I am now group blogging with the other Savage Minds over at Savage Minds. I’m not sure whether I will be cross-posting my posts to both blogs or what, so for now, keep an eye on both spaces. And be sure to check out the other Savages there with me!
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Some time ago, Burningbird gave the [Continue reading] Forbes has a strange article about Whole Foods up. I don’t shop at Whole Foods because, as the article notes, it is quite expensive, and as the article doesn’t mention, they are anti-labor. But my not shopping there has nothing to do with the article, which notes that Whole Foods is wildly successful, earning a profit-rate 3 times higher than the average supermarket and dominating the health-food/organic/gourmet market. Super-crazy capitalist success story, you’d think. But then why is Forbes — essentially capitalism-porn — so dismissive? Listen:
The whole article is like that — from the title, “Food Porn”, to a sidebar entitled “More Organic Than Thou”. The contempt with which the author (one Seth Lubove) holds Whole Foods (and their customers) is palpable in sentences like “Mackey [founder and CEO of Whole Foods] further entices the Volvo and Range Rover set by promoting do-gooder causes, from more humane treatment of farm animals and “bird-friendly” coffee to “sustainable” seafood…” and depictions of the chain as “a glutton’s paradise” that hypocritically “present[s] food as theater, playing up the pious organic angle even as it peddles tempting offerings of culinary excess.” Now, if Whole Foods was any other corporation — say, Enron — you know Forbes would be on its knees begging to “service” Mackey. Whole Foods is practically a case-study in free marketeering: find an underserved market niche and serve it, innovatively and profitably. No other supermarket has come even close to the success Whole Foods has had in its niche — and in fact, some of them aren’t doing as well as Whole Foods in their own markets! They’re incredibly profitable, driving costs up because their market will bear it, underpaying employees and breaking unions — what Dow-fearing capitalist could object to that? The only explanation I can think of is hinted at in the last paragraph: “Beneath this booming business, however, Whole Foods still hews to its hippie, health-food roots.” That they are, in fact, the “granola-crunching hippies” that the company’s co-president Walter Robb insists they aren’t. Or, more importantly, maybe, that their customers are granola-crunching hippies, wooly-headed liberals that refuse to swallow the industry wisdom that agri-chemical farming, heavy hormone use, anti-environmental policies, and the like are Good Things. As Doc Searls has noted repeatedly, a lot of corporate-types simply abhor their customers (not least by thinking of us as “consumers”, passive open mouths at the end of corporate-controlled production and distribution conduits). Although I won’t shop there, it has to be noted that Whole Foods has succeeded — has succeeded even in bilking its customers — by treating their customers as people and their customers’ concerns as important and valid ones. And that goes flatly against the central principle of “Forbes Capitalism”: Give the customers what they want, as long as what they want is what we’re giving them. [Continue reading] A few years ago, Wilco recorded an album. It was a great album, but their label thought it was crap. So they told Wilco to fuck off and put the album in the can. Wilco bought back their masters and put them on the Internets. It was a great album, and many downloaded it, thinking as they listened to it, “this is a great album, those folks at Warner Bros [iirc] are a bunch of dillwads.” Warner Bros.’ loss was Warner Bros.’ gain, though, when another division of WB went to Wilco and said “please let us release your really great album” and Wilco said “ok” and it was released and it was, for my money, the best album of the New American Century. And God saw this, and was pleased. [Continue reading] I mentioned Ward Churchill’s response to the controversy before. I had only seen excerpts on the site, but since then I have found the full article, entitled A Campaign of Fabrications and Gross Distortions. Here’s a piece:
Bill, You’re a schmuck. –Dustin PS If anyone asks, I will deny vehemently having said that. Schmuck. From “Extreme Academia” American Lecture Idol Paula: “Fabulous! So what if they didn’t understand the concept of the postmodern rejection of absolute truth? You gave it your all, and that’s what counts.” Randy: “Dawg, it was ai’ight, it was ai’ight. A little pitchy in the Richard Rorty section, which isn’t the material I would have chosen for you. But you were you, man. You were definitely you.” Simon: “Frankly, I preferred Clay’s presentation on gender ambiguity. Have you considered a career as a book editor?” Hilary Clinton was the first female board-member of Wal-Mart. Q.V.:Back when she was first lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton became the first woman appointed to the Wal-Mart board, and tried to get the company to hire more women managers, but that effort apparently went the way of national health insurance. [Continue reading] From BoingBoing comes this story North Korean government’s efforts to promote short hair about the among its citizenry:
Here’s a thousand words by way of response: If you’re Jewish and between 18 and 26 years old, Mayanot/birthright israel will fly you to Israel for a 10-day tour, absolutely free. The trip to Israel is a Big Thing for Jewish folks, particularly in the “Jewish Crescent” (what the goyim call the Northeast Corridor) — I remember once when I was on a temp assignment at Hadassah (the Women’s Zionist Organization of America), I was introduced to the organization’s librarian, whose first words to me were “Have you been to Israel yet?” I hadn’t, and still haven’t, for a number of reasons. Jewish identity didn’t come easily to me — I spent my formative years denying it explicitly, mostly out of a pervasive disjoint between myself and religious thinking. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties and began reading the literature of the Holocaust and of the Lower East Side that I began to understand that there was a heritage here separate from the religion itself, a realization that immediately put me in the camp of the “secular” or “cultural Jews”. What’s more, a big part of this took place in opposition to the pro-Israeli, Zionist Judaism that, as a New Yorker at the time, I was surrounded with. My own feelings ran towards the Bundists’: engagement with the problems of the diaspora, not disengagement and escape towards a Promised Land. So to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have taken them up on this offer even if I was still under 26. Israel has little to do with my understanding of Judaism or of myself as a Jew — and that little is predominantly negative. What’s more, the security requirements of the trip (and do be sure to check out the security precautions) require the tour give a wide berth to hotspots like the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, meaning that an important part of the Israeli experience is ignored. (Bonus link: Have a look at the Onion’s archived front page from November 9, 1948, particularly the headline, “War-Weary Jews Establish Homeland Between Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt”.) To me, the settlements and retributive bombings and bulldozings and checkpoints and so on are of a piece with the Zionist ideology — they wanted to be a nation-state, and nation-states are defined by their use of coercive force against external threats and internally in the construction and regualtion of a “national” identity. To American Jews, remote from the threat of daily violence that shapes Israeli identity, these tours seem (to me, of course) to offer a stunted, attenuated image of the Zionist mission. I won’t go so far as to say the intent is to brainwash impressionable American Jews, but I will say I think the tours offer an unrealistically optimistic idea of what Israel offers to world Jewry. [Continue reading] |
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