Data sot është 23-05-2013, ora 19:34
We face eurogeddon and dollargeddon
By Timothy Garton Ash, the Guardian
Call me Oswald Spengler if you must, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the United States and the European Union are currently engaged in competitive decadence. The two leading polities of the west seem incapable of tackling the debt and deficit burdens which their closely related versions of liberal democratic capitalism have built up. Their politicians dance like drunkards along the cliff's edge of default. If Thursday's...
Responsible Journalism
By Al Gore, Huffpost.com
Unlike access to the 'public square' of early America, access to television requires large amounts of money. Thomas Paine could walk out of his front door in Philadelphia and find a dozen competing, low-cost print shops within blocks of his home. Today, if he traveled to the nearest TV station, or to the headquarters of nearby Comcast -- the dominant television provider in America -- and tried to deliver his new ideas to the American people, he would be laughed off the premises. The public square that used to be a commons has been refeudalized,...
Facebook narcissists
By Joel Achenbach, Washington Post
…. Let’s look at These Kids Today: They have grown up in the age of the digital camera, the computer, and Facebook. These are fabulous inventions. But they’re also narcissism-enhancers. In the era of film, you didn’t waste pictures. Each image counted. You carefully staged the photo, got the light just right, waiting for the precise moment, and then executed the shot. Now a typical teenager will take 20 photos in the time it took me to type this paragraph.Of those, 18 will be taken with the camera pointed back at the...
These resignation statements are meaningless
By Gary Younge, the Guardian
"Action," argued philosopher Hannah Arendt, "without a name attached to it is meaningless." It leaves you with objects without subjects and consequences without causes. So it is with the resignations that have emerged from the phone-hacking scandalso far. Time and again people with huge salaries and immense power acknowledge they...
Why are we afraid of male sexuality?
By Ally Fogg, the Guardian
…. Since the era of the permissive society and the mainstreaming of modern feminism, western society has gone a long way towards liberating women's sexuality. Younger women have, to an unprecedented extent, been encouraged to believe they can be as sexual as they like and to experience and express their desires as they wish. Even the age-old proscriptions on female promiscuity have been largely broken down, exemplified by the glorious flowering of the...
Can Greeks Become Germans?
By Thomas Friedman, New York Times
….Germany is the epitome of a country that made itself rich by making stuff. Greece, alas, after it joined the European Union in 1981, actually became just another Middle East petro-state — only instead of an oil well, it had Brussels, which steadily pumped out subsidies, aid and euros with low interest rates to Athens.
Natural resources create corruption, as groups compete for who controls the tap. That is exactly what happened in Greece when it got access to huge Euro-loans and subsidies. The natural entrepreneurship of...
The Cameron Collapse
By Roger Cohen, New York Times
….. Murdoch is a flawed genius whose very ruthlessness has now led him to his comeuppance. He knew, more viscerally than anyone, what postmodern societies wanted to satisfy their twisted appetites and he provided that material in all its gaudiness. I don’t think he created those appetites. But he sure fed them. Something deeply insidious and corrupt is at work that has been on view in both Britain and the United States. It involves the takeover of politics by money and spin and massaged images and privileged coteries. It is the death of...
