Good Guys, Bad Guys? and OT 11/12-13
Thought provoking shortish article on the contrast between more ancient folk stories and literature and the more modern changes, making characters more rigid and the whole dilemma more black and white. The whole article is worth a read if this sort of thing interests you.
Here’s a bit from the end:
Stories about good guys and bad guys that are implicitly moral – in the sense that they invest an individual’s entire social identity in him not changing his mind about a moral issue – perversely end up discouraging any moral deliberation. Instead of anguishing over multidimensional characters in conflict – as we find in The Iliad, or the Mahabharata or Hamlet – such stories rigidly categorise people according to the values they symbolise, flattening all the deliberation and imagination of ethical action into a single thumbs up or thumbs down. Either a person is acceptable for Team Good, or he belongs to Team Evil.
Good guy/bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication, but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations. Their values feel like morality, and the association with folklore and mythology lends them a patina of legitimacy, but still, they don’t arise from a moral vision. They are rooted instead in a political vision, which is why they don’t help us deliberate, or think more deeply about the meanings of our actions. Like the original Grimm stories, they’re a political tool designed to bind nations together.
It’s no coincidence that good guy/bad guy movies, comic books and games have large, impassioned and volatile fandoms – even the word ‘fandom’ suggests the idea of a nation, or kingdom. What’s more, the moral physics of these stories about superheroes fighting the good fight, or battling to save the world, does not commend genuine empowerment. The one thing the good guys teach us is that people on the other team aren’t like us. In fact, they’re so bad, and the stakes are so high, that we have to forgive every transgression by our own team in order to win.
When I talked with Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (2017), about the rise of the idea that people on opposite sides of conflicts have different moral qualities, she told me: ‘Three inventions collided to make concentration camps possible: barbed wire, automatic weapons, and the belief that whole categories of people should be locked up.’ When we read, watch and tell stories of good guys warring against bad guys, we are essentially persuading ourselves that our opponents would not be fighting us, indeed they would not be on the other team at all, if they had any loyalty or valued human life. In short, we are rehearsing the idea that moral qualities belong to categories of people rather than individuals. It is the Grimms’ and von Herder’s vision taken to its logical nationalist conclusion that implies that ‘categories of people should be locked up’.
Watching Wonder Woman at the end of the 2017 movie give a speech about preemptively forgiving ‘humanity’ for all the inevitable offences of the Second World War, I was reminded yet again that stories of good guys and bad guys actively make a virtue of letting the home team in a conflict get away with any expedient atrocity.
The café is open. T.G.I.F.
Starbucks Anti-Union Blitz in High Gear as Buffalo Employees Begin Historic Vote
Great post!
The article also said that it’s looking good! 🙏
nm have to have a sub. remember when he was free or maybe LD had a sub.
This yahoo should be out on the street barely dressed forced to seek shelter under an overpass. Just who is h3ll’s bells does he think he’s kidding?????? Comparing the Holocaust to an union strike? Really Schultz, you are one dumb greedball jew. T and R x 2, pb4!! 🙂 You guys are terrific!! 🙂
haha. didn’t notice i repeated. iirc, I meant to add a different part of the article. Oh well😁
i forgot to BOLD this:
Who was dumb enuff to buy into their “charity” rap to start with?
i hope every darn time. probably how I end up so cynical.
“Corporations will always put profits first if you give them control over who lives and who dies.”
That is the golden rule of Crapratism, Profits first and foremost at the expense of anything else.
Bernie will retire when his term ends. Who is going to step up to replace him in the cesspool known as the Senate?
I’ve been getting e-mail donation requests from his campaign, which leads me to believe he’s not retiring in 2024.
I notice the cretin is still prancing around and not in any sort of jail or holding cell. SOS.
Cult-45 and his cronies will delay until mid terms are over when all will be forgiven and forgotten
Amy, like so many Dems, lives in a bubble.
Even after being successfully treated for breast cancer, her push is only for preventative care.
You know what would save even more lives, Amy? People actually having the ability to get treated!
There’s discovering a medical issue early on and then, wait for it, then there’s having the money to actually TREAT the issue! Are they not aware how many people cannot afford deductibles and co-pays?
https://www.pinejournal.com/news/government-and-politics/7258302-After-breast-cancer-battle-Sen.-Amy-Klobuchar-leads-push-to-promote-preventive-care-screenings
they’re aware, imo, of how good they have and seem to be born with a sort sociopathic denial gene.
We need to talk about the real reason behind US inflation
Robert Reich
On Wednesday, the US labor department announced that the consumer price index – a basket of products ranging from gasoline and health care to groceries and rents – rose 6.2% from a year ago. That’s the nation’s highest annual inflation rate since November 1990.
