Just to the right of Nelson Mandela. I'll take it.
Cory Doctorow: The Monster: the fraud and depraved indifference...: "The Monster starts with the S&L crisis, and the fraudsters who destroyed the finances of the ordinary people who’d trusted them, and shows how the worst of the S&L conmen moved on to subprime, founding companies like Ameriquest and FAMCO. People like Richard Arnall, who became a billionaire, was the prime financier behind George W Bush’s 2004 presidential bid, and actually served as the US ambassador to the Netherlands, even as he built an empire built on outright, deliberate swindling. And swindling it was. Hudson leaves no room for doubt here. You may have heard that the subprime collapse was caused by greedy homeowners fudging the facts about their income in order to secure easy credit, but Hudson shows that in the vast majority of cases, the “liar” in the “liar loan” was usually a banker, a mortgage broker, an underwriter, a bond-rater, an appraiser. These are the people who went into poor neighborhoods where vulnerable, poorly educated people had scrimped and saved all their lives to buy their homes and conned them into taking out brutal, lopsided second mortgages, lying to them, bilking them out of 20% (or more!) in upfront fees, lying some more, forging documents, and then handing off the mortgages to Wall Street to launder out as toxic bonds....
The subprime outfits literally used the movie Boiler Room as a training film, requiring new hires to watch it in order to learn how to conduct their working lives. But lest you think that the problem was just the con-artists at the bottom, Hudson shows you how regulators (all the way up to Alan Greenspan), Lehman and the other big Street firms, and politicians all the way up to the President of the United States were all in on it, that there was no way they couldn’t have known that they were participating in a once-in-a-century scam that was destroyed millions of good peoples’ lives as well as the planet’s economy, and how they all sat idly by and collected their share of the wealth rather than speak up. From lobbyists to campaign contributions, dirty tricks and massive media campaigns, bribery and intimidation, the men behind the subprime crisis were not merely expressing some historical abstraction, playing a part in a nebulous “business cycle.” They were deliberately, personally participating in something that they had to know would result in terrible consequences for innocents all around them."
What's wrong with political correctness? A few observations from a mansplainer.: "Conservatives can get in on the identity-politics game, too. The reprobate may be damned, but we’re not stupid. If statistical underrepresentation is likely evidence of subtle institutional bias, or of cultures that exclude some as a "bad fit," or of networks that discourage the "other" from even seeking entry, then academia must have a “statistically impossible” bias problem against Republicans and Evangelicals. Conservatives pretending to want in on an identity-spoils system is partly a way of calling the P.C. bluff. It asks the left to admit that there are some identities that don’t deserve a safe space...
Political correctness can hurt or distract from broad left-wing goals. I apologize in advance for conservative-splaining liberalism to you, but the left succeeds when it creates solidarity among broad groups. For all its protestations about good allies, the demands of political correctness seem to act like an acid on solidarity. This may be why leftists who are concerned primarily with redistributing economic power get tired of the kind of infighting, back-biting, and jockeying that is inherent to this style of politics. Political correctness talks about solidarity, but performs itself as expressive individualism. Everyone is micro-aggressed and silenced in their own special way. Solidarity-liberalism helps people communicate across divides, and trains leaders to speak for mass groups. Political correctness tells us that no, your communication is problematic...
Political correctness conflates normal slights, sincere disagreements, thoughtless cracks, and the verbal miscues of the uninitiated with actual oppression. In extremely crude terms, political correctness engenders (or really, embodies) extreme sensitivity to status. The victims of historic oppression were accorded a low status by their oppressors. Imposing a low status on a group is a way of granting yourself permission to abuse its members. And so some of the normal rough and tumble of human interaction can be mistaken (or willfully misconstrued) as an attempt to replicate the very hierarchies that cause oppression and genocide. A real “P.C.” blowup leaves one person crying and feeling misunderstood and “othered,” while it leaves another person feeling both defensive and offended that the crying person appears to be trivializing real oppression...
Political correctness looks like grasping aspirational privilege. Related to the above. The right not to be offended, or the ability to punish those who offend your finely tuned sensibilities, is a form of privilege... “politically correct” styles of engagement are most popular among a class of people that is in a similar position to the old petite bourgeoisie: college students and strivers whose primary class consciousness is not their relative privilege over, say, Appalachian whites or people in the developing world, but their lack of power and status compared with the haute bourgeoisie, which is composed of everyone from crass GOP-affiliated lax-bros that want to go into finance to the polished and tamed “liberal” graduates of Sidwell to the real inheritors of privilege like the Bush twins...
