# data[].attributes.body
Our ideas of individualism in America have gone as far to make a movie about Anarchy. But only for a twelve hour span because complete anarchy would be frowned upon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Purge: Anarchy - Theatrical Trailer (Official - HD)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In Theaters July 18 http://blumhouse.com/film/thepurgeanarchy The Purge: Anarchy - Official Trailer (HD) The New Founders of America invite you to celebrate your annual right to Purge. THE PURGE: ANARCHY, the sequel to summer 2013¹s sleeper hit that opened to No.

# data[].attributes.body
While most of this seems like religious mumbo jumbo when getting to one of th final sections I realized why it all related. Near the end I talked about all the different denominations in one single religion. It talks about the progressive movement in America and how all these factions came to be.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Consider this a follow-up to an essay I wrote last year leading up to Reformation Day (October 31) and entitled, "How Denying Christ's Body And Blood Leads To Progressive Politics."

The very notion that Christian debates over sacraments can have anything to do with modern politics sounds laughable, especially given these realities: (1) non-sacramental church bodies tend to comprise the religious right, (2) sacramental Roman Catholics have historically tended to be Democrats, (3) sacramental Protestant groups (e.g., the Episcopalians, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) have often led the way toward extreme liberalism, and (4) Christian influence in general has been muted, so how could pedantry regarding Christian sacramental differences mean anything?

Yet the historical record stands: modern progressivism is a species of Christian heresy arising out of a specific Christian culture that had the same taproot as modern non-sacramental non-sacramental-yes, even evangelical-Christianity. To understand where we are, it's important to look at how we got here.

What Is Christ, and What Is the Church?

The issue boils down to what Christ and his church are. The historic confession answered this question corporally. Jesus is God in flesh, and as St. John teaches in his gospel and letters, Christ's incarnation is a "once done and forever continued" event. He's still in the flesh.

As far as the church is concerned, if one were to ask, "Is Christ present in the church?" the answer would be, "Yes. Of course he is." But here is where two paths historically part ways. Some conclude, "If Jesus is present in the church, it must be in the flesh-'once done and forever continued,' right?" This is the sacramental camp: Jesus is present sacramentally in the church, through sacraments like baptism and communion.

Others reject any idea that Christ remains present in the church corporally. They focus more on his spiritual presence, a spiritual presence that communicates internally, in cooperation with our intellect, wills, and emotions.

The problem with this latter position is its premise denies something explicitly written in St. John's first letter. Using the perfect tense regarding Christ's incarnation, John writes: "Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world" (1 John 4:3).

St. John was speaking specifically of the Gnostics, who denied the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Because they denied the value of anything material, they could not embrace a material God, a God-in-flesh. Such a notion "boxed in" God, which in turn endowed power to those who controlled who could peek in the box-i.e., the clergy and their sacraments.

Rather, the Gnostics believed, God was something one's "higher Self" could be in union with through gnosis outside any earthly parameters. No clergy or sacraments were needed (although a "leader" could facilitate the ascent journey in a guru role).

The key difference between the sacramental and non-sacramental positions is whether Christ and his church are seen in corporal, delineated, and defined forms. If so, his presence is distinct from me, an external gift with clearly formed parameters governed by God's word. It is a true gift, because there is a corporally delineated form completely separated from me: giver, gift, and receiver are each defined. I am fully a passive receiver of divine gifts.

If not, his presence happens through purposely non-external, non-corporal, wholly internal means. The intellect, will, and emotions must be mustered to cooperate with this wholly spiritual, non-corporal process.

How Infant Baptism Fits In

This is why infant baptism is such a bellwether for how people understand Christ and his church, and the nature of Christ's kingdom on earth. Let's put it this way. Imagine a Grandma and her infant grandson. Now imagine situation one: Grandma has died before the infant grandson was born. If grandson is to have any "relationship" with Grandma, it will at best be an internal phenomenon, an act of the mind, will, and emotions. It will be memories based on stories. Of course, he'll have no such experiences until his mind develops. But in the end, Grandma will be a phantasm generated by the stories and memories of others.

Now imagine situation two: Grandma lives and holds her infant grandson in her arms. Of these two situations, which one is a more real and intimate connection between Grandma and grandson? Obviously situation two. The same is true in the church. If Christ is present in the church-and he is-and Christ is in the flesh-which he is-then the church is truly the Body of Christ.

If so, then how can baptism, which is where we are incorporated into Christ, not be offered to infants, of whom Christ said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not forbid them"?

If a baby were brought onto Noah's ark, would it have been saved? Of course it would have. Christ and his church are like the ark. It's a corporate structure whose parameters are governed by the word of God. Those brought in through the doorway of the sacraments are in the ark. That is the faith, into which the infant grows, just as an infant on the ark would grow up learning what the ark is all about.

Certain groups throughout the history of the church could not tolerate this teaching, because they insisted on an understanding of faith that rested finally on the internal actions of the individual, which by necessity require an advanced age and mind. Such groups included the Gnostics, Messalians, Paulicians, Bogomils, Cathars, and the Free Spirit movement. In the Reformation era, this position was taken by the Anabaptists, Pietists, and Puritans, and over in America in the modern age among the revivalists and various evangelical church bodies.

The Hegelian Roots of Modern Progressivism

This focus on the mind, emotions, and will concerns us, because it gets to the heart of the matter. Church historian Perry Miller brilliantly observed how the non-sacramental tradition "liberated men from the treadmill of indulgences and penances, but cast them on the iron couch of introspection." This tradition drew from self-absorbed, semi-mystical, Neoplatonic tendencies in the Middle Ages, which Martin Luther fought by placing the focus on externals like sacraments and doctrine. As he repeatedly taught, those who seek God outside of Christ and his externally ordained means will find the devil.

