Holding the controversial Formula One race in April was a key part of the attempt to demonstrate to the international community that Bahrain had returned to normal — a portrayal somewhat undermined by the burning tires, furious activists, and critical media coverage which followed. (My all time favorite video response remains this "Epic Fail" from Katy Perry.) This Index on Censorship story suggests that whatever her personal intentions, Kardashian's visit falls into the same category of attempts to rehabilitate Bahrain's image without any meaningful policy changes. That protests and tear gas disrupted the international media coverage of her visit as well is therefore in some ways a promising sign that the reality of Bahrain's ongoing repression and failure to deal honestly with its recent past has not yet been washed away.
As another child of 1984 (Orwell's children), I want to add that it's too easy to paint all of us with the same brush. I have some good friends my age who are every bit as conservative, religious, and social-issue driven as our parents' generation. I myself come from one parent who was a deacon in our church and has become even more religious and conservative over the years, while my mother was a Jesse Jackson supporter who protested Bush and took time off to visit DC to see the Obama Inaugural.
Like many millennials, my parents divorced. I didn't have the "Leave it to Beaver" childhood, and more importantly, never aspired towards it. The sitcoms I watched growing up, from "Full House" to "Family Matters", showed how people made connections based on a willingness to live with and work with each other by choice. This shift in culture – of not blindly following our sometimes bumbling parents, of embracing technology faster than the generations that came before us – has all had the cumulative effect of making people of my generation a little more willing to challenge orthodoxy than those before us (see Occupy Wall Street and the strong pro-pot movements).
Another:
As other writers have articulated, we do pride ourselves on our ability to try to get the real scoop of the story. But this pride, I fear, may be our downfall as a generation as well.
Just about every year of my life, I look back on the stances I took prior and feel a crushing sense of regret that I ever dared express such beliefs. We're still young, and we're living in a time where adolescence is longer than ever. Add to this the sort of smug ideological entitlement we feel on account of "getting it" more than our parents and you have a recipe for a generation that is unwilling to confront whatever blind spots become a hindrance in the future.
This may seem vague, since I couldn't articulate right this moment where my ideologies go astray. But I've learned the importance of never resting on my own laurels. Yet it's all I see my peers doing. From the prevalent Millennial presence on sites like Reddit to the people I've encountered in the college classroom or on Facebook, what I see among people my own age is a profound sense of confidence that the world's problems end with us. It reminds me very much of the social phenomenon we saw with the Baby Boomers, who – despite being showcased in the media during the late '60s and early '70s as the hippie generation – ended up being the villains of many of today's Millennial narratives.
I'm not saying that our generation won't make some valuable progress. It is undoubtedly positive that we're more level-headed when it comes to drug policy, and overall support marriage equality. Yet when it comes to the really tricky economic challenges we'll face – unfunded mandates, entitlements for an aging population, continuing dialogues on race and the social implications of complex human sexuality, I fear that we are woefully under-prepared. The worst part is that most Millennials don't even realize it.
To read all the letters from millennials, go here.
Wherever she goes, she brings people together—imperiously gesturing to cantankerous couples to sit down together and lifting their palms onto each others’ thighs, reconciling warring classmates by joining their hands, and charming child-leery adults with flirty smiles and studious imitations of their idiosyncrasies. Her gifts are the opposite of my own: Where I am shy, she is bold; where I am good with (known) words, she is good with drama, dance, and music; where I am frightened of groups, she loves them, and the children in her preschool compete hard to sit by her side at lunchtime as the nurses in her hospital petitioned to be assigned to her room.
[M]ost American conservatives, myself included, rail against collectivism in much less significant arenas. Let government try to force us to change to a more energy efficient lightbulb or regulate the water capacity of our toilets and the calls for revolution ring out across the land. Encourage us to buy more energy efficient automobiles through tax incentives and corporate subsidies and you’re a tyrant. Suggest that we turn off electronic devices that aren’t in use and you’re at very least a dirty hippy and probably an out-and-out commie. But suggest that women give up the advances they’ve made over the last half century because somebody has to have more kids, why, what could be more reasonable?
[Douthat] argues that while in theory we could deal with the challenge of population decline in wealthy societies through greater immigration, as "humanists" we should seek to maintain those populations through children instead, because we’re so rich that we can provide better childhoods than other people. This is spectacularly unconvincing.
A broad commitment to something we might plausibly call humanism might very easily lead to the opposite conclusion: that providing an opportunity to migrate to a wealthy society for people suffering considerable oppression or mired in hopeless poverty scores at least as high on the humanism scale as having a not especially wanted additional child. I would also submit that a humanist commitment to the well-being of future generations is, first and foremost, concerned with the quality of life of those future people, rather than quantity in which those people exist. (Is Douthat a closet Parfitian?) Given our rather pathetic lack of progress to date to scale human consumption to a level that doesn’t dramatically alter the earth’s climate, a somewhat lower population at some point in the future might be worth pursuing as a necessary but not sufficient condition of ecological stability, despite the policy challenges it presents.
Neil Irwin wonders why the stock market hasn't tanked in anticipation of the fiscal cliff:
The basic question is who is judging the political temperature better: Those at a healthy remove who know that these things usually work themselves out, if at the last possible minute? Or those who are closest to the action, who see little visible evidence that a deal is reachable by the end of the year? Here’s the thing: They both could be right. It may be that the thing that will finally force the parties to negotiate in earnest will be increasingly desperate calls from supporters in the business community, or a few hairy days on the financial markets, of 5 or 7 or 9 percent declines.
"Personally, I know we have to raise revenue…. I would rather see the rates go up than do it the other way because it gives greater chance to reform the tax code and broaden the base in the future," – Tom Coburn.
Previous coverage of the Republican senator's pragmatism here, here and here.
According to multiple Fox sources, Ailes has issued a new directive to his staff: He wants the faces associated with the election off the air — for now. For Karl Rove and Dick Morris — a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox’s anti-Obama campaign — Ailes’s orders mean new rules. Ailes’s deputy, Fox News programming chief Bill Shine, has sent out orders mandating that producers must get permission before booking Rove or Morris. Both pundits made several appearances in the days after the election, but their visibility on the network has dropped markedly. Inside Fox News, Morris’s Romney boosterism and reality-denying predictions became a punch line. At a rehearsal on the Saturday before the election, according to a source, anchor Megyn Kelly chuckled when she relayed to colleagues what someone had told her: "I really like Dick Morris. He’s always wrong but he makes me feel good."
The removal of one clown and one huckster is a good thing. But here's what caught my eye in the piece:
Multiple sources say that Ailes was angry at Rove’s election-night tantrum when he disputed the network’s call for Obama. While the moment made for riveting television — it was Ailes’s decision to have Kelly confront the statisticians on air — in the end, it provided another data point for Fox’s critics.
So Ailes is personally yelling live into the ear-pieces of his minions. It makes you think the TV personalities are mere puppets on a string, doesn't it? That Megyn Kelly isn't an "actual journalist" but a mere mouthpiece for a corporate mogul. And that couldn't be true, could it?
Michael C. Moynihan is an American journalist and managing editor of Vice magazine. Before that he was a senior editor of the libertarian magazine Reason. Moynihan founded the English language magazine based in Stockholm, Sweden, the Stockholm Spectator. He was a resident fellow of the free-market think tank, Timbro. After censorship by Comedy Central of an episode of South Park in 2010 that featured a depiction of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, Moynihan announced his support for the protest movement, "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day". On July 30, 2012, a Moynihan article appeared in Tablet Magazine showing evidence that New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer had fabricated Bob Dylan quotations, led to Lehrer's resignation.
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