politics

There are 113 posts filed in politics (this is page 13 of 15).

Arrested Development

Kay S. Hymowitz, on how 20-something men are kinda sucky at being men (via Maria Popova):

Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This “pre-adulthood” has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it’s time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn’t bring out the best in men.

Government Programs Infect Every Aspect of American Life

American idiots calling for less government have no idea how much government they depend upon (via NYTimes):

The most comprehensive data appear in the Census Bureau’s Consolidated Federal Funds Report for Fiscal Year 2009, but the data is very aggregated and doesn’t tell much about how many people benefit from various programs or to what extent. The most recent study I could find that tried to do that was published by the Tax Foundation in 2007. It found that in 2004, a typical middle class family in the middle income quintile received $16,781 in benefits from the federal government.

Reminds me of this piece on the Tea Party by Matt Taibi:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They’re completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I’m an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I’m a radical communist? I don’t love my country? I’m a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

AOL Acquires The Huffington Post

This should go well. Because Arianna has consistently demonstrated that she’s interested in supporting high-end premium brands like Cinematical, a support demonstrated through the Post’s lavish payments to its multitude of talented bloggers, right? Right?

Om Malik has a take that I agree with:

AOL’s moves are much like the ending scene from Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Surrounded by the Bolivian Army, Dos Hombres have no choice to make a gallant dash to their horses, guns blazing, hoping against hope as thousand guns blaze around them. The ever-increasing web inventory is like the Bolivian Army firing on AOL and others who have not yet come to terms with the futility of chasing page views…

In a chat with The New York Times, charming and always quotable Armstrong quipped “I think this is going to be a situation where 1 plus 1 equals 11.” Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, for in this case one plus one ends up equaling none – as we might soon see!

Time will tell.

Adventures with Julian Assange

If you’re a journalism news junkie like me, you may find Bill Keller’s recounting of The New York Times’ interaction with Julian Assange to be a thrilling read:

The adventure that ensued over the next six months combined the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of handling a vast secret archive with the more mundane feat of sorting, searching and understanding a mountain of data. As if that were not complicated enough, the project also entailed a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian); an international cast of journalists; company lawyers committed to keeping us within the bounds of the law; and an array of government officials who sometimes seemed as if they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to engage us or arrest us. By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents and generated much breathless speculation that something — journalism, diplomacy, life as we know it — had profoundly changed forever.

The Best Defense of Gay Marriage I’ve Ever Read

Nancy Cott approaches the very emotional topic of gay marriage from the best angle possible: the historical/legal one. With  magnificent detail, she explains that modern marriage was the result of literally hundreds of years of evolution. Allowing gay marriage will simply be the next step:

The ability of married partners to procreate has never been required to make a marriage legal or valid, nor have unwillingness or inability to have children been grounds for divorce.
And marriage, as I have argued, has not been one unchanging institution over time. Features of marriage that once seemed essential and indispensable proved otherwise. The ending of coverture, the elimination of racial barriers to choice of partner, the expansion of grounds for divorce—though fiercely resisted by many when first introduced—have strengthened marriage rather than undermining it. The adaptability of marriage has preserved it.