![]() turned fugitive or an embarrassing series of hacks didn’t kill your faith in crypto’s prophets, surely the loss of your teacher’s pension fund would.īut crypto’s not gone yet. After all, even if workplace harassment, a trash-talking C.E.O. One might think that after a year of crypto implosions, culminating in FTX’s November mega-collapse (to blame: the Democrat-boosting billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s bad business practices - and maybe even criminality), faith in the currency’s sanctity might finally fail. Even “no coiners” finally had to figure out how crypto works, if only to learn enough to mock its true believers. Prospectors who had mined speculative assets weathered a series of crashes that threatened to bust their boom towns while everyone else watched. This year, the digital gold rush dried up. In the end, the fact that The Slap - a minor scuffle involving three famous people - was being mustered as evidence for so many different agendas and worldviews should perhaps be taken as a sign that the simplest take is the right one here: America really likes talking about celebrities. Smith should be arrested for assault calls for his arrest showcased Americans’ carceral attitudes toward Black men. Will and Jada were longtime celebrities who should know by now how to take a joke no one should have to take a joke. Smith was defending his wife in a way that Black women are rarely defended defending a woman’s honor with physical violence was an expression of toxic masculinity. It seemed like every possible angle had its proponents: Mr. Smith “could have killed him”? Remember when a spokesman for the British prime minister weighed in?) (Remember when Judd Apatow tweeted that Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith - was so shocking (Physical assault! During one of live television’s most stage managed events!) and touched on so many of America’s most neuralgic subjects (Free speech! Toxic masculinity! Ableism! Black manhood! Black womanhood!) that it spawned a flurry of takes in the aftermath that few other events this year have matched. The event that would come to be known as The Slap - the actor Will Smith’s assault on the comedian Chris Rock after the latter made a joke about Mr. That means we’re in for at least another year of disagreement. ![]() In the end, it won’t be the court of public opinion that matters: The administration’s debt relief plan has been tied up in legal challenges practically since the day it was announced, and it’s headed for the Supreme Court. And anyway, would a payout do anything to solve the real issue, which is that higher education in America is far too expensive? Many other Americans, on the other hand, felt that the White House’s plan was just plain unfair: They had scrimped and saved to pay for post-high school education and now others were getting undeserved handouts. Biden’s debt relief plan didn’t go far enough. Activists, anxious debtors and Senator Elizabeth Warren - to name just one prominent voice - said that the package was a huge step toward fixing the problem of America’s costly higher education system. When President Biden announced in August that the federal government would forgive up to $20,000 per borrower in student loan debt (estimated to total roughly $400 billion), the response was fierce. And policing - and everything around it - remains as fraught as ever. There are serious, unsettled questions about how crime is measured: Statistics are notoriously unreliable, outdated and piecemeal. What’s the deal with crime? Has much of America descended into lawlessness thanks to soft-on-crime progressive prosecutors and a movement to “defund the police”? Are liberals refusing to grapple with reality when it comes to robberies and murders? Or is it essentially all in our heads, really more of a story about bad vibes than bad guys? Are people confusing other issues - especially homelessness - with crime? In the run-up to this year’s midterm elections, crime was a top issue in races from Oklahoma to New York, but ultimately it rarely proved decisive. One thing that’s definitely spiked: heated, politicized, polarized discussion around the issue. But they remain far lower than they were as recently as the 1990s. Crime rates have risen in many parts of the United States over the past few years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |