I’d like a citation on the funding from Iran. Iran is mostly Shi’ite, and doesn’t generally get involved in Arab or Sunni affairs. And this article from 2021 (prior to the current conflict) points out that the bulk of Hamas funding comes from Qatar and Turkey, respectively.
FPTP
Can you explain in more detail? I’m unclear on what First Past the Post voting has to do with the OP’s concerns.
There’s also a strong argument that the Indiana licensing board that censured Dr. Bernard were activists who were bowing to public pressure. Many external authorities who reviewed Dr. Bernard’s case do not believe that she committed any unethical disclosure.
https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/01/caitlin-bernard-indiana-abortion-10-year-old-advocacy/
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/03/1179941247/abortion-caitlin-bernard-indiana-doctor-medical-board
“Who could possibly be responsible for the catastrophic loss of value of one of the Internet’s most beloved brands? Could it be me, the owner, and the decisions I’ve made?”
“No. The Jews are responsible.”
So, when Rod Stewart sings, “Oh God I wish I was home tonight with you in my arms”… ?
This is about context, and in context, he’s clearly not meaning to imply that God is a 5-foot-3, 300 lbs welfare recipient.
“Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds… taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds”
Perhaps I’m misreading it, but I took “God” to be an exclamation, not the 2nd-person subject for the following sentence. “You” is the fat welfare cheat.
the enemy is more defined, namely rich people
Well, rich northerners. That’s a very important distinction. Southern gentlemen – that is, Confederates – are excluded.
Richmond was the capital of the confederacy, so it’s important to point out that they were north of Richmond particularly.
To cope with the pain, they can tend to “kick down” on other groups, like obese people,
It’s a very specific appeal to a right-wing stereotype from the Reagan era: the urban “welfare queen”, refusing to labor, getting fat off welfare while country “working poor” starve.
Of course, the reality is the opposite: per capita, rural folk get larger government disbursements in the form of welfare and disability than city dwellers.
The execrable stereotype was invented to turn the poor on each other. The country, full of uneducated hicks, the cities full of welfare cheats getting fat off your tax dollars. And while the proles fight each other, the fat cats steal wages and get tax breaks.
I suppose it’s possible that Mr. Anthony is so far down the rabbit hole, having been raised with these ideas as “common sense truths”, that he doesn’t even realize he’s been fed a partisan line and he’s just repeating it like a good soldier.
“Neoliberalism and Its Prospects”. 1951
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/
This entry explicates neoliberalism by examining the political concepts, principles, and policies shared by F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan, all of whom play leading roles in the new historical research on neoliberalism, and all of whom wrote in political philosophy as well as political economy. Identifying common themes in their work provides an illuminating picture of neoliberalism as a coherent political doctrine.
…
But several recent book-length treatments of neoliberalism (Burgin 2012; Biebricher 2018; Slobodian 2018; Whyte 2019) have helped give form to an arguably inchoate political concept. As Quinn Slobodian argues,
in the last decade, extraordinary efforts have been made to historicize neoliberalism and its prescriptions for global governance, and to transform the “political swearword” or “anti-liberal slogan” into a subject of rigorous archival research. (2018: 3)
Along similar lines, Thomas Biebricher (2018: 8–9) argues that neoliberalism no longer faces greater analytic hurdles than other political positions like conservatism or socialism.
In light of this recent historical work, we are now in a position to understand neoliberalism as a distinctive political theory. Neoliberalism holds that a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state. Neoliberals endorse liberal rights and the free-market economy to protect freedom and promote economic prosperity. Neoliberals are broadly democratic, but stress the limitations of democracy as much as its necessity. And while neoliberals typically think government should provide social insurance and public goods, they are skeptical of the regulatory state, extensive government spending, and government-led countercyclical policy. Thus, neoliberalism is no mere economic doctrine.
… etc …
I mean, sure, the term can be misused. But “neoliberal” was adopted by Hayek, Mises, Friedman et. al. to describe their philosophy of liberty, capitalism, and free market policies. So it’s not completely inappropriate to associate “neoliberal” with those principles.
I think that in the minds of Friedman, Hayek, Mises et. al. (who coined the term neoliberal after WW2), it was meant to marry modern pro-market economic ideas (the “neo” part) with classically liberal social ideals, reaching back to the Enlightenment. I think they intended it as a counter to socialism, which combined anti-market ideas with regressive ideas around social and civil liberty (at least, in practical application in the wake of WW2).
