Dispatches from the Culture Wars - Redefinition of Funny edition

Colbert out on a Limbaugh; IKEA goes windy; The CEO myth; Normcore: threat or menace; Where's the grief?; Class war with a smiley face

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Aug. 10, 2012 photo shows Stephen Colbert, host of "The Colbert Report," onstage during StePhest Colbchella '012 Rocktaugustfest at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York.,Jason DeCrow/Invision/AP File // National Post

Stephen Colbert's Hiring to Replace Letterman Angers Conservatives

By Josh Visser
April 11, 2014
National Post

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh blasted CBS for giving the Late Show to Stephen Colbert, the comedian who made his career playing a right-wing blowhard partially based on Limbaugh.

"CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America," Limbaugh said on his radio show Thursday after CBS announced Colbert would be replacing David Letterman after he retires in 2015.

"No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values [and] conservatives. Now, it's just wide out in the open. What this hire means is a redefinition of what is funny and a redefinition of what is comedy.

"they're blowing up the 11:30 format under the guise that the world's changing and people don't want the kind of comedy that [Johnny] Carson gave us."

IKEA Investing in Illinois Wind Farm

By Julie Wernau
April 10, 2014
Chicago Tribune

Home goods giant Ikea is building a wind farm in downstate Illinois large enough to ensure that its stores will never have to buy a single kilowatt of power again.

With the project, Ikea's first wind investment in the U.S., the company is among a growing number of companies taking care of their energy needs by buying or investing in power produced by the wind and sun.

The Myth of the CEO

By Hamilton Nolan
April 3, 2014
Gawker

The ostensible justification for executives getting paid more than everyone else is that they have more responsibility than everyone else. They make the hard decisions. They are paid for their judgment. They certainly don't work harder than the janitor, but we suppose that their wisdom and knowledge is so valuable that its benefits for the company at large will outweigh their hefty pay packages.

This is, in general, a farce.

Normcore: Fashion Movement or Massive In-Joke?

By Alex Williams
April 2, 2014
New York Times

Normcore (noun) 1. A fashion movement, c. 2014, in which scruffy young urbanites swear off the tired street-style clichés of the last decade - skinny jeans, wallet chains, flannel shirts - in favor of a less-ironic (but still pretty ironic) embrace of bland, suburban anti-fashion attire. (See Jeans, mom. Sneakers, white.)

2. A sociocultural concept, c. 2013, having nothing to do with fashion, that concerns hipster types learning to get over themselves, sometimes even enough to enjoy mainstream pleasures like football along with the rest of the crowd.

3. An Internet meme that turned into a massive in-joke that the news media keeps falling for.

Where is the Protest? A Reply to Graeber and Lapavitsas

By Jerome Roos
April 9, 2014
ROAR Magazine

Last week, two commentaries appeared in The Guardian - one by David Graeber and the other by Costas Lapavitsas and Alex Politaki - basically asking the same question: given that we're under such relentless assault by the rich and powerful, why are people not rioting in the streets? What happened to the indignation? The screws of austerity are only being tightened. So where are the protests? The two pieces provide two very different answers to the question, and while each contains a moment of truth, both ultimately remain unsatisfactory.

So, apart from the most immediate factor inhibiting protest (i.e., violent state repression), why are we no longer out there in the streets? I would suggest that, if we look a bit deeper and move beyond mere surface manifestations, we can identify at least three interrelated factors - all long-term developments coming to the fore today - underlying the relatively ephemeral character of contemporary protest: precarity, anxiety, and futility.

Class War with a Smiley Face

By Kathleen Geier
March 28, 2014
The Baffler

In Silicon Valley there really is a class war going on, a wage-fixing cartel that's pitting the one percent against everyone else. Thomas Piketty, the economist who wrote the new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is most famous for his insight that economic inequality is mostly driven by the top one percent of income earners. The incomes of the top one percent have pulled away from the rest of us and their economic interests have, over time, come to diverge dramatically from those of the mainstream of American society.

The one percenters are waging class war not just on the traditional targets, poor and working class Americans, but increasingly, on middle class professionals as well.

A dramatic example of class war by the one percent on the middle class is the Silicon Valley wage-fixing case. As revealed by Pandodaily's Mark Ames in a series of reports (here, here, and here), in 2010, the U.S. Justice Department launched an antitrust investigation into Google, Apple, Intel, and several other tech companies. Investigators discovered that, beginning in 2005, the firms had secretly conspired to suppress the wages of engineers and other tech workers by agreeing not to poach each others' employees. The companies also "shared their salary data with each other"-which violates antitrust law-and they did so "in order to coordinate and keep down wages."