The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America
The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America

Author: David Bosworth

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2014-08-27

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 162564812X

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Although the financial disaster of 2008 proved devastatingly quick, the evolution of the bad faith that drove the collapse is a more gradual story, and one that David Bosworth powerfully narrates in The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession, his sweeping history of the forces driving ethical, political, and economic change over the last sixty years. Here, Bosworth traces how the commercialization of public spaces and electronic information has created a new and enclosed American place. Chapter by chapter, he then shows how the materialist values of this Virtual America have suffused our everyday lives, co-opting the themes of our narratives, the planks of our parties, the practices of our professions, and the most intimate aspects of our personal lives, including our beliefs about God, marriage, and childcare. From Ronald Reagan and Disneyland to modern pharmacology and "prosperity theology," from the phony conservatism of Wall Street to the faux rebellion of "transgressive" art, Bosworth's alternative story of American life since 1950 relentlessly challenges today's dominant narratives--narratives that, as he reveals, made both the calamitous invasion of Iraq and the economic collapse of 2008 all too likely.

The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America
The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America

Author: David Bosworth

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2014-08-27

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1630874108

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Although the financial disaster of 2008 proved devastatingly quick, the evolution of the bad faith that drove the collapse is a more gradual story, and one that David Bosworth powerfully narrates in The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession, his sweeping history of the forces driving ethical, political, and economic change over the last sixty years. Here, Bosworth traces how the commercialization of public spaces and electronic information has created a new and enclosed American place. Chapter by chapter, he then shows how the materialist values of this Virtual America have suffused our everyday lives, co-opting the themes of our narratives, the planks of our parties, the practices of our professions, and the most intimate aspects of our personal lives, including our beliefs about God, marriage, and childcare. From Ronald Reagan and Disneyland to modern pharmacology and "prosperity theology," from the phony conservatism of Wall Street to the faux rebellion of "transgressive" art, Bosworth's alternative story of American life since 1950 relentlessly challenges today's dominant narratives--narratives that, as he reveals, made both the calamitous invasion of Iraq and the economic collapse of 2008 all too likely.

Conscientious Thinking
Conscientious Thinking

Author: David Bosworth

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2017-02-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0820350648

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In Conscientious Thinking, David Bosworth cuts through all the noise of today’s political dysfunction and cultural wars to sound the deeper causes of our discontent. Americans are living, he argues, in a profoundly transitional era, one in which the commonsense beliefs of the first truly modern society are being undermined by the still crude but irreversible forces set loose by technology’s drastic revision of our everyday lives. He shows how this disruptive conflict between modern and post-modern modes of reasoning can be found in all advanced fields, including art, medicine, and science, and then traces its impact on our daily actions through such changes as the ways in which friends relate, money is made, crimes are committed, and mates are chosen. Just as feudal values had to give way to a modern worldview that more effectively contained the new social reality generated by the printed book, so must our democracy reimagine itself in ways that can domesticate—civilize rather than merely “monetize”—a post-modern scene radically transformed by our digital machines. To that end, Conscientious Thinking supplies not only the means to make sense of our contentious times but also a provisional sketch of what a desirable post-modern America might look like.

Localism in the Mass Age
Localism in the Mass Age

Author: Mark T. Mitchell

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2018-04-02

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1532614438

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In the United States the conventional left/right distinction has become increasingly irrelevant, if not harmful. The reigning political, cultural, and economic visions of both the Democrats and the Republicans have reached obvious dead ends. Liberalism, with its hostility to any limits, is collapsing. So-called Conservatism has abandoned all pretense of conserving anything at all. Both dominant parties seem fundamentally incapable of offering coherent solutions for the problems that beset us. In light of this intellectual, cultural, and political stalemate, there is a need for a new vision. Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto assembles thirty-one essays by a variety of scholars and practitioners—associated with Front Porch Republic—seeking to articulate a new vision for a better future. The writers are convinced that human apprehension of the true, the good, and the beautiful is best realized within a dense web of meaningful family, neighborhood, and community relationships. These writers seek to advance human flourishing through the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism. In short, Front Porch Republic is dedicated to renewing American culture by fostering the ideals necessary for strong communities.

