How Corporate America Invented Christian America In December 1940, as America was emerging from the Great Depression, more than 5,000 industrialists from across the nation made their yearly pilgrimage to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, convening for the annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers. The program promised an impressive slate of speakers: titans at General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Mutual Life, and Sears, Roebuck; popular lecturers such as etiquette expert Emily Post and renowned philosopher-historian Will Durant; even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Tucked away near the end of the program was a name few knew initially, but one everyone would be talking about by the convention’s end: Reverend James W. Handsome, tall, and somewhat gangly, the 41-year-old Congregationalist minister bore more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Stewart. It all sounds familiar enough today, but Fifield’s audience of executives was stunned. They just needed to do one thing: Get religion.
Slaves of the Internet, Unite! People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing. They often start by telling you how much they admire your work, although not enough, evidently, to pay one cent for it. “Unfortunately we don’t have the budget to offer compensation to our contributors...” is how the pertinent line usually starts. But just as often, they simply omit any mention of payment. A familiar figure in one’s 20s is the club owner or event promoter who explains to your band that they won’t be paying you in money, man, because you’re getting paid in the far more valuable currency of exposure. This is partly a side effect of our information economy, in which “paying for things” is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling people after having sex with them.
A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System | The Weekly Sift If you’ve seen the Lincoln movie, maybe you’re still walking around with this bit of cognitive dissonance: In 1864, the Democrats are the party of slavery and the Republicans the party of emancipation and racial justice. What’s up with that? How did we get from there to here? The story is doubly worth telling because Republicans like Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg have been misrepresenting it so grossly. A good place to start is the presidential election of 1860, which brings Lincoln to power and convinces Southern whites (the only people who can vote in the South in 1860) that secession is their best chance to maintain slavery*. Lincoln gets only 40% of the vote, but in a four-way race (the Democratic Convention split over whether the platform should endorse the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision) that’s enough to win. 1876 electoral map 1896 electoral map 2012 electoral map The “solid South” stays Democratic through 1944, when FDR carries Mississippi with 94% of the vote. Phillips writes:
Which Side of the Barricade Are You On? - Doug Sosnik - POLITICO Magazine Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik was a close adviser to President Bill Clinton, and he’s famed in Washington circles for his closely held, big-think memos on the state of American politics. We got our hands on his latest—in which he warns of a rising populist tide that threatens to swamp Republicans and Democrats alike—and are reprinting it in full here with his permission. For some time now, the daily commentary has focused on the public’s increasing anger and frustration about the sluggish economic recovery, dysfunctional government and a failure of leadership. But all this analysis misses the more fundamental point, which is that Americans’ alienation from our political system and its leaders has been building for more than a decade. This extended period of dissatisfaction has had an extremely corrosive effect on the nation’s social fabric. A decade of anger and disaffection The country’s dissatisfaction is evident in all the major polling trend lines.
Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party | The Weekly Sift Tea Partiers say you don’t understand them because you don’t understand American history. That’s probably true, but not in the way they want you to think. Late in 2012, I came out of the Lincoln movie with two historical mysteries to solve: How did the two parties switch places regarding the South, white supremacy, and civil rights? The first question took some work, but yielded readily to patient googling. Who really won the Civil War? That sounded crazy until I read about Reconstruction. And oh, those blacks Lincoln emancipated? Here’s what my teachers’ should have told me: “Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It wasn’t just that Confederates wanted to continue the war. The Lost Cause. But eventually the good men of the South could take it no longer, so they formed the Ku Klux Klan to protect themselves and their communities. A still from The Birth of a Nation That telling of history is now named for its primary proponent, William Dunning. The first modern war.
The American Police State - The Chronicle Review By Marc Parry On a winter afternoon in 2004, a woman waits in the detective unit of a Philadelphia police station. Two officers, outfitted with combat boots and large guns, enter the room. The cops place their guns on the table, pointed at her. The woman is 22, tiny, and terrified. The officers show her a series of photos of men from around her neighborhood. Spewing obscenities about the woman's supposed appetite for casual sex, the cops press for information about her roommates and threaten criminal charges if she fails to cooperate. "If you can't work with us," one cop says, "then who will you call when he's sticking a gun to your head? Such scenes are nothing unusual in the lower-income black neighborhood where this woman spends most of her time. Unknown to the cops, though, there is one difference this time. Nearly a decade later, Goffman is emerging as a rising star of sociology. But after braving violence and intimidation to get this story, Goffman now faces a different challenge.
