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July 19 - August 10, 2019
gaslit nation
rack up college debt because a steady job is guaranteed.
elite
Al Jazeera
elites
culture of arrogance, hubris and winner-take-all was established,”
Today, creative industries are structured to minimize the diversity of their participants—economically, racially, and ideologically. Credentialism, not creativity, is the passport to entry.
In the suburbs, poverty looks banal and is overlooked.
It is not skills or majors that are being devalued. It is people.
We live in the tunnel at the end of the light.
You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people.
Survival is now a laudable aspiration.
It is a crisis of managed expectations—expectations of what kind of job is “normal,” what kind of treatment is to be tolerated, and what level of sacrifice is reasonable.
In the post-employment economy, jobs
are privileges,
A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.
Poverty is lost potential, unheard contributions, silenced voices.
Economic opportunity, he argued, is essential to human rights.
The youth unemployment rates of Western nations now mirror or surpass those of the Arab world before the uprisings.
political statement,
As journalist Kevin Drum observes, in every previous recession, government spending rose. In this recession, they cut benefits, food stamps, jobs. They cut and blame us when we bleed.
Self-immolation has long been an act of protest against corrupt and tyrannical rule:
In every country with massive unemployment—which is, increasingly, every country—citizens see the loss of a functioning social contract, and the apathy with which that loss is received.
In many U.S. schools, a child who cannot come up with lunch money is expected to go hungry.
A proposal for Silicon Valley to secede and therefore deny taxpayer money to social programs benefiting low-income residents, including children, was met by many with approval.
Charity is no substitute for justice.
one of the most overlooked stories in the great recession: the explosion of pawnshops and payday loan outlets throughout the U.S.
After stating that the point of a college degree was not a “first job” but “a lifetime of citizenship, opportunity, growth and change,” she recounted her own experience.
Her life story is a eulogy for an America of the past.
In 1968, $2,545 was about the most you could expect to pay for college—most schools cost half as much, and many public universities were still free.
people of this age group share an important quality. They have no adult experience in a functional economy.
But in the new economy, scholarships are increasingly reserved for the rich.
Pierre Bourdieu called “the social alchemy that turns class privilege into merit.”
post-employment economy,
structural constraints masquerading as choice.
Polish
They were outsiders, foreigners, with a suspicious religion—Catholicism—and strange last names.
Eastern European immigrants were treate...
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feared they would be punished as a group for the terrible actio...
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When the phrase “the Muslim world” is invoked, it is usually to reduce, denigrate, or impugn.
what the U.S. needs is a cold, hard look at social structure.
They should fear apathy. They should fear acquiescence. They should not fear each other. But it is understandable, now, that they do.
Those the public are taught to fear are often the ones in danger.
America spent the summer of 2012 having religiously motivated protests over a chicken sandwich.
Those forced to live in countries without free speech know that one of its greatest values is that it allows citizens to speak the truth about their position, to contest false depictions, to refute bias and slander.
Free speech means not only the right to offend, but the right to defend.
In free societies, people have the right to say hateful things. And those offended have the right to oppose and condemn them.
anthropologists,
The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged.
Today, publishing in an academic journal all but ensures that your writing will go unread.
