world history link blog

framing fail

2010-01-26T11:42:00.001-08:00

DeMint is now unable at this point to speak with proper grammar. TNR:

[Y]esterday on ABC 's "This Week," Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, whom Michelle Cottle recently profiled in TNR's pages, took this practice to a comically nonsensical extreme:
DEMINT: We can't promote freedom and democracy by repressing free speech. That's not the way to do it. I think people should be able to come together in associations and organizations and spend money to get their message out. I think that's going to promote the democrat process, instead of really what we've got now, is where you essentially give the labor unions carte blanche over our system, grassroots as well as spending.
The democrat process? DeMint has so thoroughly conditioned himself to avoid the label "Democratic" that he apparently now has trouble uttering the word even when it comes with a small 'd.'

Ugh.

Tea Party's roots

2010-01-26T11:40:00.001-08:00

Las Vegas Sun: "The Tea Party's (old) paranoia"

Beck and the Tea Party movement of which he is a central figure are often portrayed as a new and exotic political phenomenon. Pollsters treat the Tea Party movement like a third political party, and indeed, it is especially popular at the moment among unaffiliated voters new to politics.

For voters — most recently in last week’s Massachusetts special election — who believe big government and big business are engaged in a corrupt marriage, the movement feels like a refreshing voice for average people who aren’t in those backrooms and so aren’t getting cut in on the deals, like during health care reform negotiations.

Indeed, Kay Lawrence, a retired art gallery manager who attended a Tea Party event in Las Vegas recently, voices this complaint: “We’re sick of these sweetheart deals.”

For all its apparent freshness, however, the Tea Party movement is neither new nor novel, historians and political scientists say.

It is firmly rooted, in its ideology, rhetoric and — there’s no polite word for it — its paranoia, in the post-World War II American right.

Connecting them back to the Birchers and others.

US Grant

2010-01-26T11:30:00.000-08:00

Better than advertised? Some re-assessments going on. Basically, if we think he was bad it's because of revanchist Lost Cause bullshit dominating the history. So sad.

One random (but good) writer, Nathan Newman:

But with the end of Reconstruction, we have seen history written to bury most memories of the period and assassinate the reputations of those who led it-- including Grant. There were real accusations of corruption among Grant's cabinet, although no one believes Grant himself was corrupt, but those charges of corruption appear relatively minor in light of far worse corruption in many administrations to come. But saying Grant was "corrupt" became an easy offhand way to dismiss his Presidency and Reconstruction at the same time. Even today, there are NO great films honoring reconstruction, just racist anti-Reconstruction films like Gone With the Wind and even modern documentaries like Ken Burns' Civil War only mentions accusations of corruption In Grant's administration -- without a single mention of his vigorous fight against Klan Violence.

TNR: The Return of Ulysses S Grant, a review of a new bio by Joan Waugh. ("Grant’s standing began to erode drastically after 1920 owing to several currents, cultural and intellectual, that emerged from diverse quarters.")

sdf

professor label

2010-01-26T11:22:00.000-08:00

NYT: "Professor is a label that leans to the left."

A pair of sociologists think they may have an answer: typecasting. Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up.

Gets to Bourdeiu classifications thing, also the efforts to construct political identities over generations. Good assignment for CP.

Prop 8 Trial makes for good history

2010-01-14T06:56:00.000-08:00

Observers of the Prop 8 trial are writing some great posts on the history of homosexuality. Given the prominence of historians among the witnesses, this is natural. A great thing. Samples:

Margaret Talbot writes in the New Yorker about George Chauncey ("A Structural Hostility"), who must "focus on the nineteen-thirties through the sixties, the period when, he has argued, gays and lesbians were most sharply stigmatized as deviants and degenerates. But he must also make sure to say, as he did on the stand today, that such attitudes do not belong only to the past."

She links a Rick Perlstein profile of Chauncey from 2004 ("Moment of Decision"), when his scholarship went to the Supreme Court and effectively cut out the argument from tradition:

Sodomy laws, for most of America’s history, were not antihomosexuality laws but bans on all manner of nonprocreative sex. Then came the 1970s. Most states repealed their sodomy statutes as embarrassing anachronisms. But some passed new laws outlawing gay sex exclusively. These laws were as deeply rooted in America’s history and tradition as the lava lamp. At Cobb, Chauncey explained the significance: Bowers did not merely uphold some originary tradition of outlawing sodomy. “It reinterpreted it as if it applied to homosexual couples only. The court said, ‘It’s okay to single out these people.’”

Chauncey and others then worked to overturn this reinterpretation, in Lawrence.

Finally, Independent Gay Forum writes about the trial itself: both Chauncey and Nancy Cott, a marriage historian and expert witness. Interesting passage here about changing language:

When the L.A. historian Stuart Timmons was staying with me researching his book, Gay L.A., he showed me the L.A. Times archives he could access, dating back to the early parts of the 20th Century. But he told me that at first, he wasn’t sure there were many articles about homosexuality; he could not find more than a handful. He knew there were thousands of criminal cases, beatings and deaths from the court documents he had been reading. Did the mainstream press just not cover those stories? Was it a political bias at the historically very conservative L.A. Times?

Then he realized that he was searching for words and phrases he was used to using: “homosexual” and “gay” and “sexual orientation.” But those were not the words journalists would have used prior to our own time.

Try it for yourself. If you have access to any database of news stories up to about the 1960s, see how many articles you can find about homosexuality using the words you know to describe sexual orientation.

Than try using these: “deviant;” “degenerate;” “pervert.”

These will all be useful this semester for various CP weeks.

Don't mess with the devils!!

2010-01-14T06:53:00.000-08:00

Pat Robertson, who can always be counted on to blame the victims for the natural disasters that strike them: Haiti made a pact with the Devil to beat the French.

Salon debunks here.

NR shrugs

2010-01-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

1956 Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugs from the National Review ("Big Sister is Watching"). Interesting to see how they denigrated it at the time; now it's the Bible. Some good passages show that it will link up well to the course's final week on culture-creating models. Ran wrote fiction because her philosophy was more easily defended in fiction's starker terms:

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

And this:

Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism.

What really amazes me is Chambers' analysis of Rand as simultaneously Marxist and fascist. Her philosophy is materialist, in that it takes economic principles as its motivating force for political philosophy. And her conclusions are fascist, because they place force at the center of all things, they lionize the overclass that delivers violence, and then lauds the overlords as heroes:

So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held “heroic” in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author’s economics and the politics that must arise from them. For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact, it is, essentially — a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

And this then leads us to the problem of how the philosophy applies to the real world. Not well, as we've found out these past 30 years.

a nation of intellectuals - gasp!

2010-01-11T09:13:00.000-08:00

Thomas Sowell in a National Review TV thing, when asked if the US is becoming a nation of intellectuals: "It's a chilling thought."

Possible use in habitus week - the conservatives' problem with higher education is that it places people in an open-minded, tolerant, questioning environment that can re-shape people's political outlooks through their everyday living context. They become intellectuals, and then intellectuals don't vote for reactionary, reality-ignoring policies.

culture industry - Ailes edition

2010-01-11T05:27:00.001-08:00

1. NYT article on Roger Ailes and his pernicious influence. ("Fox chief at the pinnacle of news and politics") Good Perlstein quote that provides good hook to use in culture war II week.

2. Also, Digby writes about the Post ombudsman finally addressing the paper's outsourcing of content to the right-wing Peterson group Fiscal Times. Opening section:

The Washington Post ombudsman finally responded to the complaints about the paper's inappropriate relationship with Pete Peterson and his new "news" operation the Fiscal Times. He says there's nothing wrong with it because Peterson has hired good reporters and the stories will be edited by the paper's staff.

Dean Baker wonders if he would say the same thing if the paper contacted with the NRAs "Firearms Gazette" or the tobacco industry's "Smoking Today." After all, he seems to think that theFiscal (End) Times can be trusted, with safeguards, to write unbiased copy. But here's the rub:
Can anyone imagine the Peterson Foundation putting a story showing how much the failure of the Fed to combat the housing bubble added to country's debt? How about a piece that showed that the U.S. deficit problem is driven entirely by our broken health care system?

No, these pieces, or many others like them, are not going to run in the Fiscal Times, because that is not what Peter Peterson wants to buy with his millions. And, the very good reporters who have signed up to work for the Fiscal Times know very well what the boss wants, even if he does not intervene directly in their reporting.

Culture industry meets culture war! Good for the last weeks.

3. Glen Greenwald on the new court gossip book that's dominated news the last few days. First two grafs suffice:

No event in recent memory has stimulated the excitment and interest of Washington political reporters like the release of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book,Game Change, and that reaction tells you all you need to know about our press corps. By all accounts (including a long, miserable excerpt they released), the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as "reporting." And yet -- or, really, therefore -- Washington's journalist class is pouring over, studying, and analyzing its contents as though it is the Dead Sea Scrolls, lavishing praise on its authors as though they committed some profound act of journalism, and displaying a level of genuine fascination and giddiness that stands in stark contrast to the boredom and above-it-all indifference they project in those rare instances when forced to talk about anything that actually matters.
This reaction has nicely illuminated what our press corps is. The book is little more than royal court gossip, churned out by the leading practitioner of painfully sycophantic, Drudge-mimicking cattiness: Time's Mark Halperin. And all of the courtiers, courtesans, court spokespeople (i.e., "journalists") and hangers-on who populate our decadent littleVersailles on the Potomac can barely contain their glee over the opportunity to revel in this self-absorbed sleaze. Virtually every "political news" TV show is hyping it. D.C. reporters are boasting that they obtained early previews and are excitedly touting howintensively they're studying its pages in order to identify the most crucial revelations. Just try to contemplate how things would be if even a fraction of this media energy and interest level were devoted to scrutinizing the non-trivial things political leaders do.

As he notes in closing: The people who brought you two years of Bill Clinton's penis haven't gone anywhere. They've only gotten stronger.

Avatar links

2010-01-08T05:44:00.001-08:00

Some really perspective critiques of Avatar. Apparently while I was offline there was a lot of criticism of it as racist - which I didn't understand at first. Starting out with LGM:

Annalee Newitz writes that "[w]hether Avatar is racist is a matter of debate," but it isn't: the film is racist. Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists). Unlike King Kong—which wrestled with the racial logic of the original—Avatar reproduces the racist logic of its source material. This is not to say the film is not also a condemnation of American imperialism or disastrous environmental policies, because it's that too.

Makes sense when you read the whole thing.

I like zunguzungu's thoughts on the childlike racism/primitivism of a particularly American type ("Avatar and the American Man-Child"). It's not necessarily racist, in the sense of being negative. But it is patronizing, beause the quality of the natives that Sully admires is their infantalism, their habitus of a pastoral adventureland that he wants to join:

This is why, for example, Jake Sully is such a spoiled brat. To note that he is the worst stereotype of the ugly American isn’t nearly enough; he’s profoundly satisfied with his ignorance and his self-absorption is so awesomely complete and all-encompassing that it seems perfectly natural when other people make huge investments in him, to the point that he makes saying “thank you” all about him. He isn’t surprised or humbled when it turns out that the entire world revolves around him – who else could it possibly revolve around? – and when he first puts on his Na’vi avatar, he thinks nothing of ignoring the advice of people that know better and doing exactly as feels like doing. A shameless and shallow asshole, the only thing that makes him even slightly uneasy is his intermittent “video log” because it forces him to confront how thoughtless he is. But while people will excuse the shallowness of his character on the basis of it being just a popcorn movie or a kid’s movie, or whatever, that shallowness isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, just as George Bush’s mask of ignorance was precisely what made him appealing to so many Americans.

Jake Sully, in other words, is a Western fantasy of spoiled childhood: pure id, he revels in the toys that the world has provided for him without understanding that someone had to make them, without ever questioning his own right to have them. I think that’s why I don’t feel contempt for him, but visceral, gut-level, and troubling disgust. I recognize his desires, because we not only have to get past them to be adults, but because they stay with us. Perhaps we still are, on some level, the sociopaths we were when we were children (that I type this while home for the holidays, in the bedroom I occupied when I was seven, only seems appropriate). Yet it’s also one of the worst aspects of the American cultural tradition that going back to childhood is somehow the fountainhead of political virtue (see, for example, Jefferson, Thomas and Roosevelt, Theodore) because it’s so rarely the childhood of curiosity, games, and sociality that the tradition extols, but rather its reverse, a very particular fantasy of careless anti-social boyishness that tends into misogyny so easily because, to again refer us to Nina Baym, it feminizes the “encroaching, constricting, destroying society” that we American boys must seek to be free of by lighting out for the territories.

Interesting connection to the frontier thesis (as he notes).

Nobel Peace Price, 2009 vs 1905

2009-12-10T06:25:00.000-08:00

Interesting read in HuffPost today from James Bradley (Flags of Our Fathers, and the new The Imperial Cruise), using Obama's Prize receipt yesterday as a bridge to talk about Teddy Roosevelt's long-ago win.

Article has good comments about modernity, Japanese-American affinities in this period:

Roosevelt viewed Asia through strict ideological lenses. One of his theories was that the Chinese and Koreans were declining "impotent" races. In contrast, Roosevelt believed that the Japanese were a rising "potent" race, "a wonderful and civilized people ... entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world." About the Russians, Roosevelt wrote, "No human beings, black, yellow or white could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant -- in short, as untrustworthy in every way -- as the Russians."

By supporting Japan, Roosevelt believed he was championing America's long-term interests in North Asia. When the Japanese military ignited the Russo-Japanese War with a surprise attack (which would resemble their later attack on Pearl Harbor) on the Russian navy at Port Arthur without a declaration of war, the Russians naturally condemned the action as a shameful violation of international norms. Not so Roosevelt, who wrote privately to his son, "I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game."

The crux of much of the article is that TR was actually working with Japan throughout the negotiations - and therefore kind of scummy, if you think about it. Even worse, actually criminal and impeachable:

Three weeks later in a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, Roosevelt approved the Japanese takeover of Korea and agreed to "an understanding or alliance . . . among Japan, the United States and Great Britain . . . as if a treaty had been signed." The "as if" was key, because by making this secret treaty without Senate approval, Roosevelt was committing an unconstitutional act.

Bradley says TR encouraged the Japanese to think in Monroe Doctrine terms about Asia. Wonder how that turned out?

Article would make good link in 002, 132.

The Left at War

2009-11-17T14:22:00.000-08:00

Tapped has a review of Berube's new book, The Left at War. Review begins with the closure of the Birmingham School:

In June of 2002, a British university dissolved one of its smaller departments. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was shuttered, and students eager to research the culture of soccer hooliganism or the effect of teen-rag advice columns on adolescents' burgeoning sexuality were effectively cast adrift. Officials at the University of Birmingham cited low marks on research evaluations as reason for the closure. The centre's defenders cried foul, speculating it was punishment for the department's history of radicalism. Nine months later, the United States would lead an invasion of Iraq, setting in motion a war still not over. Could the prevention of the former have helped stop the latter -- save the cultural theorists, save the world?

Liberal blogger and "dangerous" academic Michael Bérubé would like us to at least consider it. In The Left at War, Bérubé links progressives' inability to control the conversation on national security during the Bush administration to cultural studies' failure to deliver on its promise of a vibrant New Left. And in the process, he also tries to imagine a newer and better one -- a left that both knows what is worth fighting for and how to fight for it.

Possible good last reading for CP, since it gets to some of the problems with cultural studies, and the possibility of creating anything in the real world.

Professionalism and PhDs

2009-11-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

Ugh. Great article though. Louis Menand in Harvard Magazine: "The PhD Problem. On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy's self-renewal."

The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor. The academic credential is non-transferable (as every Ph.D. looking for work outside the academy quickly learns). And disciplines encourage—in fact, they more or less require—a high degree of specialization. The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.

Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well.

Very interesting observation that CP kids would really like this - systems of knowledge, power-knowledge, its production, and the like.

Crusades

2009-11-12T06:13:00.000-08:00

Final link of the morning: Harper's scaring the shit out of me with another analysis of the Christianization of the military. The most horrifying example in this story lends it its title: "Jesus Killed Mohammad" -- taken from an incident when these young fucks thought it would be hilarious to paint that on the front of their Bradley, then ride through the holy city of Samara yelling that from their bullhorns. Both print and voice in Arabic, so the people would know they're being insulted and provoked. And what do you know, a massive battle begins against "a city full of terrorists." It's just too depressing.

signposts

2009-11-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

Acephalous writes with sarcastic hilarity about signposting. ("In what follows I will write about signposts.") Might be good for students to see - but they might also miss the point. Hopefully though the end would make it clear:

In the previous paragraphs I have defended the usefulness of the signpost in academic prose. The inclusion of that headline demonstrates that signposts are both useful and awesome. Now I will transition to the conclusion of this post by telling you that I am transitioning to the conclusion of this post.
And here I am at the conclusion like I told you I would be. In this conclusion I will recapitulate what I have I already proven in the paragraphs above. The words I wrote in the above paragraphs prove that people who use signposts are perverse old chestnuts who are so hot shit they can include articles about whores in anything they write and that they are awesome. I will now conclude my conclusion with the period I place at the end of this sentence.

Over the top! But might be good to show them that they need to combine signposting with real content - it's a mix.

Remember remember 11 November

2009-11-12T06:06:00.000-08:00

LGM argues that 11/11 shouldn't just be a day for veterans, but for WWI. But that will never happen.

Uses the post as an excuse to link Robert Bourne's 1918 essay that gave us the famous quote "War is the health of the state." I had not read that in a long time - would make a fantastic pairing with Weber for week 2 of CP.

The gist: In republics, the state fades - or at least we think that it does. In reality it lies dormant waiting for war to allow it to take over again.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government.

LGM commentary reminds us of Bourne's own situation when he wrote this - destitute, because he was driven from opinion journalism by the Wilsonian insanity of WWI.

1989: End or Beginning?

2009-11-12T06:03:00.001-08:00

Financial Times: "Victory in the Cold War was a Start as well as an Ending."

Anniversaries are a good time for taking stock. The collapse of Soviet communism was a glorious moment. It remains so, despite mistakes and disappointments along the way. But today’s crisis tells us of the failings of a euphoric capitalism. Capitalism will not now perish, as communism did. But the signal ability of liberal democracy is to learn and adapt. We learnt from the 1930s. We must now learn the lessons of the 2000s.

Good assignment for the final WC week, when matched to other thoughts about periodization.

Multicause!

2009-11-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

Too many reasons that this happened. From TampaBay.com:

TAMPA — Marine reservist Jasen Bruce was getting clothes out of the trunk of his car Monday evening when a bearded man in a robe approached him.
That man, a Greek Orthodox priest named Father Alexios Marakis, speaks little English and was lost, police said. He wanted directions.
What the priest got instead, police say, was a tire iron to the head. Then he was chased for three blocks and pinned to the ground — as the Marine kept a 911 operator on the phone, saying he had captured a terrorist.
Police say Bruce offered several reasons to explain his actions:
The man tried to rob him.
The man grabbed Bruce's crotch and made an overt sexual advance in perfect English.
The man yelled "Allahu Akbar," Arabic for "God is great," the same words some witnesses said the Fort Hood shooting suspect uttered last week.
"That's what they tell you right before they blow you up," police say Bruce told them.

So he may be gay, have roid rage, and be worked up by right-wing rhetoric in the wake of Ft. Hood.

feminism, gender, masculinity, etc

2009-11-10T06:56:00.001-08:00

TAP gives a double dose of gender this morning, dovetailing nicely with Joan Scott et al for today's class.

First up: "What's the Alternative to Tucker Max?", with descriptions of cute activist college kids trying to brainstorm alternative masculinities. Makes the good point that most feminist masculinities have so far defined themselves negatively, and not offered programs of their own.

While it's thrilling that there is also a movement of young men all who want to tear down the patriarchy right alongside women, it's dangerous that they don't have a clear picture of what they want to build in its place. At the conference, one young man spoke up against the notion of a new "feminist masculinity," explaining that he feared it would be one more box that young men felt they had to fit into. There's a lot of validity to his argument, but I fear that the old adage is true: We can't be what we can't see. Models help us try on various identities and find one that is truly authentic. The more publicly feminist-aligned men we have, the more opportunities the next generation has to find a positive, masculine gender identity that actually fits.

Many young men, it seems, are stuck in stage one of gender consciousness. They want to prove that they are one of the "good ones" and separate themselves from all the gendered behaviors and beliefs that they now see as oppressive. That, or they wallow in guilt. (This is not unlike the stage many white kids get stuck in upon fully realizing their role in perpetuating racism.) At worst, this point of view is paralyzing. At best, it leads to burnout. It's not until privileged folks, men in this case, can own the ways in which they have a self-interest in resisting systems of oppression that their work becomes sustainable.

Also a story about Kathleen Parker ("Constant Comment: How Kathleen Parker became America's most-read woman columnist"), which points out some ironies in her rise. First, it tracks all the traditional gender stuff she's put out over the years - a very strong theme in her work. Then, the story presents her deviation from other aspects of Republican orthodoxy. Yet she took off because she fit the "Republican woman" checkbox - and because her strong position on traditional gender was enough to trump:

One would be hard-pressed under these circumstances to label Parker a loyal Republican. Indeed, she maintains that she is not and has never registered as such. It was in 1995, when Parker's column was picked up for syndication, that she became a designated voice of the right. "The way the market is set up," Parker says, "there has to be a left, there has to be a right, there has to be a conservative, there has to be a liberal, there has to be a man, a woman, a black, an Asian. Blah blah blah blah."

This political packaging came as a surprise to some. About six years ago, Keyes, Parker's former editor, was managing editor of a paper in Hawaii and searching for a right-leaning columnist to round off the op-ed page. "I called a friend of mine who's an editorial-page editor and said, 'I'm looking for a good conservative columnist,'" Keyes says. "And this person said, 'Oh, Kathleen Parker!' I said, 'What?' I thought, 'Oh, that must be another Kathleen Parker.'"

But Parker's focus on traditional gender roles and impatience with political correctness were enough to sell her as a conservative in a market where a right-leaning woman was an appropriately diversifying oddity. (Which is not to say being a woman was an advantage. "When my syndicate tried to sell me," Parker recalls, "they often heard: 'We don't need Parker, we have [Ellen] Goodman.' Meaning, we already have a woman.")

And it was as a nominal conservative, not as a Palin-bashing would-be liberal, that The Washington Post hired her -- just weeks before she wrote the column advising the vice-presidential nominee to step down.

Goes to show how central traditional gender concepts are to the whole array of rightist politics - even when she deviates in other areas, she covers herself through traditional gender. (Not that she is as crassly opportunistic as that phrasing implies - she writes her thoughts, and others place her work in the larger politico-social gender framework.)

Nazi history of HH

2009-11-04T07:33:00.000-08:00

From book blog "Tatty Jackets". Doesn't give the title unfortunately. His translation of an interesting passage:

The historical development of our city could easily create the impression that Hamburg had placed her own interests over those of Germany. However, we must not overlook the fact that it was only through this political independence that the Hamburg’s inner strength of purpose, enterprising courage, tenacity in the face of set-backs, and flexibility in the conquering of new markets could develop, and could blossom among Germany’s ranks. The successful utilisation of these qualities for the city simultaneous meant service to the interests of Germany; Hamburg’s profile in the world was Germany’s vindication, Hamburg’s economy was the German economy. The fact that Hamburg, despite all her international connections and despite the various points of contact with foreign ways and customs, remained truly German at heart, is proven by the inscription on the memorial columns in Adolf Hitler Square: “40 000 sons of this city gave up their lives for you!” (p.62-3)

Has original German too. Would be nice to get a real copy and check it out.

come on, IL

2009-11-01T05:52:00.000-08:00

Illinois English teacher suspended for assigning his students an article from Seed Magazine -- "The Gay Animal Kingdom," which describes homosexuality in animal species. The problem (besides just the fact that it's downstate Illinois), is that the article starts out really... sexy:

Male big horn sheep live in what are often called “homosexual societies.” They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males “effeminate.”

Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in “penis fencing,” which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.

So some parents freaked, and he is now suspended (with pay). Article on the story from Psychology Today has some good summaries of the state of play regarding homo- and heterosexuality. Apparently this teacher is straight, but very into showing his students how heteronormativity works. Can't have that!

the latest from The Family

2009-10-30T06:14:00.001-07:00

Rep. Bart Sustak is trying to make the Dems choose: abortion rights or health care. From a Kos diary ("Health Care in House Held Hostage by 'Christian Mafia' member"):

Stupak has threatened to block the House health care bill unless he can add an amendment that according to a Media Matters report would restrict, perhaps dramatically, the availability of abortion services in the US - which according to the Guttmacher Institute are currently unavailable in 87% of US counties. As one Daily Kos member put it, "If this [Stupak's amendment] goes through, then ANY clinic who takes funds from the public option will be prohibited from performing abortions even if they are privately paid for..."