But it goes beyond individual salvation concerns. There's a reason each of these movements, drawing from a medieval millenarian tradition, believed their internal transformation should alter society. Those who understand faith as an internal process-a gnosis requiring the mind, will, and emotions-have a certain perspective regarding the individual and his place in society. The Puritans are emblematic, as they attempted to found a "new" England based on their self-understanding as "new" Englishmen, purified by God.

Simply put, they believe a changed self must change society. Making society conform to the "New Law" is the urgent project of a truly sanctified self, but more importantly for our concerns, it must occur if the self is truly in cooperation with God's Spirit. If one is in union with God-who himself is no longer clearly delineated and located (in the manner of Christ himself) at tangible external points, and can therefore leak into my soul-would not his actions be God's actions of instituting his kingdom on earth?

The logical terminus of this thinking is G. F. Hegel, the father of progressivism whose divinizing of History gave us the whole "right side of history" nonsense. Hegel appealed to the Lutheran Reformation as a moment in which man's consciousness jolted forward and laid the foundation for modern democracy.

If human consciousness in the Middle Ages required a clergy and church structure-with sacraments, dogmas, and whatnot-in order to communicate good things, Martin Luther's Reformation signaled an end to that age and the coming of a new age of individualism. For Hegel, History was moving toward a time in which men would need no church to teach them charity and dignity; it would be writ in humans' DNA.

Hegel's focus on consciousness, and his (very wrong) assumption that Reformation theology heightened it, is rooted in his sympathies with Pietism, a perversion of Lutheran doctrine Hegel praised because it acknowledged "no objective truth and opposes itself to dogmas and the content of religion, while preserving an element of mediation, a connection with Christ, but this is a connection that is supposed to remain one of mere feeling and sensibility."

Notice the connection to Christ based on "feeling and sensibility." This is exactly the sort of Christ every progressive indirectly worships. It is a Christ distilled from his flesh and blood-a God leaking out of the forms of Christ's name, body and blood, and Word-and reconstituted through actions of charity, justice, tolerance, and whatever else defines the progressive agenda. Hegel laid the foundation for the secular religion that progressivism and its government have become.

Progressivism in America

In "The Cross of Culture" (1970), Paul Kleppner analyzed the voting patterns of mid-nineteenth-century America. Of all the variables deciding what someone's party allegiance would be, one stands out. It's whether someone was from what he calls a "Pietistic" perspective or a "Ritualistic" one.

In his words, the Pietistic perspective "emphasizes a personal, vital, and fervent faith in a transcendental God." Its central theme is right behavior. By nature more action-oriented, it emphasizes conversion, change of heart, personal piety, and informality in worship.

For the Pietististic perspective, life is 'a series of exciting opportunities to recreate the world for the greater glory of a personal knowable God.'

While believing the world is sinful, the pietistic perspective "does not accept that condition but concerns itself with converting people, with helping them to make the change from a life of sin to one of 'being saved.'" Furthermore, for the Pietististic perspective, life is "a series of exciting opportunities to recreate the world for the greater glory of a personal knowable God."

By contrast, the ritualistic perspective is more passive in nature, and stresses intellectual assent to formal doctrine and traditional confessions. It is ritualistic and "eschews emotionalism." Its central theme is right belief. In politics: "It views the world as a sinful one, but one that has to be accepted as such, rather than as one to be molded into God's kingdom on earth." Kleppner adds, the holder of a ritualistic perspective "does not seek to reach out and change that world, for there is nothing that man may change."

The Pietistic perspective tended toward Republicanism, whose driving crusades were abolitionism, women's suffrage, and temperance. These movements arose out of the revivalism of the early nineteenth century and fed into the social gospel of the late nineteenth century.

As social gospel ideas fused with "Religion of Humanity" ideas coming out of Hegel's legacy (via August Comte), we have progressivism, whose founding principles have no greater spokesman than the puritanical evangelical Herbert Croly. Exhibiting a perfect example of revivalism adapting to then-current progressive symbols, he writes, "Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility. . . . What a democratic nation must do is not to accept human nature as it is, but to move it in the direction of improvement."

How would the nation move human nature toward improvement? In the fine tradition of Hegelian "consciousness-raising," Croly comes up with education as the answer. State-sponsored education would catechize and bestow grace to "leaven the actual social substance." Changed minds change societies.

Rethinking the 'Boxed-in God'

It's typical of evangelicals to claim that, in their worship especially but also in their theology, they don't "box in" God. God's just way more awesome and bigger than our little minds can frame. So don't confine God to your rituals, sacraments, doctrines, Scriptures, or, um, the person of Jesus Christ?

The fountainhead is the Gnostic belief that true faith is an internal process transcending forms, like sacraments, or like the flesh and blood Christ himself.

This is the trajectory of evangelical thought, and it always has been. Today it's the emergents who have remarkable sympathies for universalism and list John Lennon ballads among their "spiritual songs." Yesterday it was the revivalists who gave way to progressivism. Before them it was Puritans who laid the foundation for New England transcendentalism-recall Harvard University was at first a Puritan "school of prophets" (some things never change). It's why Pietism birthed Kant and Hegel. We only broached upon the story of Anabaptism and the millenarian movements going back to Joachim of Fiore.

But the fountainhead is the Gnostic belief that true faith is an internal process transcending forms, like sacraments, or like the flesh and blood Christ himself. Once God becomes "unboxed" from these forms, the line becomes fuzzy where God ends and I begin. When that happens, I begin to think I am God's hand in history, that I can change the world.

Baptism of infants unravels that entire program, because it rests on the idea that faith is not about states of the mind, but about the external, corporal reality of Christ and his church. Precisely at the point where the mind is most undeveloped-infancy-our Lord sets that moment as the standard for faith: "Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it."

