| The Greek Bailout Crisis Didn’t Have to Happen |
[13 May 2015|02:30pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/05/greek_bailout_talks_here_s_one_way_to_avoid_ugly_fights_over_sovereign_debt.html The Greek debt crisis is like the movie Groundhog Day, except it doesn’t look very likely to end with an epiphany. It’s not surprising that, once again, talks over extending the country’s bailout stalled at this week’s meeting of eurozone leaders. The current points of dispute involve pension, labor, and other reforms, which Greece must pledge to enact before the eurozone will offer funds to keep the nation’s government running. Among politicians and bureaucrats, there has been an endless cycle of derision, threats, and grandstanding while the Greeks face a revolving door of rising unemployment, poverty, and homelessness and as hospitals, schools, and other public-sector institutions remain understaffed. It’s only getting worse: Greece is still in danger of defaulting on its remaining loan repayments and being forced to exit the eurozone.
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| Straw Man |
[13 May 2015|06:06pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/05/philip_zimbardo_s_man_disconnected_claims_porn_internet_are_destroying_men.html In 1971, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo spearheaded the Stanford prison experiment to show how the hierarchy of the penitentiary system could turn otherwise reasonable men into monsters. Now, Zimbardo has identified a new threat to mankind: the Internet. Excessive video game use and porn consumption, Zimbardo says, is turning modern young men into limp, loveless losers. It’s a theory he’s pushed with increasing urgency over the past several years. In 2011, Zimbardo delivered a TED talk titled “The Demise of Guys?” The next year, he penned an e-book based on the talk titled The Demise of Guys, no more question mark. And this month, Zimbardo released his full-length tract: Man (Dis)connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What It Means to Be Male, and What Can Be Done.
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| A Tax on Blackness |
[13 May 2015|10:59pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/05/racism_in_real_estate_landlords_redlining_housing_values_and_discrimination.html In 1934, Homer Hoyt wrote a dissertation—“One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of the Growth of Chicago to the Rise of Its Land Values, 1830–1933”—that ranked various races and nationalities by order of “desirability.” Most desired were the old American stock of Anglo-Saxons and Northern Europeans—English, Germans, Scots, Irish, and Scandinavians—followed by Northern Italians, Czechoslovakians, Polish, Lithuanians, Greeks, “Russian Jews of the lower class,” South Italians, and at the bottom of the list, “Negroes and Mexicans.”
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