links for 2009-03-23
March 23, 2009-
As men age they become “distinguished”. When they decide to trade in their first wives for a younger model it is not considered predatory. How many times have we heard the story of a woman supporting her husband through med school or law school, only to be unceremoniously dumped for arm candy as that is assumed part of the trappings of success? We don’t have any pet names for this behaviour.
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As they neared Britain, in June 1948, the passengers were suddenly gripped with fear that they might be turned back. "In parliament, the colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, said: 'These people have British passports and they must be allowed to land.' But he added: 'Don't worry, they won't last one winter in England.' Well, I'm proud to say I've lasted 59."
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Is there a numerical point at which their cultural distinctness offends the secular liberal principle of 'integration'? Is it 100,000? A million?
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Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution specifies that the legislative branch must watch the instructional training film "A Vote For Understanding" once every six years. The 30-minute video was made in 1976 and stars former Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), who guides viewers through a series of short lessons about the importance of listening to the opposition without interrupting, yelling, or filibustering.
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I thought I was going to start my series on classical Iranian poetry with Shahnameh, Iran’s national epic, but President Obama’s videotaped Nowruz message to Iran, in which he quotes the 13th century poet Sa’di, has forced me to change my plans. Those lines, The children of Adam are limbs to each other/having been created of one essence, are among the most famous lines of poetry in the world, though few in the United States have ever heard them. They are inscribed on the wall of the Hall of Nations in the UN building in New York City, and the sentiment they express, which you find throughout Gulistan, the book from which they are excerpted, helped in 16th century to catalyze a sea change in the way Christian Europe viewed Muslims and Islamic culture, from one that was governed by the mutual hatred of the Crusades to one that accepted as real the possibility that Muslims were no less human, and believed in humanistic values no less strongly, than the Christian Europeans themselves.
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As the debate turns to economic stimulus, we’re starting to hear this: “Bush realized that the economy needed help, so he asked Congress to enact tax cuts to provide stimulus. And this turned the economy around.” None of this is true.
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In the words of Simon Edge from Gay Times (hat-tip Peter Tatchell): "will any non-homophobic news editor explain why Causer’s murder mattered less than that of every other teenager killed last summer?"
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Q: Why isn't this just a massive giveaway to yet another set of financiers?
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I find that a scary sentence to write. If the past decade has taught me anything, it has taught me that mistakes are avoided if you follow two rules:
Remember that Paul Krugman is right.
If your analysis leads you to conclude that Paul Krugman is wrong, refer to rule #1.
So why do I have a positive and Paul a negative view of the Geithner Plan? -
In the month since the Chris Brown and Rihanna case broke, bodies of women killed by their current or former intimate partners have piled up. An ex-cop was just arrested for fatally shooting his former girlfriend in Brooklyn. A young mother in East New York was killed by her ex-boyfriend, who also shot her new girlfriend LINK. In Birmingham, Alabama a man stabbed his ex-girlfriend and her three housemates to death. A woman in Michigan was shot and killed by her estranged boyfriend. In Tennessee, an 18-year-old wife was murdered by her husband. An angry ex in North Escambia Florida murdered a pregnant 19-year-old and her boyfriend. In Atlantic City County, a man stabbed his girlfriend to death and then set her condominium on fire, killing himself. An 18-year-old cheerleader was murdered by her boyfriend in Charlotte. On average, three women are killed each day by their current or former romantic partners. Those are just a few cases from the past week.
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The soldiers' transgressions are an inevitable result of the orders given during this brutal operation, and they are the natural continuation of the last nine years, when soldiers killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians, at least half of them innocent civilians, nearly 1,000 of them children and teenagers.
Everything the soldiers described from Gaza, everything, occurred during these blood-soaked years as if they were routine events. It was the context, not the principle, that was different.
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The descriptions show that Israel's view of the enemy is becoming more extreme. The deterioration has been continuous – from the first Lebanon war to the second, from the first intifada to the second, from Operation Defensive Shield to Operation Cast Lead.
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My fear is not that so many of these incidents have taken place in my presence; instead my fear is reserved for the countless other acts that children are being subjected when no adult is around. Because my gut tells me that if a student feels comfortable enough ching-chonging me – the adult teacher who happens to be a person of color – that they sure as heck are doing it to other kids, kids who are far more vulnerable and in a weaker position to defend themselves compared to myself….Generally speaking as both a parent and a teacher, I believe that in order for real learning to occur, there needs to be a solid, working foundation as well as an existing, cohesive understanding of a single concept before you can successfully add another one. We don’t expect our children to run before they even know how to crawl or for our kids to attempt double digit multiplication before they even know how to add. I think the same is true about conversations regarding race and race consciousness.
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One of the best articles I've read in the past month – measured, thought-provoking and sensitive – but so so horribly sad and upsetting.
"Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible. In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons." -
Another example is Saul Steinberg’s ironic as well as iconic The World As Seen From New York’s 9th Avenue, a comment on the supposedly self-absorbed world view of the typical New Yorker. The map (discussed earlier) has been parodied many times over, one recent example being this view of Palinworld by the New Yorker magazine, which had published the original map in 1976.