America remains a by and large Christian nation. Today on Reformation Day, it might be a good time for everyone to check his theology. Progressives hold to a historically heretical position of Christian Gnosticism-call it spiritualized atheism. They might want to consider the implications of this ( read the full story here).

Meanwhile, evangelicals need to consider to what extent their anti-sacramental theology paved the way for progressivism, and do some self-reflection. It is, after all, what they do best. Sacramental church bodies might do well to think twice before chasing every latest evangelical or progressive trend like lost puppies, and recall their theological grounding.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Denying Infant Baptism Leads To Leftist Politics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Consider this a follow-up to an essay I wrote last year leading up to Reformation Day (October 31) and entitled, "How Denying Christ's Body And Blood Leads To Progressive Politics."

# data[].attributes.headline
The Effects of Individualism on Relationships

# data[].attributes.subject
The Effects of Individualism on Relationships

# data[].attributes.body
This article talks about the effects of individualism on society, social media, and the family life. This article claims that the world has become too individual. That our personal lives are no longer cohesive and that a day-to-day conversation is becoming less and less normal.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At what point does a society cease to be a society? Somewhere there is a line between an organized group of people sharing a common culture and a group of disconnected people living in geographical proximity to one another. Whether American society has crossed that line of dissolution is debatable, but we are at the least heading intently toward that oxymoronic state of existence: individualized society.

We are obsessed with the idea of how connected we are, but social media is no substitute for real society, and our thousand electronic connections only dazzle our minds enough that we cannot recognize how paltry our actual human connections have become. The process of individualization that began centuries ago is now increasing at an exponential rate, fueled partly through technological realities, but even more so through the weighty accumulation of ideological shifts.

Cultural individualization has obviously contributed to our many dismembered families, but it has also cornered us into a welfare state mentality from which we cannot escape unless we replace our concept of a society of individuals with something more ordered and interconnected.

A Brief History of Individualism

In my ninth-grade government and economics course, I memorized the definition that "the family is the basic unit of society." Even 20 years ago, the reality of that definition was tenuous. Family as a social unit in America has been measurably in decline for more than half a century. It is not the deterioration of the family, though, that has led to the concept of the individual as the basic social unit, but vice versa.

Throughout millennia of human history, societies were structured from the family upward. Exile, which hardly seems a threatening penalty today, was the epitome of punishment in antiquity because it cut the individual off from family and thus from society, including all means of financial and physical well-being. The much-maligned feudal system of the medieval period was not intended to keep power in the hands of a few, but rather to provide protection for all by ensuring each had a secure place within the social order.

With the exception of monastic life, outside of marriage and family there was no way to gain the material items necessary for daily existence. At every stage of life, each individual was connected to family in some way-as a child, a spouse, or a parent. In fact, up until the eighteenth century or so, the family was not only the basic unit of society but more importantly its basic model. The state was the benevolent "parent" of all, deriving authority not by mutual agreement but by transcendent decree.

The ideological shift toward individualization began to be stated clearly in the Enlightenment. Distilling truth down to only what could be derived by reason, Enlightenment thinkers effectively eschewed all realities except the self. The philosophy of the social contract became the predominant political theory in Europe, but also in the nascent United States, which declared its independence precisely on the basis of government being legitimate only through "the consent of the governed."

The practical push toward individualism came at the behest of the Industrial Revolution. Centralized work in factories relied on people acting as individual workers, not members of a family. Machines equalized women and children with men as useful laborers, and rather than family providing security as the place physical needs could be met, it became a place of uncertainty where a man's monetary income was increasingly strained to provide for his entire family unless he were willing to send some of them into the factories or others' homes to work as servants or tutors.

By the mid-nineteenth century, transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau turned from rationalism but continued to extol the self-sufficiency of the individual. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have dutifully followed the path they blazed, separating the individual from society, then family, and now even the self, as we question whether we have any inherent identity apart from our transitory desires and feelings.

Family as an Oddity, Not a Norm

These intentional and unintentional shifts have brought us to the twenty-first century with the assumption people should navigate life from the perspective of the individual, not the family. The preeminent philosophy of our day is the starry-eyed Disney moral "Be yourself!" What does this vacuous imperative even mean? Can you actually avoid being yourself?

If we assume dastardly forces such as family and societal responsibilities can sway you to be something other than yourself, how can you be sure you have filtered out all these pernicious influences to distill your true essence? Unless you are content to "be yourself" in isolation, you end up performing a precarious social balancing act in which individualism turns a blind eye to its own impossibility in order to become the basis of our cultural norms. We live alone together.

Parents do not want to "impose" their beliefs on their children, thereby harming their distinct personalities, so they raise their children without religion or discipline. Birth control and abortion become "health rights" because men and women want the pleasure of sex without any inconvenient consequences to restrict their individual plans. Retirement communities and nursing homes conveniently remove the dependent elderly so their affluent children and grandchildren can continue their individual lives without nuisance.

Perhaps most telling is the rise of singlehood as a way of life. More than a quarter of American dwellings now house only a single inhabitant. We have gone from assuming that the natural life course after adolescence is marriage (living alone being a concession for rare circumstances) to assuming just the opposite. Young people who marry right out of college are viewed with skepticism, and those who marry before completing college are assumed to be acting under the influence either of immature infatuation or oppressive religious compulsion. If a person does not live on his or her own for at least a few years of young adulthood, society furrows its brow in worried concern.

This expectation of independent living comes with promises of greater personal fulfillment, financial stability, and relational wisdom, all without denying the possibility of marriage-when it is quite convenient. But not excluding the possibility of marriage and planning a route that will culminate in marriage are entirely different undertakings, as many 20- and 30-somethings are discovering. Having blithely gone along the successful career path, they wake up one morning and realize in a panic that somewhere in that foggy land of independent life, they passed the point at which they should have found a spouse and married. For others, the comfortable inertia of singlehood makes marriage seem unappealing or unnecessary, and they prefer to continue hooking up, hanging out, or maybe buying a puppy together instead of a ring.

