Category Archives: Humanities

Let’s Talk Democratic Socialism, Already: After 30 years of failed neoliberalism, we need a real alternative.

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Corporate America’s assaults on working people—seeking profits through offshoring jobs, busting unions, paying politicians to slash corporate taxes and deregulating the banks—have ruined our economy. . . The accident of birth should not determine the course of a person’s life. Government expenditures are an indication of a society’s priorities, and it is both economically and morally imperative to provide a safety net for those who suffer the most in a downturn. . . Capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy—they are linked structures of oppression that must be dismantled. Analyzing these structures is critical to forging a political strategy to challenge corporate power.
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Christopher Hitchens Night: A Review

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“I’m not as I was,” Christopher Hitchens poignantly remarked recently. Afflicted by oesophageal cancer and, now, pneumonia, Hitchens, who I interviewed for the New Statesman last year, was too ill to appear in conversation with Stephen Fry at the Royal Festival Hall in London last night. But rather than cancelling the event, the organisers assembled an extraordinary selection of Hitchens’s comrades and friends to pay tribute to the great essayist and polemicist.
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PZ Myers: This is why I hate college football programs

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I know, students enjoy them, and a weekend of sports can be a fun event, and yes, they do have a strong effect on college enrollments (which always seemed bizarre to me—students actually select their academic institution based on the performance of the athletic team? But the correlations in the enrollment/season wins data all bear it out). But they also turn into hyper-inflated domains of privilege, where the coaches are paid more than faculty, students and alumni vividly demonstrate the etymological source of the term “fan”, and the athletes too often turn into swaggering assholes. Can we just have small athletic programs where it’s all for fun, and no one makes the games more important than the academics?
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Gov. Scott Walker Gets Checked, Mic Checked!

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The beauty of this is the witnessing of the involuntary transfer of authority by the right-wing reactionaries, and the priceless look on their faces upon realization that their authority had just been stripped from them. That was pure poetry in motion!

Wall Street Traders Have Profited More Under Obama Than In Eight Years Under Bush

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Wall Street banks experienced years of unprecedented growth under President Bush, at least until the crisis of 2008. But in the two-and-a-half years since President Obama took office, the largest Wall Street banks have grown even larger, and profits at banks and trading firms have risen even faster than they did under Bush, the Washington Post’s Zachary Goldfarb reports:

Wall Street firms — independent companies and the securities-trading arms of banks — are doing even better. They earned more in the first 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, industry data show. […]

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