“It’s easy to look at technology as the biggest change between these kids and their parents,” says Mr. Edelstein, “but a bigger effect on young people is the corruption in the world around them.”
Two wars, the financial crisis, rapidly eroding democracy. “I’m much more panicked about that lesson than any video game.”
The chokehold that killed Eric Garner, a maneuver prohibited by the NYPD, takes center stage in Paul Butler’s latest book, Chokehold: Policing Black Men.
Butler employs the chokehold—the maneuver as well as the metaphor—as, in his words, “a way of understanding how American inequality is imposed.”
Although applicable to many marginalized groups, Butler uses the experiences of black men to unpack and understand the chokehold. He takes the literal, physical chokehold and applies it to the figurative chokehold with which the criminal justice system has gripped the lives of black American men.
Source: The Fight for Racial Justice Can’t Stop With Fixing a Broken Policing System – Pacific Standard
We know from everyday experience that a person is partly forged in the crucible of community.
Relationships inform self-understanding. Who I am depends on many ‘others’: my family, my friends, my culture, my work colleagues.
The self I take grocery shopping, say, differs in her actions and behaviors from the self that talks to my PhD supervisor. Even my most private and personal reflections are entangled with the perspectives and voices of different people, be it those who agree with me, those who criticize, or those who praise me.
Source: Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ | Aeon Ideas
“Hungary and Poland can no longer be considered liberal democracies. In both countries, the authoritarian institutional system has been established, giving largely unrestricted political power to the ruling party. While they are still not dictatorships, the potential for authoritarian rule increases considerably with every new legislation expanding the power of the government.”
Source: OP 13: How To Deal With Poland And Hungary » Social Europe
I submit that the unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers.
This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship.
The jerk himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact; and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivatively upon his own interests.
The bumpkin ignorance captured in the earlier use of ‘jerk’ has changed into a type of moral ignorance.
Source: So you’re surrounded by idiots. Guess who the real jerk is | Aeon Essays
The world Marc Goodman outlines in exhaustive detail in his forthcoming book, Future Crimes, is as real, gritty, and frightening as life outside the Matrix.
You won’t remember every detail of the book—it’s packed to the gills with them—but you may walk away with a better understanding of the challenges facing those of us engaging in the “consensual hallucination” that is modern cyberspace. And that’s the point really.
The central problem Goodman outlines—that everything with a connection is hackable—isn’t insoluble.
Source: The Future of Crime: Smartphone Tracking, Neurohacking, and AI Assisted Murder
If we think closely about anger, we can begin to see why it is a stupid way to run one’s life.
A good place to begin is Aristotle’s definition: not perfect, but useful, and a starting point for a long Western tradition of reflection. Aristotle says that anger is a response to a significant damage to something or someone one cares about, and a damage that the angry person believes to have been wrongfully inflicted. He adds that although anger is painful, it also contains within itself a hope for payback. So: significant damage, pertaining to one’s own values or circle of cares, and wrongfulness.
Source: There’s no emotion we ought to think harder about than anger | Aeon Essays
The problem isn’t just using the word populist as a euphemism for racism and ethnic chauvinism.
The term also helps to reproduce the very ideology that has trapped white working-class people by reinforcing the idea that they are not supposed to experience the same social and economic problems as everyone else.
White workers outraged over the economic difficulties they’re facing get a movement with a name; the economic hardship that non-white working people face is ignored. The implication is that white working-class people are the members of society who are supposed to be financially secure or comfortable – that they have a birthright to prosperity.
Source: Populism now divides, yet once it united the working class | Aeon Ideas
A tradition as old as John Stuart Mill’s, renewed by Louis Brandeis, had coupled the efficiency of free speech to that of free markets.
The remedy for any bad product of markets, on that view, is more and better products. And the remedy for bad speech is ‘more speech’.
For leftists, that coupling of free speech with free markets ends up too true by half. Marketplaces of goods serve not to overcome class divisions but to seal and to legitimate them as inevitable products of the necessary forces of ‘natural’ competition.
The ‘marketplace of ideas’ does the same. It guarantees a vacuously formal equality of access to all, but is in fact always systemically skewed towards wealthy and powerful voices, against the subordinated ones.
Source: Free speech debates are more than ‘radicals’ vs ‘liberals’ | Aeon Ideas
And environment is a non-trivial cultural choice. Some prefer shorts, some pin-stripe suits.
This is another example of the importance of be-do-say. What you say to people about what matters is one thing. They may or may not believe you. They will believe what you do, how you show up and act.
But matching your words and actions or environmental choices is not enough unless they match your fundamental beliefs.
Source: How The Difference Between WeWork And Servcorp Highlights The Link Between Environment And Culture