The present example, entitled How China Sees the World, appears on the cover of the current issue of The Economist and illustrates a series of articles centering on China’s rise as a world power, especially at a time of economic crisis, seemingly underlining the decline of the West. The map is of course an explicit re-imagining of the original map, including (on a billboard): With apologies to Steinberg and the New Yorker. The city is of course China’s capital, Beijing
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In its most recent issue, The New Yorker magazine revisits one of its most famous covers ever. Saul Steinberg’s cartoon on the front page of the 29 March 1976 issue showed the world as seen from New York’s 9th Avenue. Mr Steinberg’s ironic, iconic cartoon, mentioned earlier on this blog (#72), has been recycled, imitated and parodied many times – and now by the New Yorker itself, as a comment on vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s world view.
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Many New Yorkers feel their city is more than just the (self-proclaimed) capital of the world. They think it actually is most of the world, the rest of the planet merely being the unavoidable orchard in which their Big Apple grows…The map in this post is another, earlier cover of the New Yorker. In 1976, artist Saul Steinberg drew up this depiction of the world as seen from New York’s 9th Avenue.
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Manages to be a good skewering of classism while whitewashing (ahem) the CBB racism.
"That summer, a string of images of white working class women presenting them as bestial imbeciles dominated our screens. Vicky Pollard – a single mum so thick she swaps her baby for a Westlife CD, played by a multi-millionaire private schoolboy – was becoming a national icon. A chaotic single mum established ‘Wife Swap’ as one of our favourite shows. Words of straightforward snobbish abuse – “chav” and “pikey” – were becoming acceptable again." -
Now, maybe this couple were indeed treated harshly. It doesn’t sound like it to me, but for argument’s sake, let’s say that some magistrates would have waived the £75. Why is this newsworthy? Because the Daily Mail wants to stir up hatred against people they don’t like. It has all the ingredients of a proper Daily Mail article; digs at anyone who isn’t white and Christian, and a suggestion that the state is biased against them. Just think how the Dilay Mail would have treated non-white immigrants who hadn’t paid their taxes.
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Talking Economics: A Guide
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The right wing tabloids behave exactly like the same people they mock. "He's my son and he didn't kill nobody" sounds exactly like "whatever you make of Iraq, these are 'Our Boys'" .
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Zadie Smith: "Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port. Maybe this fact is only what it seems to be—a case of bald social climbing—but at the time I genuinely thought this was the voice of lettered people, and that if I didn't have the voice of lettered people I would never truly be lettered."
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Fascinating history of an illegal industry:
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Now testimony is emerging from within the ranks of soldiers and officers alleging a permissive attitude toward the killing of civilians and reckless destruction of property that is sure to inflame the domestic and international debate about the army’s conduct in Gaza. On Thursday, the military’s chief advocate general ordered an investigation into a soldier’s account of a sniper killing a woman and her two children who walked too close to a designated no-go area by mistake, and another account of a sharpshooter who killed an elderly woman who came within 100 yards of a commandeered house.
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One doesn’t know the extent of these things, but both of the people speaking here are describing orders that were given to groups of people, not just individual instances of bad conduct. Needless to say, there are atrocities and war crimes associated with every war, so there’s no indication that this was any worse than any other military’s conduct. But by the same token, there are atrocities and war crimes associated with every war. A lot of the stateside supporters of this Israeli action seemed completely blind to that reality, as they imagined the IDF somehow stepping pristinely through the most densely populated place on earth and perfectly plucking out Hamas villains rather than, say, gunning down old ladies. That, however, is not the way of the world. And the result is a military operation that’s responsible for orders of magnitude more civilians deaths than were the rocket attacks it was supposedly going to put a stop to.
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“My children, it is not my time yet,” read the statement in part. “But someone had to give that A-hole a good face punching, and the buck stops here.”
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roundup of privilege 101 posts.
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All the pontiff need do to acquire a more educated view of AIDS in Africa is to read the widespread literature about women and how they acquire the disease. The percentage of female AIDS patients who are prostitutes, or drug addicts, is dwarfed by the percentage who are married women living upstanding lives in their communities.
The Pope advised them, according to the Reuters news agency, to exhibit, "correct behavior regarding one's body." Very helpful! That advice is completely useless to the typical "woman" in Africa who contracts the disease. Her profile is that of a teenage virgin sold into marriage against her will and "betrothed" to a much older man with many lovers who carries AIDS and refuses to use protection.
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I'm not white. I live in the UK. The largest non-white racial/ethnic/national group in the UK last time I looked was less than 2% of the population, i.e. 2 out of every 100 people. Demands for non-white people to be personal educators are, in effect, demands that even those of us from the largest groups (which are in any case internally diverse: Hindu Tamil-British =/= Sikh Punjabi-British, Jamaican-British =/= Trinidadian-British, &c.) should take personal responsibility for educating 49 people, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, with no training or remuneration.
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Physical contact and consent didn't matter because reckless eyeballing was always less about sex than about the "crime" of challenging white authority.
