teneasysteps-blog

[teneasysteps-blog]

Fear that it's somehow your fault for not being strong enough is, of course, what allows abusers to continue to abuse. I believe the time for silence is over. If we want to build a truly fair and vibrant community of political debate and social exchange, online and offline, it's not enough to ignore harassment of women, LGBT people or people of colour who dare to have opinions. Free speech means being free to use technology and participate in public life without fear of abuse – and if the only people who can do so are white, straight men, the internet is not as free as we'd like to believe.

This is an extract, you can read the full article here:

Laurie Penny: A woman's opinion is the mini-skirt of the internet - Commentators - Voices - The Independent

[teneasysteps-blog]

A Giant Statistical Round-up of the Income Inequality Crisis in 16 Charts

Too see the other 14 charts, click here.

[Images: EPI]

[teneasysteps-blog]

[teneasysteps-blog]

A true-cost economy would align our economic system with nature’s life support systems. Biologists teach us that each living system has feedback loops that allow it to adjust and operate within carrying capacity limits. The human economy is no exception, but we’ve short-circuited an important feedback loop by letting companies externalize the costs of their pollution. The time has come to adopt systematic rules that add pollution costs to the prices of goods and services. Such rules would provide critical information that is necessary to keep the scale of the economy within the planet’s carrying capacity. A true-cost system would solve real problems, but how can we put such a system in place?

This is an extract, you can read the full article here:

A Practical Proposal to Erase Externalities « Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

[teneasysteps-blog]

The PPACA is important. It’s vital. When a bug can bring down your family, when there are people who are willing to take away the shield that could prevent that, when we as a country have become so small and stingy and mean that we cheer the idea of ripping medical care away from fellow citizens, offering nothing in its place but sanctimony and self-righteousness… What are we? We’re not a country. We’re not a community. Oh, no. We’re a zero-sum game. We’re the state of nature. We’re animals, gobbling down as much as we can, as fast as we can, swatting away the weak. “I got mine” are just about the ugliest words in the English language. They’re also, increasingly, a mantra for the same people who shout “We, the people” out of the other side of their mouths. I love this country, more than I can properly express in words. It’s my home. It’s my future. Its history and achievements are awe-inspiring. Its idea, its founding purpose, is the most important the world has ever known. We are bound together by the notion that we are all created equal, committed to one another as a single body politic, held by the strength of our lives and our fortunes and our sacred honor. We put a man on the moon and an SUV on Mars and we made sure that tens of millions of our fellow citizens can know that a goddamned insect — or an accident or a disease or any of a billion other random, faultless happenstances — isn’t going to send them to the poor house. (Assuming social services still supports poor houses. Substitute “the streets” as appropriate, assuming infrastructure funding hasn’t gone to corporate tax breaks.) We can make this work. We have to make this work. A bug bite cannot be the thing that draws the line between a middle-class life and poverty, between opportunity and the stagnant dead-end of could-have-been. Our friends, our neighbors, our children, the future of this country as a cohesive society — as an endeavor where we see each other as more than opponents, as more than competitors — depends on it.

This is an extract, you can read the entire article (and hear the story of the bug bite) here: An Entirely Other Day: Bugged

[teneasysteps-blog]

Wallace is right in noting there is illness in my community, but it has little to do with how you poke your bits in other people. Suicide is a burden GLBTI youth carry heavier than most, and beyond the media baiting, there's a danger that comments from the ACL act as a trigger for young people taking their own lives. Political intentions aside, the undertone that homosexuality is unhealthy or that acting on mutual love will lead you to an early grave is not something that sits easily on the restless mind of a teenager. Young people who do not identify as heterosexual are four times more likely to take their lives than their heterosexual classmates, and beyond anti-bullying campaigns or promises that "it gets better", for the most part we have stopped asking why.

And why might suicide hit gay youth hardest? - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

[teneasysteps-blog]

Please. When you listen, listen with your whole body. Use your ears, of course, but also use your eye and your heart. Listen for the facts, of course, but also listen for the underlying emotions and values of the other person. Only when you listen that carefully and deeply can you begin to understand and then communicate with another person. I don’t know if the Chinese character for listening really does include the characters for the ear, the eye, and the heart, but I do know that listening needs to include all those things. Let's start listening better to one another and maybe -- just maybe -- we can save this magical planet and the precious, irreplaceable people on it.

