The Best Theories On Everything (Volume III)

Please see The Best Theories On Everything (Volume I) and (Volume II) here.

The “Discretionary Spending” Theory: Don’t buy things (electronics, clothes). Buy experiences (travel, concerts).

The designer jeans will fray. The next (barely-improved) iPad will come out in six months. But that diving with whale sharks memory will last forever.

The “Manti Te’o” Theories

The “Manti Te’o, The Romantic” Theory:

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Today, Poor Youth’s College Dreams Shattered Early On

The Article: For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall by Jason DeParle in the New York Times.

The Text: Angelica Gonzales marched through high school in Goth armor — black boots, chains and cargo pants — but undermined her pose of alienation with a place on the honor roll. She nicknamed herself after a metal band and vowed to become the first in her family to earn a college degree.

“I don’t want to work at Walmart” like her mother, she wrote to a school counselor.

Weekends and summers were devoted to a college-readiness program, where her best friends, Melissa O’Neal and Bianca Gonzalez, shared her drive to “get off the island” — escape the prospect of dead-end lives in luckless Galveston. Melissa, an eighth-grade valedictorian, seethed over her mother’s boyfriends and drinking, and Bianca’s bubbly innocence hid the trauma of her father’s death. They stuck together so much that a tutor called them the “triplets.”

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The Best Gore Vidal Quotes

Gore Vidal is to political commentary as the tetanus shot is to medical procedures. They’re both incredibly sharp, stinging and, well, strong enough to make you immune to whatever feral creatures you encounter in the woods or on Capitol Hill. A lifelong Democrat and vociferous opponent of American foreign policy, when the self-proclaimed “queen bitch” wasn’t criticizing American democracy, he was getting into well-publicized spats with other literary greats like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. Here are some of this intellectual diva’s strongest penned punches.

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China In Revolt

The Article: China in Revolt by Eli Friedman in Jacobin Magazine.

The Text: The Chinese working class plays a Janus-like role in the political imaginary of neoliberalism. On the one hand, it’s imagined as the competitive victor of capitalist globalization, the conquering juggernaut whose rise spells defeat for the working classes of the rich world. What hope is there for the struggles of workers in Detroit or Rennes when the Sichuanese migrant is happy to work for a fraction of the price?

At the same time, Chinese workers are depicted as the pitiable victims of globalization, the guilty conscience of First World consumers. Passive and exploited toilers, they suffer stoically for our iPhones and bathtowels. And only we can save them, by absorbing their torrent of exports, or campaigning benevolently for their humane treatment at the hands of “our” multinationals.

For parts of the rich-world left, the moral of these opposing narratives is that here, in our own societies, labor resistance is consigned to history’s dustbin. Such resistance is, first of all, perverse and decadent. What entitles pampered Northern workers, with their “First World problems,” to make material demands on a system that already offers them such abundance furnished by the wretched of the earth? And in any case, resistance against so formidable a competitive threat must surely be futile.

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Google: Tax-Dodging Villain Or Capitalist Conqueror?

The Article: Google’s tax avoidance is called ‘capitalism’, says chairman Eric Schmidt in The Telegraph.

The Text: Mr Schmidt’s comments risk inflaming the row over the amount of tax multinationals pay, after it emerged that Google funnelled $9.8bn (£6.07bn) of revenues from international subsidiaries into Bermuda last year in order to halve its tax bill.
However, Mr Schmidt defended the company’s legitimate tax arrangements. “We pay lots of taxes; we pay them in the legally prescribed ways,” he told Bloomberg. “I am very proud of the structure that we set up. We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to operate.”

“It’s called capitalism,” he said. “We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.”
In Britain Vince Cable was unimpressed by Mr Schmidt’s views. The Business Secretary told The Daily Telegraph: “It may well be [capitalism] but it’s certainly not the job of governments to accommodate it.”

A Californian pressure group called Consumer Watchdog wrote to the Senate’s Finance Committee demanding a hearing on Google’s “global tax avoidance strategies”.

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