The Normal Heart

The Media Forgets That AIDS Is Still an Epidemic, But Hollywood Doesn't. 'The Normal Heart' is a damning indictment of our government's negligence by Eric Sasson

Wow all of the actors were really, really good. Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons, Taylor Kitsch, Alfred Molina, etc. Brad Pitt was one of the executive producers.

market values from relationships to transactions and societal rot

On Panitch & Gindin and American decline by Doug Henwood

And now onto the psychological realm. I’ve been thinking lately about what we might call the neoliberal self. Gone seems to be the classically bourgeois executive ego, a relatively stable, if sometimes anal-retentive structure to guide the subject through life. In its place is a much more fragmented thing, adaptable to a world of unstable employment and volatile financial markets—but unable to think seriously about long-term things like social cohesion or, god save us, climate change. 

The material basis of this transformation looks to be the replacement of the relationship by the transaction, to steal the language of corporate governance. Workers are told to run their lives like little entrepreneurs, moving from one ill-paying short-term job to another, or maybe holding two or three at a time. And at the top of the society, we see the erosion of the planning function, and any rationality beyond the most crudely instrumental. It’s been a long time since I read Polanyi, but this seems to me a perspective on the social rot produced by market-regulated societies, from the macro level of investment down to the socially shaped psychology of how we think and feel. I don’t see how the imperium can long survive this sort of pervasive rot.

When suits challenge the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law barring recognition of same-sex marriages, federal lawyers will now tell judges it should be struck down.