Valentine's Day illuminates how American culture is not only becoming more individualized but proud of the shift. Whereas February movie offerings generally include at least some ostensibly romantic flick, the only remotely romance-themed movie playing in theaters this year was " How to Be Single." Dairy Queen actually commissioned a survey on relationship statuses and partnered with a clinical psychologist before creating the Singles Blizzard as their 2016 Valentine's treat to celebrate the singles who now outnumber their married counterparts and, presumably, will appreciate the shift toward a " more modern definition of the day that celebrates all kinds of love, including love of self." If the push for a self-loving version of Valentine's Day doesn't pan out, we can all (individually) promote Singles Awareness Day, as social media helpfully reminded me.

Our Highly Individualized Society

Individualism affects not only the family and interpersonal relationships but the entire American culture. The force of technology in our broader societal individualization is, of course, on constant display. We take selfies and post them along with the fleeting emotional commentary of our lives on Facebook, where we are superficially connected to hundreds of people, most of whom we rarely speak to in person. We compose jibes of under 140 characters and tweet them out to a world we assume is anxiously waiting to hear our reactionary quips.

America's enchantment with individualism is so thoroughly ingrained that it has become almost invisible.

Or if we have more words and time for reflection, we compose earnest blog posts and send them into the leveling field of cyberspace where every author can always get published. We work from home, do the assignments for our online education at our own pace, and check in with a cyber church when we feel a personal need for religious stimulus. When we have to go shopping at a real store, we can mostly avoid human contact with the help of the self-checkout.

Beyond the palpable isolation of technology, however, America's enchantment with individualism is so thoroughly ingrained that it has become almost invisible. Consider the prevalence of mandatory insurance. Although the recent mandating of health insurance has met resistance, few Americans question the legitimacy of states requiring auto insurance or lenders demanding homeowners' insurance.

Yet such property insurance did not become widespread in America until the 1940s and '50s, and only became extensively mandatory around the 1970s. While these mandates might seem necessary and innocuous measures to maintain a stable society, it is telling that they replace the responsibility of a community to care for its members (think Amish barn-raisings) with individual responsibility to recover from any potential disaster.

It is also not difficult to trace the high cost of health care in part to the rise of individualism. Until the eighteenth century, hospitals were almost exclusively run by religious orders as charities, and not until the early twentieth century did for-profit and government hospitals begin to proliferate. For centuries it had been assumed that the religious community should take care of its own and the destitute, but as individualism eroded the cohesion of church and family, health care became a personal concern, bolstered by the introduction of health insurance plans in the 1920s and the expectation of employer-paid health insurance that became established during World War II.

The Woeful Isolation of the Welfare State

Liberals and conservatives alike have fallen prey to the idolization of the individual. The Left lobbies for social compassion toward minorities, immigrants, the poor. The Right clamors for individual rights to gun ownership, property, free speech. Both hit some insightful notes with their impassioned pleas, but both have fundamentally missed the forest for the trees. Society is not made up of isolated individuals but of human beings in relation to one another.

Society is not made up of isolated individuals but of human beings in relation to one another.

The family and its extensions-church, school, workplace-used to be the means by which the underprivileged were served and the essential rights preserved, but as society has fragmented into total individualization, these institutions have lost their cohesion, and social responsibility has ironically been pushed further away from the individuals. On their own, the members of society lack the capability to support or protect one another, and since they no longer form cohesive local groups, the only social institution left to shoulder the protection of the individual is the increasingly unwieldy government.

Even the proposed socialism of some leftists is only sham cohesion. Rather than bringing people together in real social connection, it merely pools their money so they can avoid actual human compassion. The onus of caring for the needy is removed to the state, to which each citizen contributes not as part of a family, church, or other social institution, but merely as an individual who can pay his dues to be relieved of the duty of loving his neighbor. Those on the receiving end of government assistance are even more isolated, since the financial handouts give them no human network of support, only a check with which they are expected to care for themselves independently.

Let's Reconnect with Each Other

Living together in isolation is not a sustainable social model. So long as we continue to think of the individual as the basic unit of society, our progression toward the disenchanted welfare state will continue, even while no amount of socialized government intervention will provide the human cohesion we need.

Indeed, government is incapable of buttressing our crumbling human connections. That task must start with rebuilding individuals into families and families into society. Like every great undertaking, the process will be slow and require sacrifice, but the recompense will be not only a healthy and sustainable society, but also, paradoxically, a stronger sense of our individual identity as we reconnect with other human beings.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Our Individualism Has Trapped Us In A Welfare State

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At what point does a society cease to be a society? Somewhere there is a line between an organized group of people sharing a common culture and a group of disconnected people living in geographical proximity to one another.

# data[].attributes.body
This article talks about the hipsters effect on society. How at first they seem to help the small town businesses but when they come it masses its a different story. Economically the hipsters are helping the poor but those who already had trouble maintaining a home are experiencing a depression of sorts thanks to the influx of people.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Of all the youth movements of the past several decades, that of the hipster is surely the most benign, committed to a gentle life of macrame, basket-toting bicycles, craft beer and the (much-derided) smashed avocado on toast. Hardly a culture of revolution and chaos. Who could they possibly be hurting?

Depends who you ask. In Footscray, hipsters are the focus of several bizarre attacks on local businesses, including a cafe that had a bag of rotten meat thrown through its front door and a burger joint, 8-Bit, that was vandalised and sprayed with the words "f--- off hipster scum".

Two bars also report being targeted: Littlefoot's front window was plastered with printouts of ironic slogans such as "people said it was too dangerous to live here but you can actually find a couple of decent cafes now".

It echoes the astonishing attack last year on a cafe in Shoreditch, in London's East End that - ironically? - specialised in bowls of cereal costing up to $10. Apparently enraged that such a place could even exist in what was once a working class neighbourhood, a mob of what the press called "anti-gentrification activists" swarmed it carrying burning torches and pigs' heads.

Among them was an artist who told The Guardian she'd been evicted from her home when the rent doubled. "It's our fault," she said. "Artists like me go to these kind of areas, then the architects follow, the developers, the hipsters, etc."

Whether the Footscray attacks are the work of a couple of mischief-makers or an organised movement is unknown, but the sentiment is one common to inner-city neighbourhoods that undergo rapid gentrification: the fear that affluent newcomers will displace long-time residents, both economically (through rising house prices and rents) and culturally (with new businesses replacing traditional ones), and destroy the local community.

The fear is not groundless: many of Melbourne's working class suburbs have changed beyond recognition in the past few decades, from Port Melbourne (where the once-unloved "Bank" homes now change hands for upwards of $2 million) to Brunswick, Northcote, Preston (which once backed onto farmland) and beyond.

Footscray is the last holdout, and an unusual case. Home to successive waves of migrants on top of an original, firmly working class population, it has until recently had a (mostly undeserved) reputation as a tough neighbourhood plagued by gangs and drugs. Its relative isolation has engendered a fiercely loyal sense of community: is there a football team in the country with more grassroots support than the Doggies?

Yet as nearby Newport, Yarraville and Seddon gentrified and house prices soared, pragmatic young home buyers decided to overlook "Foot-scary's" faults in favour of its location, just five kilometres from the CBD, and its stock of period homes ripe for renovation.

They trickled into West Footscray, bordering Seddon, first, then Footscray proper, where last year house prices were among the fastest-rising in Melbourne, fuelled, one can assume, by the symbiotic arrival of fashionable new businesses like cafes and bars. Domain reported that a "charming four-bedroom period house" sold in March for $1,346,000 - more than $1 million more than its last sale in 1998.

Gentrification isn't necessarily a game of winners and losers. As The Economist magazine argued last year, the arrival of young professionals could improve the area for everyone as they put pressure on local schools and other services to get things done. Meanwhile, the magazine said, new businesses generated taxes and jobs. "However annoying they may be, hipsters help the poor."

That may well be true - if you can still afford to live in the area that's being improved. Rising house prices aren't a huge issue if you already own property. The trouble is, many of Footscray's long-term residents have always struggled to buy a home: according to Domain, 58 per cent of locals rent.

Rising prices push rents up or, worse, encourage home owners to evict their tenants and sell up to take their profits. It won't happen overnight, but eventually many who call Footscray home now won't be able to afford to live there.

Perhaps the gentle hipster isn't so benign, after all.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The hipster does have something to answer for as Melbourne suburbs gentrify

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Of all the youth movements of the past several decades, that of the hipster is surely the most benign, committed to a gentle life of macrame, basket-toting bicycles, craft beer and the (much-derided) smashed avocado on toast. Hardly a culture of revolution and chaos. Who could they possibly be hurting?

# data[].attributes.body
Mark Greif talks about his daily life as a hipster. Hipsters are people who normally find solace in self improvement, past generations, and older simpler practices. He and his fellow hipsters oppose many of today's practices such as stereotypical gyms, modern music like rap, certain foods, and certain political stances.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When he was a child, Mark Greif's mother used to take him to swim at Walden Pond, near his home in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden is closely associated with Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalist writer who lived there in a shack for two years, writing a classic work about his experience. Although neither Greif nor his mother had yet read Thoreau, they were aware of some phrases of his, having seen quotations on mugs, bumper stickers and T-shirts. On the way to and from the pond by car, Greif's mother wondered aloud what Thoreau would have made of the roadside banalities of contemporary existence: the advertising hoardings, the shopping malls, the vast mansions. "It was my task to do the wondering," he recalls.

This early acquaintance with Thoreau led Greif to believe philosophy to be "against everything, if it was corrupt, dubious, enervating, untrue to us, false to happiness". And, in Against Everything, he's fittingly uncompromising. Greif's collection of essays is full of surprises, not least that it is, at least in part, concerned with that old fashioned question of how to live. "It's a book of critique of things I do," he writes in the preface. But instead of being the kind of self-help book that tells you "how to do the things you are supposed to do, but better," it "asks about those things you are supposed to do".

But this doesn't capture everything Greif is up to in this politically engaged, coolly stylish and often drily funny book. Over the course of the essays - which were first published in n+1, the journal he co-founded in 2004 - he covers the significance of exercise, our relationship with food, the meaning of hip-hop music, Radiohead, the figure of the hipster, society's sexualisation of children, and war. Although he's vexed, even depressed, by many aspects of contemporary culture he analyses, he stops short of pessimism, and the essays rarely conclude without opening at least some minute window of possibility. Greif doesn't tell you everything is great - far from it - but rather than merely sketch the bars of the prison he seems deeply concerned with how it can be escaped.

He begins in the gym, a location that, to Greif, "resembles a voluntary hospital", where we willingly undergo self-administered treatment with the aim of improving our health. It's also a place where formerly private activities are now carried out in public - there's a degree of performance involved in attending. The gym is, in Greif's estimation, a quintessentially post-industrial location where we re-enact the repetitive motions once required of us by industrial labour. "Nothing can make you believe we harbour nostalgia for factory work but a modern gym," he writes - its pulleys, cables and bars appear to him miniature versions of factory machinery. In the process of exercising we become more aware of our own bodies as mechanisms to be fine-tuned: exercise, he writes, "makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself".