This is an extract, you can read the full article here:

Nick Morgan, Public Words: Thin Slicing, Malcolm Gladwell, and the Chinese character for listening

[teneasysteps-blog]

Within an hour, a national movement was born, spearheaded by social commentator Jane Caro. It's called Destroy the Joint. And it's very funny. There were thousands of tweets and Facebook posts as women detailed the many ways they were derailing the Australian success story. They were picking their kids up from soccer; making Father's Day lunches; operating on broken hands; delivering babies; working on legislation for improved school funding. Or to legalise same-sex adoption, same-sex marriage. All the while, destroying the joint. Caro says humour works. She also says that the left continues to lose the battle because it imagines that arguments can be won on the basis of social justice, good evidence and common sense. ''Humour takes the power away from the powerful,'' she says. Power is hard to give up - and even harder to share. You can see that from what happens in our own Federal parliament as our politicians struggle to make the compromises to make a minority government work. As Caro puts it, it's a game of thrones and someone will always be trying to knock you off (Go Team Stark). In this case, it's women just wanting to share some of the power in a society which is still deeply embedded in old ways. Men in charge, women in waiting. Some of us thought this was over. Jane Gilmore, one of my favourite opinionators, declared at the weekend that while she wrote a column in 2008 saying that feminism had done what it had set out to do, she now knew she was wrong. ''In my world at the time, that was true … that was all I saw in my professional world and my personal world … so I am taking up the angry feminist mantle and I'm proud to do so.'' And here's what Caro says. She says that social media has given us the opportunity to band together in a way we've never had before. The collective expression is stronger than the individual complaint and it's all out there.

This is an extract, you can read the full article on the background to the "Destroy the Joint" tweets here:

Destroying the joint on the way to the post-patriarchy

[teneasysteps-blog]

Brilliant! How to deal with a shock jock, thank you Mr President of Ireland

(via A Tea Partier Decided To Pick A Fight With A Foreign President. It Didn't Go So Well.)

[teneasysteps-blog]

Critical thinking is a skill that develops over time. Independent thinking does not occur overnight. Critical thinkers are open to having their cherished beliefs challenged, and must learn how to “defend” their views based on evidence or logic, rather than simply “pounding their chest” and merely proclaiming that their views are “valid.” One characteristic of the critical, independent thinker is being able to recognize fantasy versus reality; to recognize the difference between personal beliefs which are nothing more than personal beliefs, versus views that are grounded in evidence, or which have no evidence.

This is an excerpt, which is so utterly worth reading. Full letter from a professor to his students here:

Charles Negy, Professor, Says Students Showed 'Religious Arrogance And Bigotry' In A Letter Later Posted On Reddit

[teneasysteps-blog]

Watching Democrats and Republicans hash out their differences in the public arena, it’s easy to get the impression that there’s a deep disagreement among reasonable people about how to manage the U.S. economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, there’s remarkable consensus among mainstream economists, including those from the left and right, on most major macroeconomic issues. The debate in Washington about economic policy is phony. It’s manufactured. And it’s entirely political.

The U.S. Economic Policy Debate Is a Sham - Bloomberg

Fantastic story in Bloomberg, via Anna Rascouët-Paz

(via emptyage)

[teneasysteps-blog]

Mass media does not exist to promote a series of desirable social, economic or political ends. Of course not. Mass media exists to create a profitable business from the things that interest its public. Don't confuse that with the public interest. And the consequence? If the consequence is creating a gush of reckless reportage that may well encourage the next generation of Dark Knight shooters? Well, that sounds like an enduring business model. And anyway, we're just giving the public what it wants. Etc. Why should we care? Why should we care when newspapers hack phones to exploit a public thirst for prurience and celebrity tittle tattle? Maybe we do. There have been arrests in the UK this week, as the state has acted to sooth public outrage at the conduct of the News of the World. Arrests of former senior newspaper editors, executives and reporters who either hacked, or conspired in the hacking of phones for reasons, we must assume, that made perfect, compelling, commercial and journalistic sense at the time. For reasons that fitted neatly with the fiercely competitive prosecution of journalistic craft that makes the UK the first world's hottest newspaper market. Why should we care when an Australian TV crew intrudes (yet again) to squeeze whatever broadcast quality video it might from intimate moments of tragedy? Surely the journalists in question are just serving some notion of freedom of speech when they harass a grieving family, then hover in their helicopter over a disconsolate mother and the body of her 13-year-old daughter? We should care because all this behaviour folds somewhere into the current practice of news and journalism and the argument now raging on whether its rights ought be curtailed by regulation or sterner self discipline. Freedom of speech is the cause our media corporations are so keen to defend. And 'freedom of speech' is how they define the unfettered freedom to pursue their commercial interests, a neat blend of noble public principle and narrow corporate need. The troubling concept here is merging the idea of freedom of speech with the repeated behaviour of the corporatised media that claim it as a social benefit only they can deliver.