KOHLBERG'S STAGES OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT Lawrence Kohlberg was a moral philosopher and student of child development. He was director of Harvard's Center for Moral Education. His special area of interest is the moral development of children - how they develop a sense of right, wrong, and justice. Kohlberg observed that growing children advance through definite stages of moral development in a manner similar to their progression through Piaget's well-known stages of cognitive development. These conclusions have been verified in cross-cultural studies done in , , , , , , , , and . An outline of these developmental stages follows: FOCUS: Self AGES: Up to 10-13 years of age, most prisoners Behavior motivated by anticipation of pleasure or pain. STAGE 1: PUNISHMENT AND OBEDIENCE: Might Makes Right Avoidance of physical punishment and deference to power. response of physical retaliation. determine its goodness or badness. holocaust who were simply "carrying out orders" under threat of punishment, illustrate that others? peers. "nice." here.
There Is No Nobel Prize in Economics October 12, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. It’s Nobel Prize season again. The five real Nobel Prizes—physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and medicine/physiology—were set up in the will left by the dynamite magnate when he died in 1895. Sweden’s Central Bank quietly snuck it in with all the other Nobel Prizes to give free-market economics for the 1% credibility. “The Economics Prize has nestled itself in and is awarded as if it were a Nobel Prize. Members of the Nobel family are among the harshest, most persistent critics of the economics prize, and members of the family have repeatedly called for the prize to be abolished or renamed. Scientists never had much respect for the new economic Nobel prize. That hatred continues to simmer below the surface, and periodically breaks through and makes itself known. To answer that question we have to go back to Sweden in the 1960s.
Social Justice Bullies: The Authoritarianism of Millennial Social Justice Social justice, as a concept, has existed for millennia — at least as long as society has had inequity and inequality and there were individuals enlightened enough to question this. When we study history, we see, as the American Transcendentalist Theodore Parker famously wrote, “the arc [of the moral universe]…bends towards justice.” And this seems relatively evident when one looks at history as a single plot line. Things improve. And, if history is read as a book, the supporters of social justice are typically deemed the heroes, the opponents of it the villains. And perhaps it’s my liberal heart speaking, the fact that I grew up in a liberal town, learned US history from a capital-S Socialist, and/or went to one of the most liberal universities in the country, but I view this is a good thing. But millennials are grown up now — and they’re angry. Many will understand this term I used — millennial social justice advocates — as a synonym to the pejorative “social justice warriors.”
The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government - Chris Hedges The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government Posted on Oct 6, 2013 By Chris Hedges Editor’s note: Chris Hedges will speak in the Los Angeles area Oct. 13 on the myth of progress and the collapse of complex societies. There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America. U.S. The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the forces of Satan. New and Improved Comments If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page.
How To Spot And Critique Censorship Tropes In The Media's Coverage Of Free Speech Controversies | Popehat American journalists and pundits rely upon vigorous free speech, but are not reliable supporters of it. They both instruct and reflect their fickle audience. It's easy to spot overt calls for censorship from the commentariat. Those have become more common in the wake of both tumultuous events (like the violence questionably attributed to the "Innocence of Muslims" video, or Pamela Geller's "Draw Muhammad" contest) and mundane ones (like fraternity brothers recorded indulging in racist chants). But it's harder to detect the subtle pro-censorship assumptions and rhetorical devices that permeate media coverage of free speech controversies. Fortunately, this ain't rocket science. When you see the media using these tropes, ask yourself: what normative message is the author advancing, and does it have any basis in law? Trope One: "Hate Speech" Example: "hate speech is excluded from protection. dont [sic] just say you love the constitution . . . read it." Example: "It’s not free speech.