All posts tagged: Capitalism

Indiana Voters to Pick Party Candidates in Competitive, Multimillion Dollar Primaries

Indiana Voters to Pick Party Candidates in Competitive, Multimillion Dollar Primaries

Published by skeptic

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — In deep red Indiana, where Republicans hold a supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature and most top offices are held by GOP politicians, the May 7 primary will determine the outcome of the general election in many races. The most-watched is the GOP race for governor, a six-way competition of office-seekers who all have cast themselves as outsiders in an appeal to conservative voters. Indiana also will send at least three new representatives to the U.S. House following a series of retirements. Here’s a look at the key races: Six Republicans are vying for the seat being vacated by outgoing Gov. Eric Holcomb, who is term-limited. Holcomb has not endorsed a candidate. Photos You Should See – April 2024 The race is the most expensive primary in Indiana history, with about $20 million spent in the first three months of 2024 alone. The winner of the GOP primary will face long-shot bids in November from the sole Democratic candidate, Jennifer McCormick, and the Libertarian nominee, Donald Rainwater. All six Republican …

Who screwed millennials? Yanis Varoufakis on the death of capitalism – podcast | Australia news

Who screwed millennials? Yanis Varoufakis on the death of capitalism – podcast | Australia news

Published by skeptic

In Guardian Australia’s new series Who screwed millennials, co-host Matilda Boseley spoke to Yanis Varoufakis about how the Australian housing market entrenches inequality. In this bonus episode, we hear more from Varoufakis on the state of the economy, how young people are coping with financial hardship and how capitalism has mutated into something he calls ‘technofeudalism’ How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know Source link

Who’s Watching Whom?: The Dangers of Surveillance Capitalism

Who’s Watching Whom?: The Dangers of Surveillance Capitalism

Published by skeptic

Source: David Donnelly/Used with permission David Donnelly, a U.S. filmmaker based in London, has released a new documentary entitled The Cost of Convenience. While you might think the focus would be solely on our collective digital addiction, that problem is only the gateway to a broader issue that the film addresses: the sinister reality of power and thought control in the hands of a few corporations. It is not a conspiracy theory; it is the raw reality of our times. Internet platforms are collecting sensitive data from users without their knowledge, which has opened up a floodgate of opportunity for exploitation and manipulation. It is one of the reasons TikTok has come under such political scrutiny as the Chinese government allegedly has access to all of the app’s users’ information. Tracking digital versions of ourselves The truth is that every move we make is being recorded, online and off. Through our excessive smartphone usage, so-called digital versions of ourselves are being tracked. Algorithms learn our preferences and keep feeding us more of the same in …

Wokeness might set you free. No one said it would make you happy.

Wokeness might set you free. No one said it would make you happy.

Published by Sam

(RNS) — Truth will set you free, goes the saying. The corollary says it will only do so after making you miserable. The latter was given more weight as fact by a recent study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology that suggests that people with strong social justice values may be more likely to be depressed, anxious and unhappy. Though its author, Finnish psychologist Oskari Lahtinen, studied only his fellow Finns, “the scale was designed to be used and validated in other Western and possibly other populations as well,” he wrote. In fact, Lahtinen admits in his study that the woke discourse arose from America, writing “critical social justice (or intersectional or ‘woke’) discourse draws mainly from dynamics within American society.” Conservatives have responded to these findings with predictable insults and inane questions. “Do progressive ideas make people unhappy, or are unhappy people drawn to the cultural Left?” asked Canadian politics professor Eric Kaufmann in an essay for the Manhattan Institute. But such questions obscure the oppressive conditions that produce so-called progressive ideas and …

How to adapt the “theology of work” to Succession-era capitalism

How to adapt the “theology of work” to Succession-era capitalism

Published by skeptic

In 1904, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In the book, Weber argued that the paragon of “modern capitalism” was someone who “shuns ostentation and unnecessary show, spurns the conscious enjoyment of his power, and is embarrassed by the outward signs of the social esteem in which he is held… He gets nothing out of his wealth for his own person.” Weber died in 1920 and sadly never got to see Succession, The Real Housewives, or Bling Empire. He never popcorn-crunched his way through Leo’s The Wolf of Wall Street. I bet he didn’t even have a favorite Kardashian. If Weber were alive today, he’d be hard-pressed to see much that “shuns ostentation.” But we live in a different time, and the skyscrapers shadowing our cities are built on a very different ideological foundation. Try Big Think+ for your business Engaging content on the skills that matter, taught by world-class experts. When Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic, he was motivated to answer one unignorable question: Why were some …

A Poem by W. H. Auden: ‘Preface’

A Poem by W. H. Auden: ‘Preface’

