“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
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Heidi Moore: Wall Street and Washington want you to believe the stock market isn’t rigged. Guess what? It still is
Michael Lewis woke up Average Joe investors, but the fat cats are still trying to lull you into financial submission with their intellectual dishonesty
Most Americans don’t think much about the stock market, and that’s just fine with Wall Street. Because once you wake up to how screwed up the stock market really is, the financial industry knows you’re likely to get very nervous and take your money out. [..]
Let’s get one thing straight: Investor confidence is not the problem. The screwed-up stock market is the problem. It’s time to break down the polite fiction that investing in the stock market is something that sane, rational, sensible people do. It is a high-risk contact sport for your money.
If you know that, you’re ahead of the game.
And the more you read about the new game in town, the more nervous you should get about high-frequency trading (HFT).
Lauren Wilson: Net Neutrality’s Impact on Free Speech
Safeguarding free speech rights cannot be left to the whims and bottom lines of self-interested corporations. And if corporate interests are allowed to pick winners and losers online, it does not require much guesswork to predict who the winners and losers will be. The winners will be those who can afford to pay to play and those speakers who do not wish to threaten the system that has allowed corporate interests to amass such disproportionate control of our government and of our daily lives. Translation: The winners will be deep-pocketed content companies and those who look like the men in charge at ISPs.
The losers will be the young up-and-comers, the black and brown creators who lack access to capital and the connections to get their ideas off the ground, and anyone who dares to speak truth to power. Closing the Web is a step backwards not only for freedom of speech, but also for diversity of thought. Gutting Net Neutrality means regressing toward a shameful era in our history when the ideas and beliefs of the majority were unabashedly valued over those of minorities. Gutting Net Neutrality means that revolutionary Internet ideas, which have historically come from cash-poor outsiders, will die in their infancy.
Without an open Internet, investors might not have backed Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight or Ezra Klein’s Vox. Without an open Internet, and without the prospect of investment in his visionary reporting, we may never see what else Ta-Nehisi Coates could do. We should not have to live with this fear.
Hey, conservative columnists: don’t court controversy by whining about ‘privileged’ victims and then feign surprise at the backlash. Your time’s up
Feminists are used to being called hysterical over-reactors. So I wasn’t surprised to read The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf argue on Monday that the controversy over George Will’s recent Washington Post column on “privileged” rape victims was part of the Internet “outrage machine”.
There’s no doubt that online arguments can be head-bangingly awful. (I’m on Twitter, I know!) But what Friedersdorf’s column ignores is that writers like Will – out-of-touch conservative white men fearful of the shifting culture – court and revel in such controversy, perhaps knowing it’s likely their last gasp of relevance.
Let’s call it the “backlash machine”: the old guard pumping out deliberately regressive ideas about women while they still can.
Katrina vnaden Heuvel: Why Obama Needs to Ignore ‘Armchair Warriors’ and Focus on the Global Economy
As Iraq blows up (again) and tensions rise in the Ukraine and in the South China Sea, the United States’debate is focused on military intervention. Neoconservatives, having learned nothing from the debacle they caused in Iraq, indict the president for not intervening in Syria and for leaving Iraq. Liberal interventionists, having learned nothing from the calamities now visited on Libya, call for modulated bombing in both. The beleaguered administration sends planes to the Baltic states and Poland, ships to Asia, token troops to Baghdad, sustains hundreds of bases around the globe and is accused of withdrawing from the world. Commentators fret over whether the war-weariness of the American people will keep the “indispensable nation” from doing what must be done.
When you have a hammer, as the adage goes, everything looks like a nail. The United States’ hammer is the most sophisticated military in the world-and nails appear in infinite variety across the globe.
Virtually absent from the debate is any awareness of how much the United States’ commitment to police the world detracts from dealing with the real security needs of its people and the globe. Last week, Richard Trumka, president of the AFLCIO, delivered a short address that reminded us of what is being lost in the muscle flexing.
Clara Long and Alice Farmer: Obama pledged to limit the practice of detaining minors. What happened?
Being ‘thoughtful and humane’ is a political liability, apparently, as the US continues to hold migrant kids on the border – despite plenty of options
There’s no reliable evidence that putting families who enter the US illegally into detention centers actually deters unauthorized immigration. But there’s plenty of evidence that it can cause children in those families severe harm – from anxiety and depression, to long-term cognitive damage. That’s one big reason that family detention for immigration violations is banned under international law.
So it was disturbing to hear late last week that the Obama administration plans to open more family detention centers, starting with a 700-bed center in New Mexico, to tackle a surge in unauthorized migration across southeastern US border.It appears that the White House has come to view being “thoughtful and humane” as a political liability. The new move to ramp up family detention comes in response to criticism that the administration’s lax immigration enforcement “created a powerful incentive for children to cross into the United States illegally”, as Senator John Cornyn of Texas put it last week.
Bryce Covert: For Women’s Office Wear, Who’s Making the Rules?
Today, clothing companies seem to have figured out how to design suits and work clothes for women’s bodies. But women’s choices still come fraught with tripwires they might not even know are there. Is your clothing too brightly colored? Do you leave the collar of your shirt out of the suit jacket or tucked in? Skirt or pants? You should wear heels, but not stilettos. You shouldn’t look frumpy, but don’t dare show cleavage. Don’t “dress like a mortician,” but also avoid your “party outfit.” Wear a nice suit, but not always an Armani one.
Not to mention the invisible line separating dowdy and slutty. Hillary Clinton, whose fashion choices never cease to fascinate us, is a living example of how difficult it is to chart these waters: for so long chastised for dressing in sexless turtlenecks, she got an entire article written up the one day she showed a very small amount of cleavage.
The fact that women are faced with an unclear dress code while men know what they should wear-a suit if it’s a formal workplace, dress shirt and pants if it’s business casual-is one more sign that the workplace has still not totally dealt with the fact that women will be half of the inhabitants. That we endlessly discuss female politicians’ fashion choices and single out female employees for their clothing faux pas marks them as aliens entering someone else’s territory-they are an other, an outlier, and their clothing is one more reminder of that fact.
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