So, Bart Stupak is holding health care hostage to his agenda of further restricting access to abortion services. Mafia imagery is very appropriate here :

Stupak is a member of "The Family" whose members sometimes refer jokingly to their shadowy, cultic influence peddling group as a "mafia". Representative Stupak lives in the rent-subsidized "C Street House" that's registered as a church, which became notorious over the summer when three Republicans associated with the C Street House became embroiled in sex scandals.

They pretty much are a mafia, and if not certainly spooky quasi-fascist cult. According to a story in Harper's, which the above diary linked ("Jesus plus nothing: Undercover Among America's Secret Theocrats"):

The brothers of Ivanwald are the Family's next generation, its high priests in training. I had been recommended for membership by a banker acquaintance, a recent Ivanwald alumnus, who had mistaken my interest in Jesus for belief. Sometimes the brothers would ask me why I was there. They knew that I was “half Jewish,” that I was a writer, and that I was from New York City, which most of them considered to be only slightly less wicked than Baghdad or Amsterdam. I told my brothers that I was there to meet Jesus, and I was: the new ruling Jesus, whose ways are secret.

A good "thick description" maybe. His book, The Family is available. Scary stuff.

grammar police!

2009-10-29T12:54:00.000-07:00

Good for a writing week attachment. From Salon: "Memo to Grammar cops: Back off! A new book on the history of proper English says you're just stuck up."

According to Lynch, the very notion of correct English is only 300 years old; in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the idea that native English speakers could be accused of using their own language improperly would have seemed absurd. The advent of printing -- and, especially, the growth of general literacy -- led to efforts to establish authoritative standards of spelling and usage in the 18th century. Scholars known collectively as "the 18th-century grammarians" have, in some accounts of the language's history, been set up as "dastardly, moustache-twirling villains and mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons," who attempted to impose a lot of arbitrary restrictions on English grammar. Their most notorious crime was the prohibition against split infinitives.

Will work great for history courses especially - the linguistic forms I'm imposing on them have specific origins.

The Rise of Gingrich

2009-10-29T05:39:00.000-07:00

Digby points out a Frontline story about Gingrich:

I think people should read this piece about the rise of Gingrich. He was a malevolent figure whose political philosophy nearly destroyed this country. But he changed the course of history, and dominated American politics for more than a decade by being brash enough to go at the power structure --- and winning. His is a classic case of someone moving the Overton Window.

From the story itself (Vanity Fair, 1989):

Gingrich... has been practicing what he calls "confrontational activism," a standard theme of which is the defeatist psychology of the Soviet-appeasing Chamberlains on the other side of the aisle.

But even this is not why Newt Gingrich stands at center stage in the political theater just now. To many in Washington, both those who admire and those who loathe the Georgia representative, Newt Gingrich is the future of American politics, arrived; a hope, or a nightmare, come true.

And of course that came even more true once he took over in 94. A useful pairing with the GOPAC memos and other Overton type readings for political culture classes.

Rand reviews

2009-10-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

Some reviews of the new Ayn Rand bios, one of which I'm thinking of assigning next semester. If I do, these links might be useful to contextualize her present-day popularity.

First up, Andrew Leonard presents "Scary Fantasy Alert", which relays a hagiographic book review from Bloomberg news. The reporter tries to show Rand's relevance as a consequence of her ficitonal world coming true. An obvious crock. Leonard:

The idea that Ayn Rand's renewed popularity is a result of some kind of life-imitates-art recapitulation of the themes of her novels is ridiculous. What's really happening is much easier to explain. When world events conspired to destroy the myth that an unregulated free market is the best way to organize society, the true believers retreated into a shell made from their own hardened ideology. That's why Fox News has higher ratings, and Ayn Rand is selling more books -- because fantasy is more appealing than the real world, when the real world is telling you that what you believe is wrong.

And that of course is why fiction was such a better vehicle through which to create and defend this ideology: when refuted by the real world, it can persist in fantasy.

