The movement toward ESG reporting certainly highlights important issues, such as climate change and the treatment of workers, and it is welcome that corporations want to engage in the debate. But the belief that companies can solve such pressing issues—through pursuing ESG standards or otherwise—is deeply flawed. Despite purportedly having good intentions, many corporations are not genuinely interested in bettering the world, and some use ESG metrics or other sustainability measures mainly to launder their reputations. Fixing some of the world’s most vexing problems will require that businesses dramatically alter their own practices, and it makes little sense to entrust systemic reform to the very institutions that themselves require change.
Instead, action must come from elsewhere: namely, governments. States must impose new regulations on the market economy to ensure that businesses are delivering shared productivity and social progress. Politicians will need to create laws that make markets work well and embed values—such as environmental sustainability or higher wages for low-income workers—that reflect the mainstream views of society. Renewed regulatory activism must include restoring competition through effective antitrust enforcement, legislating for the national interest over global profits, and tilting the balance of economic returns from older, wealthier generations to younger, poorer ones. It should also mean regulations to fight climate change, such as emission limits, mandates to end the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles, or bans on the use of certain materials.
I agree with the limits of corporate social responsibility. However, government is not the only response. Civil society needs to hold both groups accountable. This highly localized sector has to engage in sector wide projects to aggregate data and demonstrate the reality of the experiences of so many who cannot access the resources offered by either government or business. And they must stand firm in holding open the space for civic engagement against the limiting action of so many companies.
The power of this one-two punch— eroding democracy at the state level and then handing power to the states—won’t be limited to abortion. There are any number of areas, including environmental regulations, workplace protections, and anti-discrimination laws, where gerrymandered state legislative majorities are far to the right of Americans as a whole.
In a tweet (which can be seen below) on Saturday night, he wrote: “SCOTUS is letting private citizens in Texas sue to stop abortion?! If that’s the precedent then we’ll let Californians sue those who put ghost guns and assault weapons on our streets. If TX can ban abortion and endanger lives, CA can ban deadly weapons of war and save lives.”
We cannot support the right outcome – fewer illegal guns on the streets – with bad means. I was trying to decide if id label this as vigilanteism. I don’t think so. More I think it’s the kind state sponsored spying – so rampant in East Germany – that undermines cohesion and trust in a community, keeping us away from people who do not share our views.
So stop eating yourself up. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt. Life is like that. I know I sound like I'm preaching from a pulpit, but it's about time you learned to live like this. You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things.If you don't want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life's natural flow.
Image: The phone is against the chain link fence so it remains unseen, shooting in to a community garden. A stand on one side, a stand on the other. A path is slicing the view in two.
The semicolon is an element of language that communicates stops, pauses, reflections, and cigarette breaks within a sentence. It connects loose ends with disparate ideas; the semicolon lets you have it both ways. Today having it both ways is considered little more than hypocrisy, not an exercise in artistry. The digital world churns; Twitter is not an arena known for reflection. Semicolons, then, are snottily elitist and shadily indirect.
The simple fact is that the Republican Party, and the conservative movement that gave it life for the past 50-odd years, has mutated into something alien and dangerous. Whatever that chimeric creature is, there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop its growth. But one way to ensure that it gets larger and more dangerous is to deliberately ignore the reality of it when it’s right in front of your face. Half of our political ecosystem has gone irreducibly renegade, and to pretend it hasn’t is to fail journalism’s constitutional powers worse than Richard Nixon failed his.
Too often, we fail to be wounded by the stories we tell. Or, worse, we feel the wound but hide the pain. We hide it with cynicism. We hide it with cleverness. We hide it with easy repetition of nostrums and conjuring words that keep us from facing the overwhelming reality of the threat. We choose to operate on the same level of unreality that’s created for us. Perception is reality? That’s bunk. Reality is reality, and the job of journalism is not to pretend that perception is reality, but to hammer the reality home until the perception conforms to it.
A Puerto Rican friend, a wealthy widow who travels the world, revealed to me that she had cured her fear of flying through whisky. She’d always take a good supply with her on board, hidden in a small bag, and at the second or third sip, the ship could turn somersaults or be tossed about by the wind and she’d be giggling and happy, impervious to everything. I tried to apply her formula, but it did not work for me. I am very allergic to alcohol, and gulps of whisky, far from taking away my fear of flying, just increased it, and gave me headaches, shivers and nausea on top. I would probably have needed to become a hardened alcoholic, seeing little green men, to achieve the indifference to flying that my Puerto Rican friend managed with a few sips of alcohol. The cure would have been more damaging than the illness.
I am afraid of flying. Mario VargosLlosa's reason above is why I do not take anti-anxiety medicine on a flight. I am convinced it will work on the wrong anxiety. I recite the facts of flying. It is not scientific reassurance. It is a chant.
In some circles, the kind of attitude shown by SaeedDiCaprio is being labelled as “right-clicker mentality,” Vice reported this week. It’s a term first coined by NFT collector and creator Midwit Milhouse, who complained at the time that somebody was cheaply recreating gold-coated steaks online.
According to Milhouse, it was a homebrewed version of a steak popularized by internet sensation Salt Bae, who was selling the creation for $2,000 at his restaurant in London
“Sure, you can make your own gold-coated steak for 65GBP, but then you don’t have the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant,” Milhouse wrote in a tweet last month.
“The value is not in the cost of the steak,” Milhouse argued. “It’s all about the flex.”
So, why is Zuck talking about this big new metaverse thing? Well, the cynic in me believes because they want to own this new internet. In some countries, Facebook is already equivalent to the internet because they partner with local telcos and offer free or extremely cheap data rates to users that connect to Facebook services. I think that this time around, they want to become synonymous with “internet” for the whole world. The name Meta, of course, is a first step in controlling that narrative: Many people will think that the metaverse is called metaverse because of Meta, not the other way around.
