My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring). This week: Rape, US attitudes to inequality, and, idle or vulnerable?
Rape has been a regular topic this week. The UK Respect MP George Galloway repeated one of the Assange defenders’ legal myths – that having sex with someone while they’re sleeping wouldn’t be rape in the UK. Republican Congressman Akin is refusing to stand down from his Senate race after his claims that a woman’s body can shutdown pregnancy in the case of ‘legitimate’ rape (nicely satirised by The Onion). So it seems a good time to ask: why has rape become a regular and acceptable comedy topic recently?
There’s another good piece on The Guardian about the Right vs the Left’s concepts and language. Are the out of work, the unsuccessful, “idle” or “vulnerable”? Is our lack of success individually and as a country down to laziness and we all just need to suck it up and work harder as some Tory MPs are pushing, or maybe we don’t have complete individual autonomy and other things impact on our ability to achieve…
As NZ’s inequality hits it highest ever, with CEOs getting 9.9% pay rises while almost everyone outside the top 10% saw their average income fall, what does the US think about inequality? The rest of the world may see the land of the American Dream as incredibly unjust in its wealth distribution, but US citizens don’t realise that the bottom 40% own a mere 0.3% of the wealth, and the top 20% own 84%. Given the choice of how they’d like society structured, Americans will go for something noticeably more equal than Sweden, but they don’t vote for it. And figures this week show middle class wealth shrinking as that inequality gets worse.
Makes you wonder why Ayn Rand keeps being so popular over there…
Lastly, for those who fancy some heavy reading on a Sunday: an IMF paper backing full reserve banking is out. More evidence for those wanting to nationalise the money supply…
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