But yes, in modern parlance it is often a slur aimed at pro-corporate capitalist kleptocracy.
Is it? Neoliberalism describes a modern conservative movement closely aligned to libertarian philosophy. Privatization, elimination of government programs, tax reduction, laissez-faire capitalism are all under the neoliberal umbrella.
I mean, I’m not saying the author is wrong, but they don’t even point to a hot mic confession or a conservative e-mail that says “we need to scale back humanities at public universities, because it’s teaching our kids the wrong things”.
The idea that Republicans are specifically targeting liberal arts academics sounds truthy, and on brand for them, certainly. But it would be nice to see more evidence than angry assertion.
Although I generally agree with the premise of the article, I don’t think the author does himself any favors when he points out many perfectly legitimate reasons that the cuts are happening (documented declining enrollment in humanities, a history of financial planning issues that affect all WVU budgets, humanities making up a minority of cuts, etc).
Are the humanities being cut due to political or ideological pressure? What is the actual evidence that the cuts are ideological in origin? After presenting lots of specifics around finances, the author is curiously nonspecific on that point.
Chip Wilson admitted that he chose the name Lululemon because he thought it would sound exotic and Western to Asian customers, and because he thought it was funny to hear Japanese people pronounce it.
When Wilson was CEO, he made comments in 2005 saying that it was funny that Japanese people couldn’t pronounce the “L” in Lululemon.
“It’s funny to watch them try and say it,” he told Canada’s National Post Business Magazine when asked about the Japanese pronunciation of his company’s name.
Wilson denies saying it, according to the New York Times.
It’s not even generally true for appointed federal judges. There are no formal job requirements to become a federal judge.
Engineers like to say that business people should get out of the way and let the engineers to their job, but ask yourself how many engineers choose to supervise other human beings. Somebody has to do the hard job of dealing with employee psychology all day long. It’s a messy, “up to your armpits in other people’s lives all day long” kind of job.
You need people who are actually GOOD at that, with all the emotional intelligence it implies, if you want a workplace that doesn’t completely suck.
So I’ve been in IT management since the 00s, first running a help desk, then moving on to projects, then senior technology leadership incl. running onshore and offshore dev teams. Right now I’m in a sr. dev/service architect sort of role that includes oversight of deliverables from developers.
And it’s a tough question. The problem is, you will hear valid points from every extreme. Some will say, get the business people out of the way, let the engineers run the show and solve the problems. And they’re not wrong. You will hear some people say, money rules the castle, any behavior that is not aligned toward revenue is a waste of time. And they’re not really wrong either. And others will say, the management hierarchy is paramount; do what your immediate supervisor says, and trust the process. Others will say, do what’s right regardless of what management thinks, and you’ll get ahead. And none of these people are wrong either.
What I’ve learned through working on both the technical and business sides of the house is that while technical skills comprise assembling technical assets and resources to solve an engineering problem, business skills comprise assembling financial assets and human resources to solve a business problem – assets and resources that INCLUDE engineering effort. And for the most part, business people do not, and cannot, understand everything engineers do, any more than they can understand everything HR does or everything facilities does or everything sales does. Business people are like the generals pointing to a map; they don’t know (or need to know) how the guns and tanks and helicopters actually work. They do need to decide which hill to take, which bridge to destroy, etc.
But damn it, they better listen to the people who DO know how things work.
So, inasmuch as I can answer your question at all, I would answer it this way: developers will be empowered when everybody learns to stay in their lanes… most of the time. Business people should treat development a little bit like a black box: make sure the right requirements go in the Input side, and make sure the right deliverables come out the Output side, and get involved in the innards only when there is a problem with the outputs.
Conversely, developers can – and should – analyze requirements critically, develop an understanding of WHY the requirements are what they are, and generally be consulted stakeholders in the requirements gathering process. But ultimately they should not be deciding what to build, because they just aren’t going to have the 360-degree picture to understand how the business is going to make money from that output. Those inputs have to come from business-oriented people who are actually charging money to do things (or otherwise know what the customer wants).
That’s probably why modern development methodologies like Agile are so tightly focused on pairing the developers with business people who can provide rapid input and evaluate prototypes on short timelines. Keep the inputs and outputs in digestible chunks, but keep the business thinking on the customer side and the engineering thinking on the development side.
Sure, I guess that’s a… very long term?.. solution to the OP’s problem.