Comments on "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" by Anand Giridharadas

If you've found yourself wanting to scream at the "thought leaders" shoved down your throat on Public Broadcasting Service, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World will help you translate your rage into coherent English. Author Anand Giridharadas gives us an "insider-outsider" view of MarketWorld:

MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government and think tanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory -- including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated in translated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community but it is also a culture and state of mind.

These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo's reform. [p. 30]

Quotes from Mary Shelley's "The Last Man"

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) is most famous for Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. A friend suggested her 1826 novel The Last Man was especially poignant during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you can ignore the Victorian-era obsession with facial characteristics and the casual assumptions of European, in particular British, superiority to the rest of the world, the novel does have some excellent, thought-provoking passages.

Quotations are lifted from the Romantic Circles website page on the novel. The narrator is Lionel Varney, the sole survivor of a plague and its resulting chaos. I've added my thoughts in bold.

In Law & Order: SVU S06E20 "Night," the Violent Muslim Male Relative of the Rape Victim Satisfies His Honor By Assaulting the Assistant District Attorney

Dick Wolf's Law and Order franchise is a serial promoter of Islamophobia and other forms of stereotyping, as I've documented on this blog. One early episode of the original series achieved quantum anti-black racism in a 30 second clip. 

Season 6, Episode 20, entitled "Night," aired in May, 2005. Here's some excerpts from the script. Mildred Contana is the immigrant rights advocate who has been trying to get the police to investigate a series of rapes against undocumented women who are too afraid of deportation to report the crimes.