Tag: Premium

Abby Rabinowitz traces “meme” from its coinage in Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene to its current incarnation:

Pinpointing when memes first made the leap to the Internet is tricky. Nowadays, we might think of the dancing baby, also known as Baby Cha-Cha, that grooved into our inboxes in the 1990s. It was a kind of proto-meme, but no one called it that at the time. The first reference I could find to an “Internet meme” appeared in a footnote in a 2003 academic article, describing an important event in the life of Jonah Peretti, co-founder of the hugely successful websites The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed.

In 2001, as a procrastinating graduate student at MIT, Peretti decided to order a pair of Nike sneakers customized to read “sweatshop.” Nike refused. Peretti forwarded the email exchange to friends, who sent it on and on, until the story leapt to the mainstream media, where Peretti debated a Nike representative on NBC’s Today Show. Peretti later wrote, “Without really trying, I had released what biologist Richard Dawkins calls a meme.” …

According to a recent profile in New York Magazine, the Nike experience was formative for Peretti, who created BuzzFeed with the explicit goal of creating viral Internet memes. The company uses a formula called “Big Seed Marketing,” that begins with an equation describing the growth of a virus, the spread of a disease.

Yglesias poses a provocative question: “Why give poor people grocery vouchers when it would be simpler, easier, cheaper, and more helpful to give them money instead?”

[L]egally restricting SNAP benefits to apply only to grocery purchases is weirdly punitive to the thrifty. Want to dine on lentils and brown rice for six months to save up money for car repairs? Well, you’re out of luck. Unless, that is, you come up with some scam to trade your extra benefits for money. The poor can end up either condemned for irresponsibility or condemned for fraud.

The only real winners from focusing this keystone anti-poverty program on groceries are agribusiness interests. As long as those interests were delivering the goods – in the form of conservative votes for spending money on the poor – that was a reasonable enough compromise. But now that today’s more partisan Republicans aren’t interested in the deal, it’s time for liberals to scrap it, too.

Food industry groups are keeping quiet about the cuts:

Although all grocery stores and supermarkets that accept SNAP payments – there are more than 231,000 stores nationwide – stand to benefit extremely from continued SNAP funding, many of the same organizations are large Republican Party backers. …

[For example,] General Mills, the parent company of Betty Crocker, Yoplait and Pillsbury, among others, has spent more money on Republican candidates than Democratic candidates in every election cycle between 1990 and 2012. The National Grocers Association lobby spent $23,800 on Republican house members in 2012, and $4,000 on Democratic candidates.

The grocer associations and food companies face a political conundrum. They can advocate publicly for businesses benefitting from SNAP funding, and thus ally themselves with the White House and liberal advocacy groups against Washington Republicans. Or they can stay mum on the topic and continue to back Republicans who generally support their agenda on trade, labor, tax, and regulatory issues.

Carmel LoBello offers a theory for Big Grocery’s reticence:

Another reason may be that the bill isn’t expected to get very far in the Senate – and even if it somehow did, Obama would likely veto it – so businesses can keep their hands clean and appear politically consistent without any risk to their bottom lines.

Recent Dish on food stamp cuts here and here.

Many readers are responding to this quote from Tiffany White:

Expressing concern and condolence over death and illness has always been a confusing linguistic contortion for me, a life-long atheist living in the Deep South. I’ve since settled for variations on “You’re in my thoughts”. Though I myself am at-peace with the concept of the end of life being the end of existence, so many people believe otherwise. “They’re at peace now” works well for condolences; it lets me be comforting without having to be disingenuous.

Another reader:

I faced this recently when a friend of mind suddenly lost her husband.  Instead of “I’ll pray for you” there’s “I’m thinking of you” – logically they are the same thing and yet they feel different.  On the other hand I feel that the loss of “I’ll pray for you” is as a whole a positive thing.  Atheists know that prayer doesn’t help the recipient and yet makes the person praying feel like they’d done something to help the grieved.  The atheist is forced, if they do care for the person, to do something that actually does help the grieving person – bring them food, help them give stuff to Goodwill, some actual thing to help.  So in the end the loss of “I’ll pray for you” forces us to do more, and give more and be of personal help to the grieving person, and that is a good thing.

Another:

Oy vey. Tiffany White needs to get over herself. First, she’s not talking about grieving godlessly; she’s talking about being supportive of a friend (whose religious views she doesn’t disclose) who is grieving. Second, she’s assuming her lack of theism somehow limits her expression of consolation far more than it must.

