A short (15min) online documentary:
Ten Dollars an Hour from Ben Guest on Vimeo.
via Susie Madrak
Category Archives: Public Service, Civics, Government, Activism
Healthcare, wealthcare, death due to lack of care
Think Progress: Uninsured 22-Year-Old Boehner Constituent Dies From Swine Flu
Update: Report: Miami U. Grad Did Not Have H1N1 – Kimi Young Died Of Viral Pneumonia
The New Republic: WealthCare
The Atlantic: How American Healthcare Killed My Father
Game teaches teenagers about dangerous social media use
Smokescreen is a privacy and data sharing awareness game for teenagers. via Boing Boing.
One death every 12 seconds due to lack of coverage
From Homeless to Harvard
A perfect lesson in what our acceptance of soundbites can cause
Shelley Powers was outright slandered by taking a sentence out of context from a comment she made: link.
This is part of the game of modern politics and modern media. The lack of apology from those involved is pretty damning, because no one wants to admit they participate in it or are part of the larger problem. A larger problem that is leading all of us to be less informed about the world around us when there is so much media available.
We have a responsibility one another. When you write from a position of trust – don’t abuse it.
When walking to school becomes a political act
NYTimes: Why Can’t She Walk to School? :
Certain realities also shape these procedures, such as the schedules of working parents, unsafe neighborhoods and school transportation cuts.
But when these constraints are mixed with anxiety over transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school, the new normal can look increasingly baroque. Now, in some suburbs, parents and children sit in their cars at the end of driveways, waiting for the bus. Some school buses now have been fitted with surveillance cameras, watching for beatings and bullying.
Children are driven to schools two blocks away. At some schools, parents drive up with their children’s names displayed on their dashboards, a school official radios to the building, and each child is escorted out.
When to detach the parental leash? The trip to and from school has become emblematic of the conflict parents feel between teaching children autonomy and keeping them safe. In parenting blogs and books, the school-bus stop itself is shorthand for the turmoil of contemporary parents over when to relinquish control.
NPR: Poverty Rates Highest Since 1997 (and maybe higher than in the last 50 years?)
NPR: Poverty Rates Highest Since 1997:
David Johnson, a senior statistician with the Census Bureau, says the increase is clearly linked to jobs.
“Children in nonworking families, children in female-headed households, children in families that receive food stamps, their poverty rate didn’t change much,” Johnson says. “Whereas children in earner households, the poverty was affected a lot. So you see a lot of it tied to the earnings change in 2007, 2008.”
That makes a lot of people nervous. If things were so bad last year, what about now?
“These numbers are grim — grimmer than we expected,” says Robert Greenstein, head of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He notes that joblessness continues to rise.
“This creates a very serious concern, that if we already were at just under 40 million Americans in poverty in 2008 — before the biggest increases in unemployment — poverty is going to go much higher than that in 2009 and 2010,” Greenstein says.
In fact, he predicts that it could go higher than it’s been in 50 years.
Labor Day links
Salon.com: Who are the wealth creators?:
Material production is only one of many activities that enrich a society. Public goods like safety and utilities and infrastructure and parks are part of the wealth that we share in common. So are many private goods that sometimes are best provided by the public, like public education and inexpensive healthcare.
By all means, then, let us celebrate virtuous capital owners and visionary investors as “wealth creators” on Labor Day. And let us celebrate as well as the other creators of private wealth, on the assembly line and in the office cubicle and in the janitorial closet, and the creators of public wealth in the form of roads and subways and parks, and the police officers and soldiers without whom a high level of public and private wealth could neither be created nor preserved. There are criminals and parasites among all classes of society, but most of us are wealth creators, and we deserve to be recognized as such.
FT.com: US families turn to food stamps as wages drop
NYTimes: Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools
Change.org: 5 Things You Absolutely Must Know About Homelessness
True Homeless Stories: HearMyStory.org
(via Susie Madrak)
Hope you had a good Labor Day!
Making a good case, or how to disagree
Paul Graham created a “disagreement hierarchy” that is an outline of arguing technique, from most base, to most complete. I’m hesitant to say “most effective” because as we’ve seen online – he or she with the most links can win an argument, no matter how ‘right’ or how ‘wrong’ – especially when the most fact filled refutation is considered opinion. Like Paul Graham, I’d love to see people consider it, because as he says, moving up the hierarchy makes people ‘less mean’. That’s because you move from making an argument about the person making the counter argument, to making your assertion stand on the weight of the facts you are presenting.
Sadly, anyone in any debate better be familiar with, and capable of using the first three rings of the ladder here, because an adversary most certainly will.
- DH0. Name-calling
- DH1. Ad Hominem
- DH3. Contradiction
- DH4. Counterargument.
- DH5. Refutation.
- DH6. Refuting the Central Point.
Read the whole thing: How to Disagree
The CreateDebateBlog drew up what amounts to a ‘reverse Maslow‘:
