Smart people saying smart things

Last updated on: December 17, 2011 at 6:59 pm by Fred Clark

Smart people saying smart things 2011-12-17T18:59:48-05:00 Fred Clark

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Joseph Stiglitz: “To Cure the Economy“

Government plays a central role in financing the services that people want, like education and health care. And government-financed education and training, in particular, will be critical in restoring competitiveness in Europe and the US. But both have chosen fiscal austerity, all but ensuring that their economies’ transitions will be slow.

The prescription for what ails the global economy follows directly from the diagnosis: strong government expenditures, aimed at facilitating restructuring, promoting energy conservation, and reducing inequality, and a reform of the global financial system that creates an alternative to the buildup of reserves.

Eventually, the world’s leaders – and the voters who elect them – will come to recognize this. As growth prospects continue to weaken, they will have no choice. But how much pain will we have to bear in the meantime?

Thomas B. Edsall: “The Politics of Austerity“

Austerity feeds on itself. If the country needs to invest in education and rebuilding infrastructure to regain competitiveness, as many economists of varying ideological stripes argue, those initiatives are in large part precluded in a political environment that places top priority on deficit and debt reduction. Retrenchment, in effect, becomes a noose, choking off prospects for growth.

Morf Morford: “Foreclosure Tourism“

We might be accustomed to foreclosure news stories and statistics, but one step inside one of these abandoned homes rips the curtain from the illusion that foreclosure is merely an abstraction.

Foreclosure is no abstraction.

In some houses, you must step over or through unfinished projects; once loved gardens filled with weeds and various other emblems of the ache of a once loved but now abandoned home.

For the most part, these houses are cleaned out, but there are remnants that speak volumes.

Emptiness is never total.

The child’s shoe, left in the back of a closet, the bag of cat food left on the refrigerator or the yearly growth marks on a door frame speak of the life that had filled these now barren houses.

Foreclosure is no abstraction. Every foreclosed home represents a family in crisis – a family in debt, usually homeless and with ruined credit. And many neighborhoods have more than their share of these standing vacant stares on their streets. These forlorn neighborhoods are magnets for vandalism and the perfect medium for both social and structural disintegration.

Jeremy John: “Jesus Forgave Sins and Debts“

If our structures, our societies, do not allow us to practice Jubilee, or forgive debt as Jesus teaches, we need to work to change that. Christians must clamor for debt forgiveness. We need to be the voice, as Jesus was, proclaiming Jubilee.

But I don’t believe that we are helpless. I believe that we live in an age of peaceful, nonviolent protest where we can carry the witness of Christ’s radically forgiving love into the streets.

And so I repeat my challenge: if we are not allowed to forgive debts, if truly this is a function of the market, we need to walk into the temple and overturn the market.

Mark Twain (via Ta-Nehisi Coates): “That Older and Real Terror“

There were two ‘Reigns of Terror,’ if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?

What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror–that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “Not Helping“

This is the Racist Child Molester Serial Killer theory of America. Racists–should they even exist–are not people we know, but people who existed either in some distant history or in a far off cave somewhere. Though not totally the case in The Help, class and geography are oft-used means of distancing. Hence racism doesn’t exist in polite society but among those “other people” who we do not know. But there’s always some other people. And everyone thinks their “polite.”

It’s worth remember that people brought their spouses and children to lynchings, that they kept gory reminders of the work on store counters. I’m sure many of these people were good parents, good spouses and deeply committed to their society. But it’s much more comforting to imagine them racists as Lex-Luthor evil and Jeffrey-Dahmer depraved.

For if we admit that racists–and by extension homophobes and misogynists–are not some alien species, but that they walk among us, then we must also admit that we are subject to looking past their flaws, and that we, ourselves, are subject to the same impulses. And then finally we must begin to see how easily we could have lived, in that time, and done nothing. Or done something horrible.

The stereotype of the wife-beating, baby-roasting, Southern racist isn’t about the past as it was, it’s about the future as it is now.

Dahlia Lithwick: “Never Happened“

It’s no longer just a Republican war on women. It’s a war on the idea that any woman might ever tell the truth.

John Green: “Anonymous asked: Do you believe in saving sex for marriage?“

To answer your question, I must not only define marriage (which turns out to be really hard to define); I must also define sex. What is sex? Is it actions that can result in procreation? Is it any kind of sexual intimacy? If so, is kissing sex? Is hugging sex if it happens to result in arousal?

We’ve created this aura around virginity as if one’s virginity is a real and tangible thing -— but of course it isn’t. Sex and virginity are socially constructed concepts. Are you a virgin if you engage in oral sex? Are you a virgin if you’ve kissed a girl? Are you a virgin if it was just the tip? Are you a virgin if your hymen breaks from tampon-insertion?

… So no, I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to have sex before marriage, because I don’t know what sex means, and I don’t know what marriage means. I think people should feel empowered to make their own decisions about their own bodies in thoughtful and open conversations with their romantic partners.

And use condoms. The End.

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