Pressure on Fed to raise interest rates as US inflation surges to 30-year high
Republicans are hammering Biden and Democratic lawmakers over inflation – and attacking his economic stimulus plans as wrongheaded. “This will be a winter of high gas prices, shortages and inflation because far left lunatics control our government,” Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida posted on Twitter Thursday.
A major reason for price rises is supply bottlenecks, as Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, has pointed out. He believes they’re temporary, and he’s probably right.
But there’s a deeper structural reason for inflation, one that appears to be growing worse: the economic concentration of the American economy in the hands of a relative few corporate giants with the power to raise prices.
If markets were competitive, companies would keep their prices down in order to prevent competitors from grabbing away customers.
But they’re raising prices even as they rake in record profits. How can this be? They have so much market power they can raise prices with impunity.
Viewed this way, the underlying problem isn’t inflation per se. It’s lack of competition. Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits.
In April, Procter & Gamble announced it would start charging more for consumer staples ranging from diapers to toilet paper, citing “rising costs for raw materials, such as resin and pulp, and higher expenses to transport goods”.
But P&G is making huge profits. In the quarter ending 30 September, after some of its price increases went into effect, it reported a whopping 24.7% profit margin. It even spent $3bn during the quarter buying its own stock.
It could raise prices and rake in more money because P&G faces almost no competition. The lion’s share of the market for diapers, to take one example, is controlled by just two companies – P&G and Kimberly-Clark – which roughly coordinate their prices and production. It was hardly a coincidence that Kimberly-Clark announced price increases similar to P&Gs at the same time P&G announced its own price increases.
Or consider another consumer product duopoly – PepsiCo (the parent company of Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Quaker, Tropicana, and other brands), and Coca-Cola. In April, PepsiCo announced it was increasing prices, blaming “higher costs for some ingredients, freight and labor”. Rubbish. The company didn’t have to raise prices. It recorded $3bn in operating profits through September.
If PepsiCo faced tough competition, it could never have gotten away with this. But it doesn’t. To the contrary, it appears to have colluded with Coca-Cola – which, oddly, announced price increases at about the same time as PepsiCo, and has increased its profit margins to 28.9%.
You can see a similar pattern in energy prices. If energy markets were competitive, producers would have quickly ramped up production to create more supply, once it became clear that demand was growing. But they didn’t.
Why not? Industry experts say oil and gas companies saw bigger money in letting prices run higher before producing more supply. They can get away with this because big oil and gas producers don’t operate in a competitive market. They can manipulate supply by coordinating among themselves.
Since the 1980s, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated
In sum, inflation isn’t driving most of these price increases. Corporate power is driving them.
Since the 1980s, when the US government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.
Monsanto now sets the prices for most of the nation’s seed corn.
The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks, of which JP Morgan is the largest.
Airlines have merged from 12 in 1980 to four today, which now control 80% of domestic seating capacity.
Boeing and McDonnell Douglas have merged, leaving the US with just one large producer of civilian aircraft: Boeing.
Three giant cable companies dominate broadband: Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.
A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry: Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck.
All this spells corporate power to raise prices.
So what’s the appropriate response to the latest round of inflation?
The Federal Reserve has signaled it won’t raise interest rates for the time being, believing that the inflation is being driven by temporary supply bottlenecks.
Meanwhile, Biden administration officials have been consulting with the oil industry in an effort to stem rising gas prices, trying to make it simpler to issue commercial driver’s licenses (to help reduce the shortage of truck drivers), and seeking to unclog overcrowded container ports.
But none of this responds to the deeper structural issue – of which price inflation is a symptom: the increasing consolidation of the economy in a relative handful of big corporations with enough power to raise prices and increase profits.
link by any chance? if not i can google
https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/11/us-inflation-market-power-america-antitrust-robert-reich
gracias 🙏
“Since the 1980s, when the US government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.Since the 1980s, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.
In sum, inflation isn’t driving most of these price increases. Corporate power is driving them.”
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What happened in November 1980? Ronald Craporate Fascist Reagan was elected. The fringe Far Righties and their monied backers were unleashed. As conservative as Carter was, he was a godsend compared to this bunch. 🙁
💜
and
lots more in the artcle. matt stoller is thorough.
https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1458874822272839694?s=20
Mr. mags had MSNBC on for three or four ghastly minutes yesterday and multiple times I found myself checking to see if it was FOX News I was watching.
ikr? When MSNBC liberals rage about Fox, I inwardly roll my eyes.