Saturday Readings: November 26, 2016
It’s Saturday and Fidel Castro, the leader of the Cuban Revolution who held power for 50 years, has died.
“I’ll soon be 90,” the former president said, adding that this was “something I’d never imagined”.
“Soon I’ll be like all the others, “to all our turn must come,” Fidel Castro said.
There may be another baseball strike. Fox Sports reports that tensions between team owners and players are the highest they’ve been in two decades and a lockout could be looming. The conflict comes down to, among other things, the owners’ desire to branch out in player development and free agency via the international draft.
The owners offered to resolve two of the biggest issues by offering a straight exchange, telling the players they would eliminate direct draft-pick compensation in free agency in exchange for the right to implement an international draft, sources said. The players, however, rejected the proposal, wanting no part of an international draft.
Women are micro-dosing LSD to help with their workday and productivity. marie claire has a feature profiling some of the professional women who are using this unconventional method in the workplace.
The idea of taking a psychedelic multiple times a week might seem impossibly risky to those of us who were raised with stories of 1960s-era acidheads who died thinking they could fly off tall buildings, or hearing the cafeteria shibboleth that if you took more than seven LSD trips in your life, you’d become legally insane — but the concept of micro-dosing has actually been around for a long time. Albert Hofmann, Ph.D., the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD in 1938 and died in 2008 at the age of 102, actually micro-dosed his own invention for decades at the end of his life, as reported in Waldman’s upcoming book.
Maybe micro-dosing LSD can help sexist men? The Washington Post reports that a study indicates that sexist men have deep psychological issues, to the surprise of no woman in the world.
A growing group of psychologists are interested in studying “toxic masculinity” — the idea that some traditional ideas about how men should behave are harmful to men, women and society overall. The point is not to demonize men, or the attributes some of them possess. It’s more to understand how behaviors encouraged in men can be damaging for everyone involved.
Finally, Carl Beijer wonders if Paul Krugman has any consistency of analysis — or if the economist is being conveniently forgetful. Beijer uses Krugman’s earlier writing about Clinton’s means-tested obsession with social programs to make the point that American voters, whether they know it or not, want outright socialism.
My guess it that when Krugman sold Obamacare to the public as a market-based program rather than a government program, a lot of voters believed him. Liberal technocrats deliberately designed Obamacare in a way that would minimize the government’s role (so as to preserve capitalism) and obscure it (so as to make it politically acceptable to capitalists). They then promoted it accordingly, insisting that it was not some Soviet-style Big Government initiative, but rather a modest tweak that ultimately “relied on insurance companies”.
Viva la revolucion.