I have been an agnostic for about 40 years, which – for the purposes she’s describing – is not that different from being an atheist. But more important, for about 20 years, I have been a Unitarian-Universalist – that is, I choose to belong to a religious community that works with its members to support them (and others) through life’s joys and sorrows, even though it eschews creedalism. A lot of UUs serve as chaplains. (Try listening to this podcast about Kate Baestrup, a UU chaplain with the Maine Warden service. )

When you are with someone who is grieving, it is your job to be present – physically, emotionally, and intellectually – and to focus on that person and her pain. It is not your job to worry about the finer points of your theology and what your theology says. Suppose you believed in the god of the Catholics. Could you say nothing comforting to a Baptist? To a Jew? To a Hindu? What happens to people when grief washes over them? Do they sit around like theology professors gauging the doctrinal nuances of what people say? C’mon.

Here’s what you can say: “I hear you.” “I brought you some supper.” “I’ll put it in the refrigerator.” “I’ll help you with the acknowledgement notes” “Yes.” “You’re right.” “Let me give you a hug.” “I know she loved you.” “I know she knew you loved her.” What the bereaved says and the bereaved needs determine what you say, not your religious beliefs.

Another:

Whenever I comfort anyone who’s lost a loved one, family member, or friend, I say the same thing, which I believe to be true for atheists like me or for believers: “I am so sorry.  I know, though, that the depths of your grief equal the heights of your love.”

Another:

When my first husband died, just about everything other than “I am sorry for your loss” – in its many forms – set my teeth on edge because no one could really understand just what I was feeling because to do that they needed to be me. People worry too much about this anyway. Just showing up or just acknowledging the loss, in even the smallest way, is better than a mass market sympathy card or straining your creative side trying to find a unique way to acknowledge a pain that never really goes away and is something that we will all know sooner or later and is a human reality that scares most of us witless.

Personally, I am waiting for the day when we can say, “Damn, this fucking sucks.” But that probably won’t happen.

Responding to Hanna Rosin’s recent declaration that the patriarchy is dead, Ann Friedman opines that “America is finally getting around to having the conversation about what it means to be a man that, decades ago, feminism forced us to have about womanhood”:

Women still face social consequences when they don’t conform neatly to gender norms, but many of even the most ideologically progressive men are just now starting to talk about how to break with masculine stereotypes and still hang onto a sense of gender identity. [Bryan] Goldberg and [Hanna] Rosin, in using traditional definitions of manhood (the simple, stoic breadwinner), declare him dead, or at least less marketable to advertisers. Men’s magazines, which now peddle facial moisturizers but still often shy away from heartfelt confessionals, have spotted how hard it is for men to balance both embracing and rethinking masculine stereotypes — and they’ve made some attempts to address it, but mostly ended up documenting the confusion.

For her part, Stephanie Cootz dismisses the idea that men have historically served as the “stoic breadwinner.” She calls it “a late-arriving, short-lived aberration in the history of the world, and it’s over”:

It wasn’t until the 1920s that a bare majority of American children came to live in a family where the husband earned the income, the wife was not working beside him in a small business or on a farm or earning income herself, and the children were either at home or in school and not working in a factory on in the fields. That family form then grew less common during the Great Depression and WWII, but reappeared in the 1950s thanks to an unusual economic and political situation where real wages were rising steadily and a government flush with cash was paying veterans benefits for 44 percent of young men starting families. This was a period when your average 30 year old man could buy a home on 15 to 18 percent of his own salary, not needing his wife’s.

That era is gone—for good. And yet America formulated its work policies, school hours, and social support programs on the assumption that this kind of family would last forever, that there would always be someone at home to take care of the children and manage the household.

A reader quotes an earlier one:

“The right is tone-deaf to the issues effecting its base – Southern and rural working-class whites – while the left seems to think any infringement on someone’s ability to use government benefits is unacceptable.” Come on!  Do you really think it is “the left” who doesn’t want any sensible infringement on peoples’ right to buy Mountain Dew and Pringles with food stamps, OR do you think it might have something to do with the lobbyists who work for the sellers and manufacturers of soda and chips, and who have strong influence on Farm Bill legislation?!

Another sends the above graph:

Of course banning sugary and drink and sweet foods seems like a simple analgesic to improving health and dental outcomes, but in reality this would actually be a massively expensive and complex undertaking for the government, with absolutely zero certainty it would reduce tooth decay or obesity.

