Tag: occupy

In the News: Pamela Gellar, Prophesy, PEN, and more!

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A round-up of the week’s religion news. Continue Reading →

Our Daily Links: While You Were Eating Fruitcake Edition

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Worth the Wait: It may have taken 1,500 years but the Talmud finally has an index.
Early Adopters: I’ve long said that religion and porn are the two first groups to adopt new technologies. In “Christianity and the Future of the Book” at The New Atlantis Alan Jacobs writes, “Religious communities have been the inventors, the popularizers, or the preservers of technologies.” (Jacobs doesn’t say anything about porn, alas.)
The Vatican has released its annual report on deaths of mission workers around the world. South America and Africa are highest on the list of dangerous continents.
Red Kettle Menace: The Salvation Army does great work but tis the season to hear more about their prayer-for-assistance policies, in this instance, regarding same-sex couples. (TR friend and co-conspirator Diane Winston has written about the Salvation Army in Red Hot and Righteous: the Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. Hear her talk about it here, in a 2009 interview with NPR.) Continue Reading →

All the Market's a Stage

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By George González

Placards at this weekend’s forced evacuation of “Occupy Boston,” as elsewhere in the country, defiantly read, “You Can’t Evict an Idea.” This kind of contention is key to understanding the sophisticated politics of the “Occupy Movement.”  The seeming contradiction between this notion and the original focus on the physical occupation of space exemplifies the genius of the movement.

In my previous post, “The Market, Warren Buffet and the Occupation of Wall Street,” I discussed how arguments which overstate the rationalist dimensions of economic life, whatever their political persuasion, are dangerous because they contribute to misunderstandings of  how economic power actually works in our daily lives. If we misdiagnose the stakes or misread the landscape, our social critique is impaired. I made the point that, in practice, Warren Buffett’s financial empire understands quite well the “emotional content of economics,” as one of my mentors, Bethany Moreton, nicely puts it.  Yet, his solutions for improving our economic lot are strangely rationalist given the multifaceted ways in which his company does business. What I mean by this is that his solution is formal, proceduralist and bureaucratic. It makes a policy appeal regarding tax law and commends legislative approaches. Legislative and legal activism that benefits from ten-point plans and specific policy goals are, no doubt, very important pragmatic dimensions of the work that needs to be done. Such work, however, does not begin to exhaust what is meant by the mantra Occupy Everything! nor begin to exhaust the sakes as many “occupiers” understand them. Continue Reading →

All the Market’s a Stage

Posted on by

By George González

Placards at this weekend’s forced evacuation of “Occupy Boston,” as elsewhere in the country, defiantly read, “You Can’t Evict an Idea.” This kind of contention is key to understanding the sophisticated politics of the “Occupy Movement.”  The seeming contradiction between this notion and the original focus on the physical occupation of space exemplifies the genius of the movement.

In my previous post, “The Market, Warren Buffet and the Occupation of Wall Street,” I discussed how arguments which overstate the rationalist dimensions of economic life, whatever their political persuasion, are dangerous because they contribute to misunderstandings of  how economic power actually works in our daily lives. If we misdiagnose the stakes or misread the landscape, our social critique is impaired. I made the point that, in practice, Warren Buffett’s financial empire understands quite well the “emotional content of economics,” as one of my mentors, Bethany Moreton, nicely puts it.  Yet, his solutions for improving our economic lot are strangely rationalist given the multifaceted ways in which his company does business. What I mean by this is that his solution is formal, proceduralist and bureaucratic. It makes a policy appeal regarding tax law and commends legislative approaches. Legislative and legal activism that benefits from ten-point plans and specific policy goals are, no doubt, very important pragmatic dimensions of the work that needs to be done. Such work, however, does not begin to exhaust what is meant by the mantra Occupy Everything! nor begin to exhaust the sakes as many “occupiers” understand them. Continue Reading →