Published by skeptic

Miki Lowe for The Atlantic Published in The Atlantic in 1944 By W. H. Auden Illustrations by Miki Lowe February 21, 2024, 6 AM ET For much of his career, the poet W. H. Auden was known for writing fiercely political work. He critiqued capitalism, warned of fascism, and documented hunger, protest, war. He was deeply influenced by Marxism. And he was hugely successful. Yet in truth, he wasn’t always as certain as he appeared. “Auden was never comfortable in his role as poetic prophet to the British Left,” his biographer Edward Mendelson wrote. “He was often most divided when he sounded most committed.” Auden worried that his writing was “inflated,” preachy and inauthentic—and he doubted how much it really mattered anyway. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” he once famously said. In 1939, though, he moved from England to America; the next year, he joined the Episcopal Church and became passionately religious. He grappled with how to keep writing. “I cannot help feeling that a satisfactory theory of Art from the standpoint of the Christian faith …

Objects in Space at a Moment in Time | A. S. Hamrah

Objects in Space at a Moment in Time | A. S. Hamrah

Published by skeptic

Michael Mann’s attachment to Ferraris is well known. In his 1980s television series Miami Vice, Don Johnson played Sonny Crockett, an undercover narcotics agent who drove Ferraris that the Metro-Dade Police Department had seized from drug dealers. In Mann’s 2006 film version of the show, Crockett, now played by Colin Farrell, drove a dark gray Ferrari F430 Spider, a $175,000 convertible that goes from zero to sixty in under four seconds and at the time had a resale value of around $35,000, less if a cop had frigged it. It’s ironic, then, that the quintessential American cop car, the lowly but powerful Ford Crown Victoria, had, until now, the most screen time in any of Mann’s films. In Collateral (2004), he deploys the Crown Vic not as a police cruiser but in its other standard role, as a yellow taxi. Jamie Foxx chauffeurs hitman Tom Cruise through the Los Angeles night as Cruise picks off witnesses in a drug case—a West Coast Miami Vice in reverse. This taxicab aside, Ferraris will always define Mann in …

Picking up the pieces of fractured capitalism

Picking up the pieces of fractured capitalism

Published by skeptic

The World Economic Forum convention center in Davos, Switzerland, on Sunday, January 14, 2024. MARKUS SCHREIBER / AP On the slopes above Davos, a posh village in Switzerland’s easternmost canton of Graubünden, a massive 1900 hotel dominates the resort. It was here in these Alpine heights that Thomas Mann set the scene for his Magic Mountain. On the eve of the First World War, a young engineer from Hamburg discovers the life of the people “above,” the wealthy bourgeois, recluse in their comfortable world, constantly swaying between the dream of the Enlightenment and the awareness of an inescapable decline. Davos has lost none of the poisonous charm described by Mann. Every year, people from “above” return to haunt the place to pity themselves on the miseries of the world and to do good business. Since its creation in 1971 by Klaus Schwab and its transformation in 1987 into the World Economic Forum, it has been a week-long gathering of the business and political elite. Once again, this year, from Monday, January 15 to Friday, January 19, …

‘Cheaper to save the world than destroy it’: why capitalism is going green | Green economy

‘Cheaper to save the world than destroy it’: why capitalism is going green | Green economy

Published by skeptic

The root of the climate crisis is “not capitalism but the corruption of capitalism”, according to the author of a new book on how people, policy and technology are working to stop the planet from heating. Akshat Rathi, a climate reporter with financial news outlet Bloomberg, argues that smart policies can harness capitalism to cut carbon pollution without killing markets or competition. “It is now cheaper to save the world than destroy it,” he writes, adding that this holds true even when viewed through a narrow capitalist lens. “Capitalism cannot be the solution to climate change,” Rathi told the Guardian. “But there can be a form of capitalism that we have seen working – in many different parts of the world, in big and small ways – that if we can use and deploy in other parts of the world, we really can use this tool to the advantage it provides us.” In Climate Capitalism, Rathi runs through stories of success and failure that have helped people invent clean technologies, develop them into profitable products …

The Archies review – Riverdale goes to India for goofy lessons in capitalism | Film

Published by Sam

One could be cynical and see this transposition of the Riverdale narrative universe into an Indian setting as just another exercise in brand colonialism, pasteurising youth culture one country at a time with deadly doses of emulsifying intellectual property. Or one could just chillax and dance along to the formidably catchy songs, performed with zip by the peppy and exceedingly well choreographed cast. While one is grooving along, it’s worth noting that every so often the film-makers have smuggled in a quietly subversive thought, such as in the song Everything Is Politics which argues, pace Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, that there is no position outside the ideological apparatus. It’s that very dualism which makes this goofy musical fascinating, a guilt-free pleasure that’s nevertheless super-corny and ridiculous. Like the American Archie comics on which this is based, the story here takes place in a mythical town called Riverdale – except this Riverdale was founded in northern India by Anglo-Indians, as explained in an opening animated sequence. After independence, the residents of Riverdale planted trees in the …