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The various authors linked to have expressed racist and sexist views unrepentantly. They have have have used descriptors of me and mine that include cunt, whore, uneducated, malignant fuckwit, troll, orc, unintellectual, witch-hunting, ignorant and too many others for me to even remember. Are you people now seriously telling me that I have no right to object to being so characterized and I am under an obligation to buy their books regardless? WHY exactly am I supposed to do that? WHY in the world should I support a person who considers me less than and other, to say the least? Who write books about me and mine that stereotype us , that make us feel like shit, and that contribuet to our dehumanization in the wider culture? What would that say about my self esteem? What would it say about myself that I, having been insulted and degraded, would now contribute to the degraders' financial surety?
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I've seen more than one person define the purpose of manners as making people comfortable, and that seems like a reasonable goal at first thought. But not all of our comfort is considered equally important , and over and over again, the hostile environment created by racism within literature and fandom has been treated as insignificant next to the hurt feelings of white people who don't like to be called on their behaviour.
My experience is that people appealing for manners, or a better tone, or civility in the midst of a discussion about oppression are really asking for order and trying to avoid being challenged.
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But I can't in good conscience support them. (note: i do not mean to sound superior, there are plenty of ways i give money to rotten things, i think we all have our own personal sets of not-alloweds.) There's something about these products that upsets *me* in a fundamental way.
I feel the same way about boycotting some of the authors who've been failing it up. I'm not doing it to punish or silence or send a message to them. They are the very least of my concerns. I'm avoiding their books because after seeing how they deal with real live people who are telling them, "hey, this hurts", I have no interest in seeking out their work so they can hurt me some more in a one-way medium. My boycott is my own political protest, and as the personal is political, what could be more personal than wanting the things I read/watch/buy for fun being actual FUN instead of being painful?
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article from 1964: "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind."
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The election highlighted the difficulties women still face in the political arena. The classic double bind — a woman who's feminine can't be competent; a woman who's competent can't be feminine — emerged as a key element of press and Internet commentary on the campaign. Clinton, considered unfeminine by some but generally respected for her policy experience, inspired the marketing of a nutcracker with steel thighs and was likened to "everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court" by Mike Barnicle on MSNBC. Palin, meanwhile — feminine and attractive, but relatively inexperienced and under-prepared to run a national race — spawned a pornographic spoof on the Hustler Web site and a blow-up "love doll."
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I'm not getting this. I mean, I will be honest–example, freaking Twilight gets panned thirty ways from Sunday. Everywhere. As a group, journalers and bloggers do this. This is not a magical new thing brought out just to destroy lives and tattoo a virtual swastika on people or something, and I just Godwin'ed myself. It is not a POC retaliatory plot with some kind of dark master group directing from above. This is, to put it plainly, a journaler saying "These people make me uncomfortable in their fiction and in their views, so I am not reading their work in the future, and I will link you to why I feel this way" which is, in fact, a shitload more than I ever do when I hate things publicly in LJ.
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So, all in all, it was pretty clear to me that what he meant was that I don’t have an exciting mental illness. I just plug along with depression and anxiety. There’s nothing ‘glamorous’ in my mentalism, like schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder. (I know that in real life there’s nothing glamorous or cool or exciting about those illnesses – they’re just a different way to experience misery – but I’m talking about the impression I got from General Psychiatrist here, not my own attitudes and opinions.)
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One issue that has not been mentioned in the Rihanna/Brown case is the fact that the couple is black. Since the early 1980s, large national surveys have shown that black women are at greater risk of being violently victimized by their intimate partners than white women are. Some researchers have argued that the higher rate of intimate violence among black couples is the result of culturally specific factors that include beliefs about marriage and fidelity along with negative stereotypes of black women. But in studies that have examined both race and social class, differences in rates of intimate partner violence between black and white couples are significantly reduced or disappear completely when social class is controlled. The higher rate of intimate partner violence victimization – and, indeed, all types of violent victimization – among black women, then, is another outcome of racism: the result of the disproportionate number of black people who live in poverty.
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All the images of food are from submissions across the web. While there may certainly be people who choose to eat this food, I believe the title and the tag line of this website perpetuate the myth that people that are fat are gluttonous. Socially we have this idea that if someone is over weight it is because they have a lack of self discipline which leads to massive over eating of food choices that are high fat, calorie and carbohydrate.
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However, even in this environment there is one area that has always troubled me and that revolves around the concept of promiscuity as diagnositic criteria.
My first and biggest problem with this is that I have NEVER heard this brought up as a symptom of mental illness when discussing a male. It is always something that is brought up about a female. I can’t help but assume that this is linked to the belief that “excessive” sexual activity is normal for a man and not a symptom of mental illness while no “healthy” woman would engage in or enjoy casual or alternative styles of sex.
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"Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques – these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty." – fucking military
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Get excited and make things!
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If Suddath pronounces "cheese" in any way that sounds different from what "cheez" is meant to represent, then I hate to tell her, but she's the one with the speech impediment.