It is joyless, unempowering, and unattractive. Political correctness instills a narrative of defeatism, doubt, and anxiety. Because it so zealously ferrets the political dimensions of everyday social life, it provides a sense that many or most social occasions are a confrontation with a pervasive tyranny. Do you want stories about people rising above their circumstances, or cowering in fear before a bizarre statue of a vulnerable man sleepwalking? As Freddie DeBoer pointed out, the social left’s new form of political correction informs young liberals that everything they like and enjoy is poisoned in some way. It is a left-wing version of Dana Carvey’s church lady. “Could it beeeee…… Patriarchy?”"
[Oh, so much this last one...] What's wrong with political correctness? A few observations from a mansplainer.: "I understand the instinct to not only listen to victims, but to venerate or sacralize them. And I wonder if this almost Christian reflex is kicking somewhere within the drive for political correctness. The victim’s bruised body and wounded dignity testifies to us of a broken social order, even a broken human nature. Transcendence is found in turning the event of their martyrdom into the locus of a new redeemed social order, where the hierarchies are reversed and the spotless Victim reigns."
Where Online Social Liberalism Lost The Script « The Dish: "I guess what it all comes down to, for me, is that social liberalism was once an alternative that enabled people to pursue whatever types of consensual personal behavior they wanted, and thus was a movement that increased individual freedom and happiness. It was the antidote to Jerry Fallwell telling you that you were going to hell, to Nancy Reagan saying “just say no,” to your conservative parents telling you not to be gay, to Pat Robertson saying don’t have sex, to Tipper Gore telling you that you couldn’t listen to the music you like, to don’t have sex, don’t do drugs, don’t wear those clothes, don’t walk that way, don’t have fun, don’t be yourself. So of course that movement won. It was a positive, joyful, human, freeing alternative to an exhausted, ugly, narrow vision of how human beings should behave. It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing. I now mostly associate that public face with danger, with an endless list of things that you can’t do or say or think, and with the constant threat of being called an existentially bad person if you say the wrong thing, or if someone decides to misrepresent what you said as saying the wrong thing. There are so many ways to step on a landmine now, so many terms that have become forbidden, so many attitudes that will get you cast out if you even appear to hold them. I’m far from alone in feeling that it’s typically not worth it to engage, given the risks."
The Neighborhood That Policed Itself - The Daily Beast: "...in recent weeks, Broken Windows has come under fire. As the police ended their slowdown early in the month, New Yorkers—for the first time in thirty years—experienced what their lives would be like without Broken Windows. And contrary to Bratton’s predictions, crime did not appear to be skyrocket. If anything, it looked like crime went down. Still, the NYPD was back to issuing petty summonses last week—and they appear to have been trying to make up for lost time. Summonses tripled and arrests doubled in New York City in the week after, with Bratton allegedly threatening to take away vacation time to make up for the slowdown’s loss of revenue...
While it’s too early to tell for certain how the slowdown will affect crime rates, many have begun to question the core tenets of Broken Windows—both for the way it disproportionately targets minorities and for the way it alienates communities from those in charge of protecting them."
The American Sniper Was No Hero - Reason.com: "This is neither a movie review nor a review of the late Chris Kyle's autobiographical book on which the movie is based. My interest is in the popular evaluation of Kyle, America's most prolific sniper, a title he earned through four tours in Iraq. Let's recall some facts, which perhaps Eastwood thought were too obvious to need mention: Kyle was part of an invasion force: Americans went to Iraq. Iraq did not invade America or attack Americans. Dictator Saddam Hussein never even threatened to attack Americans. Contrary to what the George W. Bush administration suggested, Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Before Americans invaded Iraq, al-Qaeda was not there. Nor was it in Syria, Yemen, and Libya. The only reason Kyle went to Iraq was that Bush/Cheney & Co. launched a war of aggression against the Iraqi people. Wars of aggression, let's remember, are illegal under international law...
Eastwood's movie also features an Iraqi sniper. Why isn't he regarded as a hero for resisting an invasion of his homeland? ... (Eastwood should make a movie about the invasion from the Iraqis' point of view, just as he made a movie about Iwo Jima from the Japanese point of view to go with his earlier movie from the American side.)"
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