For instance, the very definition of “unhealthy” is extremely amorphous. Dana Liebelson chronicled 9 foods that have more sugar than a Krispy Kreme doughnut, including a six-inch Subway sub (two doughnuts worth of sugar), 8 oz of Tropicana Orange Juice 2.5 doughnuts) and Yoplait Yogurt (almost 3 doughnuts). This is one reason USDA has emphatically rejected attempts to restrict SNAP benefits in the past: the government would have to sort through almost 300,000 products currently on the market and the 15,000 introduced each year and decide what is healthy and what is not – a subjective and almost impossible task, one that could basically create a federal food surveillance program that would have some serious implications for government intrusion into both food manufacturing and personal grocery store purchasing choices.

And SNAP recipients, especially children where tooth decay actually begins, don’t actually drink more soda than non-SNAP recipients (see graph). The problem, especially amongst low-income individuals, is access to care, and West Virginia ranked 42nd in the country with only 4.7 dentists per 10,000 residents. So you can’t blame SNAP for subsidizing bad teeth. In the end, the real root of the problem your previous reader should be blaming isn’t Mountain Dew Mouth; it’s Lack of Medical Care Mouth.

Previous posts in the thread here and here.

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In light of his decision after six months of sobriety to buy a 30-pack of beer and drink until he blacked out, Sam Wilkinson considers the research of Columbia psychologist Carl Hart, who argues that addicts are capable of making reasoned decisions and that “there’s a certain rationality to keep taking a drug that will give you some temporary pleasure”:

It would be easy to describe my actions that day as being those of a man who was out of control, who despite knowing that he had a serious drinking problem still made the irrational decision to drink. … But I knew what I was doing when I stormed out of my house. I knew what I was doing when I drove straight to a convenience store. I knew what I was doing when I bought the case of beer. I knew what I was doing when I drove to a friend’s house. I knew what I was doing when I called from the road to make sure that she would let me come over. I knew what I was doing when I went inside, when I put down the beer, when I opened the first one, and when I drank my sobriety away. Everything I did was cold and calculating and based on the knowledge that the fastest and most effective way I understood to make emotional devastation go away was to be unable to feel anything at all.

The first of Alcoholic’s Anonymous’s twelve steps is the following: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol— that our lives had become unmanageable.” Although I do not intend to argue about Alcoholics Anonymous – it is a vital mechanism that has helped so many people to get sober – I do take great issue with the idea that addicts are powerless. … [T]he scales in their lives are weighted in such a way as to make having a drink more appealing than not taking a drink. Outsiders peering in often claim otherwise – “Why doesn’t he stop drinking? He’s hurting himself!” – but that is not their calculation to make. It is not irrational take a drink when taking a drink is the best of the available options.

Shawnee Barton is happy with the NFL’s ongoing push for more female fans, but she hopes the organization will start thinking beyond marketing:

Judging by media coverage, dollars spent (according to the NFL, women’s apparel spending went up 76 percent in the last three years), and the much-talked-about football fashion spread in the September issue of Vogue, it would appear these efforts are working. (Though in 2011, Katie Baker smartly argued that the rise of female football fans more likely results from sports and popular culture increasingly blurring than it does from savvy NFL marketing efforts.)

I love a form-fitting, logo-emblazoned throwback blazer as much as the next gal. And it’s understandable that the NFL tries to boil female interest down to clichés—marketing, after all, is marketing. Yet the focus on merchandising both misses the real reasons women watch sports and forgoes an opportunity to engage them in far more meaningful—and for the NFL, lucrative—ways. If league execs spent as much time bettering the stadium and fan experience for women and families as they did contemplating how to get Condi to model her Browns jersey, pro football could win over more female fans, keep the avid ones it already has, and transform casual female consumers into lifelong, diehard fans.

Sarah Maiellano suggests repealing a recent security policy mandating “see-thru” handbags for women as a good place to start:

We want the option to carry our handbags. Our pants and skirts don’t always have pockets. We don’t want other fans to see our personal items. We are concerned about theft either in the stadium or on public transportation home. We are worried that we won’t be able to fit items like diapers, tampons, or nursing pads in tiny purses. We don’t feel like swapping purses to attend a game. We don’t own a small clutch and don’t want to pay for a new clear bag. We don’t want to carry a Ziploc bag because it has no handle and, frankly, looks stupid.

The new rule was implemented as both a safety measure and a way to speed up the entry process. Those are admirable goals. But they need to be balanced and reasonable. What seems reasonable to a group of men may not to women. According to the NFL, 35% of those who attend games are women and more than 50% of women say they watch regular season games. The league has made strides in marketing its merchandise to women. But the NFL’s female fans deserve more than lip service when it comes to this war on purses.