This is an extract, you can read the full article here:

They defend press freedom in pursuit of the gory detail - The Drum - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

[teneasysteps-blog]

Marriage has been around for thousands of years – it predates our dominant religions and has evolved over time, reflecting changes in society. What hasn’t changed is that marriage has always been a legal contract administered by the state – even if a church has, at times, also been the state. Sure we could quibble over what changes happened at what time and what those changes mean, but that is beside the point that I’m trying to make. Symbolism is the act (often unwillingly) of attributing meaning or emotion to something. Our response to symbolism is visceral – it is something deeply personal that resonates within each of us. If you play a song to someone, it may symbolise a moment in time where they were the happiest they’ve ever been. If you play the same piece to someone else, it may be symbolic of tragic circumstances. Both are correct. Both are infallible, but it is the same song. The symbolism attached to that song applies to a specific individual. On the other hand, law is broad and it (theoretically) applies to everyone, equally. It provides a structure that ensures equal treatment of all while respecting that people will have their own symbolic values. ... At it’s most fundamental the fight for marriage equality is simply to allow consenting adults who are already in a partnership to legally formalise their union in the eyes of the state. That’s it. That is as much control and jurisdiction the marriage act allows – to legally recognise a union between two people. The couple is then free to attribute whatever symbolic meaning they choose.

This is an extract, you can read the entire (and excellent) article here:

Symbolism matters, but not to the law

[teneasysteps-blog]

The deal – the political compromise with shared spoils – is not an invention of the devil but the mechanism that keeps the system on the rails, and the deal-maker or fixer is essential to effective government. A visionary who cannot negotiate an outcome is a waste of political space.

An extract from a fantastic article on how politics actually operates vs how it is viewed in modern popular culture.

Comment: Australian Democracy and the Right to Party | Amanda Lohrey | The Monthly

[teneasysteps-blog]

One would assume that a gathering of the world’s largest businesses would be focused intensely on the present, and that a gathering of the leaders of the world’s most influential countries would be focused on the future. After all, political leaders are supposed to have vision, and business leaders are about getting things done, right? This time, that traditional reality has been turned upside down. In Rio, in a coalition assembled by the World Economic Forum, CEOs of companies like Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Alcatel-Lucent have put their names to a declaration calling for collaboration with government and NGOs to achieve “the world we want.” They are articulating a vision of shared global prosperity and environmental stewardship that has traditionally been the role of government. Meanwhile, up the Trans-American Highway in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, the G20 leaders are mired in our lingering financial crisis, stubborn unemployment, and domestic political problems. If CEOs are (fairly) critiqued for looking only to the next quarter, government leaders may be even worse: focused on hourly numbers of the currency and stock markets, and monthly employment figures. There is virtually no vision coming from the G20. What’s more, very few will be making their way from Mexico to Rio—even though the date of the Rio Summit was changed in part to provide an easy way to “do” both summits. As Washington and Brussels dither, it has become all too easy to reject government as terminally incapable of leadership. This is, of course both dangerous and wrong. Indeed, the “Friends of Rio” coalition has made a specific point of saying that their efforts will make far more headway if government is fully engaged. Before Rio started, I argued that real, lasting progress would come not from intergovernmental agreements, but rather from broad coalitions of actively engaged participants. This worldview defines much of the Rio summit, and is largely absent at the G20. And as flawed as the Rio summit may be, it will be remembered by history as a messy but promising example of how the world works in the 21st century. Meanwhile, we’re likely to remember the smaller gathering in Cabo as the symbol of a dying era of global governance. The stakes are too high for the story to stop there. It’s time for the multifaceted coalitions at Rio to go even further, and for the political and national leaders of the G20 to reclaim their role as the stewards of the public interest, with sustainable development as their north star.

BSR at Rio: 20-20 Visions | Blog | BSR | Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility Network and Consultancy

[teneasysteps-blog]

The Declaration of Interdependence: A David Suzuki Foundation Thought Bubble (by ThoughtBubbler)

[teneasysteps-blog]

One can debate the environmental value of 50,000 carboning in to Rio for a 100 hour knees up. And certainly, the excuse for the fest is a poor one, a multilateral negotiation over a high level text that will deliver no deep vision, no blueprint, no new policies and certainly little or no action. But cynics begone, there are amazing things on display at Rio 20, let no one tell you otherwise. Beneath the sad rhetoric is the living vibrancy of action, interaction and reaction. It turns out that we know how to act, we just don`t know the theorize its frenzy into the a noble narrative. Thank goodness, frankly, that this is our pointless challenge, rather than its catastrophic invertion.

This is an extract, you can read the full article here:

Rio 20`s Practice Better than its Theory - simon zadek

Or you can get more info on the Rio 20+ conference