to use a scalpel you need some feedback on how the cutting is going. I am here to help...
You might have seen the shocking video in which a young women walks around New York City for ten hours (edited down to 2 minutes) while being filmed as men continually harass her. The point of the video is (I assume) to show men how uncomfortable it is to be a woman walking down the sidewalk in a public place. The video does a great job. You have to see it. Okay, so the video is presumably aimed at men, given that women are already aware of the situation. So in order for this video to succeed, it needs to convince men that a problem exists and that the problem needs to be addressed. Did it succeed? I'll give you my personal reaction...
My first reaction is that editing ten hours down to two minutes is so overtly manipulative of the viewer that I had a bad reaction to it. I understand why they had to edit; no one watches ten hour videos. But while the video clearly states it is edited, the human brain still processes it as if it is in real time. My emotional reaction to the video is a reaction to a woman being harassed every five seconds, and that is not what happened. So now I don't trust the senders of the message. If they manipulated me in one way, can I trust anything else? I'll call this a minor problem but it is worth calling out...
So here's my personal reaction, as a man who is the intended target of this educational video. The video is unintentionally racist as hell, and that doesn't help feminism. The video editing feels manipulative and turns me off to the message...
Every man featured in the video is a creep. Isn't that sexist? The harassment was mostly in the form of powerless men hurling compliments at a woman that probably has a better job and more education than nearly all of the men in the video. Remind me again who the victims are? The creepy stalker guys were just scary...
Did the video move society in the right direction? I'm not sure. It spotlights a legitimate issue and it hits the emotional notes to cause action. But I don't know how that gets the guys in the video to act differently. Are they seeing the video on BusinessInsider.com like I did?"