American Foodie
American Foodie

Author: Dwight Furrow

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-01-14

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1442249307

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As nutrition, food is essential, but in today’s world of excess, a good portion of the world has taken food beyond its functional definition to fine art status. From celebrity chefs to amateur food bloggers, individuals take ownership of the food they eat as a creative expression of personality, heritage, and ingenuity. Dwight Furrow examines the contemporary fascination with food and culinary arts not only as global spectacle, but also as an expression of control, authenticity, and playful creation for individuals in a homogenized, and increasingly public, world.

Virtue Hoarders
Virtue Hoarders

Author: Catherine Liu

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2021-01-26

Total Pages: 83

ISBN-13: 1452966044

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A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Reframed
Reframed

Author: Stuart Shanker

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2020-04-02

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1487533829

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For Stuart Shanker, the possibility of a truly just and free society begins with how we see and nurture our children. Shanker is renowned for using cutting-edge neuroscience to help children feel happy and think clearly by better regulating themselves. In his new book, Reframed, Shanker explores self-regulation in wider, social terms. Whereas his two previous books, Calm, Alert, and Learning and Self-Reg, were written for educators and parents, Reframed, the final book in the trilogy, unpacks the unique science and conceptual practices that are the very lifeblood of Self-Reg, making it an accessible read for new Self-Reggers. Reframed is grounded in the three basic principles of Shanker Self-Reg®: - There is no such thing as a bad, lazy, or stupid kid. - All people can learn to self-regulate in ways that promote rather than constrict growth. - There is no such thing as a "fixed outcome": trajectories can always be changed, at any point in the lifespan, if only we have the right knowledge and tools. Only a society that embraces these principles and strives to practice them, argues Shanker, can become a truly just society. The paradigm revolution presented in Reframed not only helps us understand the harrowing time we are living through, but inspires a profound sense of hope for the future. Shanker shows us how to build a compassionate society, one mind at a time.

How Global Corruption Becomes Rotten Flesh
How Global Corruption Becomes Rotten Flesh

Author: Ricardeau Lucceus

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2017-06-17

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13: 1387010522

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Corruption touches each of us in unique but similar ways. Transparency International, an organization devoted to fighting corruption at every level of society - in every nation of the world - defines it as "the abuse of entrusted power for private gain." (http: //www.transparency.org/about/) Ricardeau Lucceus has organized his professional experience and observation, supported by relevant research, to emphasize the destructive nature of dishonesty in everyday life and dealings. From illicit birth certificates to forged death documents, corruption follows us through life in many of our public interactions. Mr. Lucceus explores the extent and impact of dishonesty at every level of society to show its corrosive effect on ethics and quality of life. Offering awareness as the first step, this book is a valuable tool for helping us to grapple with the immoral and unethical aspects of social institutions that are misshaping our youth and risking our future as a nation and as a people.

The Culinary Plagiarist
The Culinary Plagiarist

Author: Jason Peters

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-05-28

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1532689802

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More than a collection of vignettes and stories from garden, grill, and kitchen, The Culinary Plagiarist is a sustained adventure in gustatory delight, an intensely private but candid account of desire and all its objects. Opinionated on the full range of human experience, from fasting to inebriety, from sports to politics, from religion to raunch, it is at once serious, humorous, ironic, reflective, grateful, allusive, and appetitive. Along the way it offers a defense of small-scale, local life, of family, of place, and of “the bread we do not live alone by.” And also the drinks. Don’t forget the drinks. This is a book for people who enjoy being alive, whether in the kitchen, the pasture, the library, the barn, the trout stream, the henhouse (or the doghouse), or the bedroom.

The Death of Expertise
The Death of Expertise

Author: Tom Nichols

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-02-01

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0190469439

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Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.