Aaannnnnd the Hits Just Keep On Coming!

• Game of Thrones as critique of the patriarchy from the privileged side.

  This observation is what I find so profound about “Game of Thrones”. Yes, patriarchy hurts men by luring them into its bullshit narrative about putting “honor” over more important things like love and human decency. But it’s not like they’re lured with phantoms. For men, the reward of upholding these unfair systems is that they are given a place of prestige and told that their lives matter—and that the other half of the human race exists solely to uphold and serve them.

  Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at Raw Story.  Spoilers for that last episode (I'm not watching, so I don't know which one it is.  "Red Wedding?"  Anyway.)
• It's not really all marketing; better euphemisms don't cut it.  "Smiling faces tell lies," as the song goes.

  Unfortunately, there’s not a “nice” way to say that you oppose someone’s basic human rights. Maggie Gallagher is showing what a farce this kind of thinking is, trying to claim that one can somehow believe that heterosexuals are better than gay people without it actually being homophobic, even though that’s the definition of homophobia.

  It's as though the they haven't caught on that Dorian Gray's painting hasn't changed, but Dorian has. Republican organs are all two sizes too small, anyway.
• Speaking of fraud, Naked Capitalism's Bill Black explains why plutocrats, opportunistic crooks, and folks out to fleece you financially are a bad combination.

  At the heart of Greenspan’s failure lies an ethical void in the brand of economics that has dominated American universities and policy circles for the last several decades, a brand known as “free market fundamentalism” or the “neoclassical school.” (I call it “theoclassical economics” for its quasi-religious belief system.) Mainstream economists who follow this school assert a deeply flawed and controversial concept known as the “efficient market hypothesis,” which holds that financial markets magically regulate themselves (they automatically “self-correct”) and are thus immune to fraud. When an economist starts believing in that kind of fallacy, he is bound to become blind to reality. Let’s take a look at what blinded Greenspan:
  

  1. Greenspan knew that markets were “efficient” because the efficient market hypothesis is the foundational pillar underlying modern finance theory.
  2. Markets can’t be efficient if there is control fraud, so there must not be any.
  3. Wait, there are control frauds! Tens of thousands of them.
  4. Then control fraud must not really be harmful, or markets would not be efficient.
  5. Control fraud, therefore, must not be immoral. As crime boss Emilio Barzini put it in The Godfather, “It’s just business.”

  As delusional and immoral as this “logic” chain is, many elite economists believe it. This warped perspective has spawned policies so perverse that they turn the world of finance into the optimal environment for criminals. The upshot is that most of our elite financial leaders and professionals have thrown integrity out the window, and we end up with recurrent, intensifying financial crises, de facto immunity for our most elite criminals, and the rise of crony capitalism.

• Recto-cranial fusion.  (Speaking of making Jughead appear a Rhodes Scholar.)
• Jimmy Carter as reincarnated Eleanor Roosevelt.

  I was struck by the fact that there are a group of people whose job it is destroy aspects of America that help keep us healthy, fed, housed and connected. Why do they hate other Americans so much? Is it because they want the Social Security money to go to Wall Street or do they also want to see others suffer? Is it because they don’t see their own connection with others?

  Warning: References Noam Chomsky.  From Spocko's Brain.
  

Enough, already!