It is also an effort to confer superiority - of longevity and of sex appeal - and he returns to this quest for youth and attractiveness in the queasily but fittingly titled essay "Afternoon of the Sex Children". Society's obsession with sex and youth is problematically embodied in what he calls the "sex child", a mythical image of youth and sexual freedom born from the "lure of permanent childhood" that pervades the culture of adults. Childhood, glimpsed in the rear-view mirror of adult nostalgia, appears a utopian zone of complete freedom, and the desire for a permanent childhood is in some measure a result of the "overwhelming feeling that one hasn't achieved one's true youth".

By learning to rap, Greif plays on the white liberal's guilt at cultural appropriation

The problem, he writes, is that sex and youth are zones of competition easily marketed to people - all you have to do is to tell them that they're having the wrong kind of sex and that they're not as young as they used to be to stir up a sense of opportunities lost. Greif suggests that, instead, we should value "age and accomplishment, not emptiness and newness".

The unflinching intelligence of his writing can be exhilarating, but intimidating. Yet there are many moments of levity: a doctor is described as "a mechanic who wears the white robe of an angel and is as arrogant as a boss". Of the hipster movement he writes: "It did not yield a great literature, but made good use of fonts".

As the book progresses, the style becomes looser and more expansive. The cool, stern tone of the earlier essays gives way to a more playful approach, typified by the essay "Learning to Rap", in which, yes, Greif decides to teach himself how to rap along to hip-hop records. His rationale is that, as a music fan in the early 90s, he chose to devote himself to American post-punk, such as Sonic Youth and Fugazi, rather than hip-hop. This was a mistake, he now thinks, as hip-hop was the birth of a "new world-historical form" while rock "had been basically exhausted by 1972".

It's quite the essay. By wrestling with the specifics of learning to rap, Grief plays on the white liberal's guilt at cultural appropriation while demonstrating the complexity, difficulty and brilliance of the form. He discusses the practical challenges: trying to decipher the lyrics of Nas, Snoop Dogg and the Notorious BIG; rapping along in a low voice with the music on his headphones as he waits for the next subway. He wrestles with what to do when a song includes the word "nigga". Sometimes, if he's rapping in public, he substitutes "brother", he says, often covering his mouth with his hand. He's awake to the humour of the setup. "This is embarrassing and shameful, but so is a white person, nearing middle age, rapping."

Greif's essay "What was the hipster?" is a withering critique of "tight-knit colonies of similar-looking, slouching people". Hipsterism isn't anti-authoritarian but rather "opens up a poisonous conduit" between rebel subculture and the dominant class. He gives a potted history of the contemporary hipster while noting its mutations, including the "hipster primitive", a fusion of pastoral innocence with the dominant ironic mode of hipsterism. "It was not unheard of to find band members wearing masks or plush animal suits," he notes.

Greif revisits Walden Pond in the final essay. By this point he has discussed his observations of police brutality ("a surprise of being around police is how much they touch you") and his involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement. He compares Liberty Square, the name OWS gave their temporary home of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, "a tiny rectangle of unlovable paving", to Walden, "a puddle in the grander scheme of things". Each for a short while was a site of individual and collective possibility, and Greif's incisive book is testament to their enduring influence.

* Against Everything is published by Verso. To order a copy for £13.93 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Against Everything by Mark Greif review - hipsters and how to live

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When he was a child, Mark Greif's mother used to take him to swim at Walden Pond, near his home in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden is closely associated with Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalist writer who lived there in a shack for two years, writing a classic work about his experience.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Kardashians Are to Blame for Trumps Presidency

# data[].attributes.subject
The Kardashians Are to Blame for Trumps Presidency

# data[].attributes.body
In the interview Chelsea Handler blames reality television for Donald Trumps Election. She claims that people saw him as entertainment and nothing less because of these reality TV shows like Keeping Up With The Kardashians. It seems that anyone can sell "scandal instead of substance."
The idea seems incredibly heartbreaking to the comedian. She followed the election and finds it outrageous that so many people are upset over the out come and there's nothing being done about it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Not so long ago, Chelsea Handler shared a network ― and her late-night couch ― with almost every member of the Kardashian family. But just like Rob Kardashian's sock line, some things are not meant to be.

Reflecting candidly on the first season of her Netflix series, "Chelsea," in an interview with Variety published Tuesday, the comedian doubled down on her dislike for Donald Trump and found a target for her frustration in reality TV.

"They were treating [Trump] as an entertainer first. It was a reality show. We've turned into a reality show," Handler said about mainstream media outlets. "I blame the Kardashians, personally; the beginning of the end was the Kardashians. The way these people have blown up and don't go away - it's surreal. Everyone is for sale."

Apart from taking a particular liking to Khloe Kardashian, Handler and the rest of the clan have never exactly seen eye-to-eye. In fact, the comedian once credited the famous family for inspiring her departure from the E! network and the end of "Chelsea Lately" in 2014. On "Chelsea," which debuted in 2016, the host covered Trump relentlessly throughout his campaign and broke down in tears after his victory. Since then, she's taken an active role in protesting the president-elect's policies.

In Handler's eyes, news headlines have sustained both the Kardashians and the Trumps through the years by allowing them to traffic in scandal instead of substance.

"Somebody should have put a stop to it," Handler continued. "The idea that so many people were so wrong about the outcome is so screwed up. The fact that Russia is interfering with our election is beyond repair. How do we ever recover from that? What's to prevent them from doing it for the rest of our lives?"

Don't expect the comedian to work out her issues with either party anytime soon. Kanye West, she says, "needs to get on his meds" and, as for Trump, he won't be dropping by the Netflix studio if Chelsea has anything to say about it.

"I don't ever want to see him. I don't ever want to interact with him, which won't be a problem," said Handler. "Once he came up to me in a restaurant in L.A. to introduce himself - to tell me he's Donald Trump. I said, 'Great.'"

To read the full interview, head to Variety.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chelsea Handler Thinks Kardashians Are To Blame For Trump's Presidency

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Not so long ago, Chelsea Handler shared a network ― and her late-night couch ― with almost every member of the Kardashian family. But just like Rob Kardashian's sock line, some things are not meant to be.

# data[].attributes.body
As we all know by now president Elect Trump has quiet a way with words. His former opponent for office being his first but certainly not last target. Buzzfeed was brought into these ludacris comments and called a "failing pile of garbage." While Trumps rather outrageous comments are to be expected it's rather strange for merchandise to be sold as a banner of pride.
Buzzfeed, not long after the comment had been made released several products including t-shirts, mugs and a limited edition garbage can. Let's not forget the bumper stickers. Normally one would respond in a fashion fitting of a well running company but it seems that buzzfeed had better ideas and gained a profit off of it as well.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Nine days before the inauguration, the man getting ready to inherit George Washington and Abraham Lincoln's old job held a news conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan and called BuzzFeed "a failing pile of garbage." BuzzFeed, in a matter of hours, added new merchandise to its online store: a $30 poly-blend T-shirt emblazoned with "FAILING PILE OF GARBAGE," a bumper sticker that says "I proudly get my news from a failing pile of garbage," and a $49 "limited edition" BuzzFeed garbage can.

"We are not going to respond to these divisive comments," BuzzFeed chief executive Jonah Peretti wrote to his staff - but of course their merchandise speaks for itself. A shirt emblazoned with an insult is a defiance of that insult; marketing and selling that defiance reenlists followers in the ongoing exercise of name-calling. ("No, you're the puppet.") BuzzFeed made $25,000 on the flash sale and says it will donate the proceeds to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
[It was a mad, mad day in American politics. Is it also our new normal?]
The 166-year-old New York Times once came up with "All the News That's Fit to Print," a somewhat quaint and utilitarian mantra that's still printed at the top of its front page. BuzzFeed, which celebrated its 10th birthday last year, has always taken a cheekier approach to journalism - which is fitting in an era when an opponent's denigration almost instantly becomes a badge of honor. Factions can quickly cluster around the meme of the moment, so we've sharpened the way we fight each other. We embrace the ugliness of the other side.

At a September fundraiser in Manhattan, Hillary Clinton said that some of Donald Trump's supporters belonged in a "basket of deplorables." All across Twitter, Trump supporters quickly claimed the term for themselves and re-branded "deplorable" as an honorific, like "Ms." or "the Rev."

CNN's Jim Acosta got called out in front of whole world for being FakeNews that was one of the best parts of the #TrumpPressConference LMAO

- Deplorable Annie (@Anncostanza1) January 11, 2017

When Trump called Clinton "such a nasty woman" during the third and final presidential debate in October, the same thing happened on the other side. There's a whole cottage industry of "nasty woman" merchandise; at least 181 online stores made nearly $2 million off "nasty woman" in the first two months after the debate, according to Shopify. One such T-shirt defines the term as "a confident independent female who gets s- done." In the minds of Clinton supporters, "nasty" is no longer a description of behavior but a stand against gynophobia, a rallying car for strong womanhood. The term popped up in Twitter bios, nestling between mainstream monikers like "feminist" and "political junkie."
[How America became a grudgeocracy]
The "Silicon Valley" TV actor Thomas Middleditch, in his Twitter bio, re-appropriated not one but two insults from the 2016 campaign: "nasty woman" and "cuck," an arch-conservative insult that has come to mean, essentially, a girly man. (It used to mean a conservative who wasn't vehemently anti-immigration and/or pro white supremacy, but its meaning has been diluted over the past year by constant use on Twitter.)

Added "nasty woman" to my profile. Just felt appropriate.

- Thomas Middleditch (@Middleditch) November 14, 2016

It was a small, virtual act of solidarity with women who support Clinton and/or oppose Trump. One of Middleditch's followers in Texas took his cue and started selling "cuck" T-shirts, with 75 percent of proceeds allegedly going to the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that works for suicide prevention for LGBT youth. Conservative terms became tools of liberal fundraising, just as "deplorable" became a way for Trump to enrage, inspire and focus his movement toward victory.

This is nothing new. Tina Fey titled her memoir "Bossypants," turning a negative term into a mindset to which readers could aspire. Think of Meredith Brooks's '90s anthem "Bitch," which put the misogynistic epithet alongside "lover," "child" and "mother." In his comedy act, Jeff Foxworthy turned "redneck" into a term of pride in Southern authenticity. Kate Bolick, a single-and-proud writer, slyly titled her 2015 book " Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own." When accepting an Oscar in 2006, George Clooney said he was "proud to be out of touch," taking ownership of a common Hollywood critique and redefining it as "forward-thinking" on civil rights, AIDS and other topics that were previously taboo. In the early 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his fellow thinkers were mocked as "transcendentalists" because critics considered their rationale "beyond reason and sanity," according to Jerome Loving's biography of Walt Whitman - but then the movement decided to embrace the term, and now English majors study transcendentalism as a significant movement in American literature.

What exactly is going on here? Clearly, the idea is that one way to stop trolls is to troll yourself first - to embrace, re-appropriate and de-claw the word, even before it can be used against you.

Or put another way: If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then an insult from my enemy is a compliment.

Take "Obamacare." Yes, it started off as mocking term, popularized by the GOP to tie the president's name to legislation it viewed as disastrous. Next thing you knew, Democrats were happy using taunt as friendly shorthand for their own Affordable Care Act.

"I like the term," Obama once said. "Because I do care."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
nasty woman; deplorable; deplorables; failing pile of garbage; buzzfeed; puppet; cuck; insults; buzzfeed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
From 'nasty woman' to 'failing pile of garbage': When an insult becomes a badge of honor

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nine days before the inauguration, the man getting ready to inherit George Washington and Abraham Lincoln's old job held a news conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan and called BuzzFeed "a failing pile of garbage."

# data[].attributes.headline
Meryl Streep and Tomi Lahren on President Elect Trump

# data[].attributes.subject
Meryl Streep and Tomi Lahren on President Elect Trump

# data[].attributes.body
Donald Trump was not a favorite of any star in Hollywood and it showed at the Golden Globes when Streep spoke out about Trump. Lahren talks about how "out of touch Hollywood is with the rest of the country" and "how important the electoral college really is" because without the electoral college people in Hollywood would have a much larger impact on the poles due to influence.
The "Over-rated collection of liberals" would have been considered the majority of voters because without the electoral college Clinton won the majority vote. She then specifically picks at Streeps speech especially when Streep tries to seem relatable.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After Donald Trump ripped into Meryl Streep for her politically charged Golden Globes speech, one of his biggest supporters gave her "Final Thoughts" on it.

TheBlaze personality Tomi Lahren didn't hold back in her criticism of both the Oscar-winning actress and the famous peers in front of whom she spoke on Sunday night at the Beverly Hilton International ballroom.

"Last night, Meryl Streep stood in front of a theater of rich Hollywood liberals to prove how out of touch Hollywood is with the rest of the country," Lahren said in a video posted on her Facebook page Monday night.

Also Read: Meryl Streep Calls Out Donald Trump in Golden Globes Speech: 'Disrespect Invites Disrespect' (Video)

"She also validated our reason for voting for Donald Trump, and reminded us how important the Electoral College really is," she continued.

"Without the Electoral College, people like Meryl Streep and the Hollywood elite would have a stranglehold on the rest of the country. You know, the football- and MMA-loving rest of the country."

Lahren went on to refer to the Globes guests and nominees as an "overrated collection of liberals gathered in a room to honor themselves," and then reviewed the finer point's Streep's speech.

Also Read: Donald Trump Rips Meryl Streep as 'One of the Most Over-Rated Actresses'

First she reminded us that Hollywood stars are "just average folks ... who wear millions of dollars of jewels and designer gowns to walk on a red carpet for 20 minutes, meanwhile pretending to care about so-called income equality and the working class," Lahren said.

After pointing out that many movie stars are foreigners, "then Meryl went left, way left by insinuating our President-elect Donald Trump would kick them all out ... are you sure? The folks he wants to kick out are illegals with criminal records.

"Though I am sure some would like to return a few of these Hollywood entertainers to where they came from, that is not the agenda of the Trump administration," the 24-year-old host said.

Also Read: Conservatives Really Mad About Meryl Streep's Anti-Trump Golden Globes Speech

Lahren went on to stress how Streep was on "her high horse" when talking about the arts and creating community. "Hey, Meryl, we happen to like football and MMA - go Cowboys," she said. "Without us, the football and MMA deplorables you look down on, you would have no one watching your 'arts.'"

The right-wing personality then disagreed with Streep's message that "violence begets violence," blaming rap music for inner city crime and slammed her emphasis on the importance of the truth.

"Safeguarding the truth ... is that the same truth as the 33,000 emails Hillary deleted?" Lahren asked.

"I just wonder what Donald Trump will do without the support of the Hollywood elite," she marveled sarcastically. "Oh, I know - he will make America great again."

Watch the video below, and read Lahren's equally harsh tweets about Streep from Sunday night.

Meryl bout to get some "final thoughts" tomorrow. These entitled Hollywood crybabies still don't understand how out of touch they are!

- Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) January 9, 2017

You're right about 1 thing Meryl, violence does incite violence kinda like the violence the DNC paid for at Trump rallies. Kinda like that..

- Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) January 9, 2017

Safeguard the truth Meryl? Like the truth in those 33k deleted emails? Or are we talking about Hillary's lies? Not sure, Meryl....

- Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) January 9, 2017

Left & Hollywood elite bitch about income inequality meanwhile making millions for "the arts." Hypocrites. The GOP doesn't demonize money.

- Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) January 9, 2017

Hey Meryl, you forgot some stuff last night at the #goldenglobes so let me finish it off with... https://t.co/3GuVQ2JYGt

- Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) January 10, 2017

10 Times Tomi Lahren Has Courted Outrage: From Black Lives Matter to President Obama (Photos)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tomi Lahren Goes on Tirade Against Meryl Streep's 'Liberal Privilege,' 'Hollywood Elite' (Video)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After Donald Trump ripped into Meryl Streep for her politically charged Golden Globes speech, one of his biggest supporters gave her "Final Thoughts" on it. TheBlaze personality Tomi Lahren didn't hold back in her criticism of both the Oscar-winning actress and the famous peers in front of whom she spoke on Sunday night at the Beverly Hilton International ballroom.

# data[].attributes.body
Though most teenagers and stars are searching for the "perfect" body image by dieting, working out, or, to the extreme, starving themselves. The social media has been fairly clear on what females are supposed to look like but Jennifer Lawrence and other stars like Ashley Graham and Lena Dunham oppose this aspect of Hollywood. Lawrence goes against status quo by pointing out that "Kate Moss running out here like with a bow and arrow wouldn't really be scary."
She then goes back to talking about the sexualizarion of young women. While demoting slightly by calli it "disgusting" she does later go to say "to each their own." This goes back agains the Transidentalism philosophy of going against said status quo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jennifer Lawrence talks body image - BBC Newsnight

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence talks to BBC Newsnight about the character she plays, her take on body image and her influence on young girls to look healthy, not thin.