Next, Leonard relays an equally scary fact: that Newsweek hired Mark Stanford to review the two new bios. ("Hiking the Appalachian Trail With Ayn Rand")

Give Newsweek some credit. The magazine's choice of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to review two recent biographies of Ayn Rand is an inspired act of editorial genius. Lest we forget, before Sanford became famous for (not) hiking the Appalachian Trail, he was much beloved by the Republican base for his (ultimately failed) attempt to reject stimulus money from Washington. That is what "going Galt" is all about. His proud stance bore a clear resemblance to architect Howard Roark's decision in "The Fountainhead" to blow up his own building after dastardly bureaucrats dared alter his design. Mark Sanford -- so committed to limited government he was willing to blow up South Carolina.
Add in to the mix the psychological truth that few Americans are better suited to laud Ayn Rand's cult of the individual than a man who betrayed his responsibilities to an entire state out of an undeniable passion to tango in Argentina, and you've got a clear winner. And since, as my colleague Alex Koppelman observes, no one in South Carolina is paying any attention to what Sanford says or does anymore, the governor obviously had plenty of time to read the two hefty biographies.

fuck freakonomics

2009-10-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

HA! Glad to see a takedown... now I have a more eloquent way of explaining what people didn't like hearing as we watched that dumb 20/20 ad job for their new book.

Pandagon: Maybe prostitution isn't so cute.

Ahhhh, there we go. Women may “give away” sex for free, but if you want someone to act like a subservient sexbot, then you have to pay for the pleasure. Wives are so disappointing! They do things like listen to the music they like, or refuse to indulge you when you’re being an asshat. As Allie discovered, the longer she did this, and the more she charged, the more men wanted to go on long dates. Sex wasn’t all she was doing! She was being paid by the hour to pretend that morons were smart, that assholes were delightful, and that weird thing he does is orgasmic. The thrill is less renting someone’s vagina, but buying someone’s submission.

Panda points to Sady Doyle in The Guardian, "Prostitution, for fun and profit." A devastating takedown of the Freakonomics duo.

Freakonomics, of course, is the science of choosing an appropriately wacky or controversial subject (sumo wrestlers, abortion), applying a little economic analysis to it and coming up with a shocking conclusion that will make people blog about you. In that respect, the how-to-charge-for-sex piece was a no-brainer. Expressing any opinion about prostitution will bring on outrage (and attention) from one corner or another, no matter what your opinion turns out to be. Of course, if you are aiming for maximum impact, it helps to be – as Levitt and Dubner are – really, stunningly, remarkably wrong.

Part of the problem is that they base themselves around two prostitutes - a high-end one and a slum one. They become "the Goofus and Gallant of sex work." But their contexts are never described -- one is white, one black. One rich, one poor. Does that have anything to do with it? They don't say.

Hey, here's an interesting thought: Maybe LaSheena doesn't like men because she's trapped in a cycle of poverty, and one of the only ways for her to stay alive is to have sex with men, whether or not she really wants to. Maybe that's enough to make LaSheena dislike men. We'll never know, however, because Dubner and Levitt don't ask. They don't care to humanise her. She's the Goofus in the scenario. Her poverty – which is assumed to be entirely her fault – is only there to provide a counterpoint to Allie's shining example.

And as for Allie:

And as for how much Allie loves to be a prostitute ... well, we don't have her direct testimony, do we? What we have is the word of two best-selling authors, which has been edited into book form. Allie's story is so romanticised that it seems unlikely the authors bore no agenda in their interviews – or that Allie, a woman whose job is to figure out what men want from her, was unaware of it.
It's entirely possible that, faced with a couple of men who very clearly wanted one specific version of her story, she sized them up and did the same thing for them that she did for all her other clients. That is to say, she told them what they wanted to hear.

Da-aaamn. Fuck these two.

capitalist fatigue

2009-10-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a scary reading to pair with the capitalism week: after you finish telling them about horrible hours and working conditions in the last Gilded Age, you can give them this on the current one: Describes how pilots are falling asleep at the wheel, police and doctors and firemen and nurses are all working such long shifts that they are losing it. And people are dying. But that's the logic of capitalism, so too bad!!

You’d think that business might understand that overly tired employees are hurting their bottom line. But times are tough, jobs are scarce, and big business is not in the business of seeing human beings as anything more than interchangeable cogs in a machine to be used and discarded at will. Worker protections hard-won by unions – minimum wages, maximum hours, health and safety on the job – have been systematically dismantled, from Reagan breaking the spirit of air traffic controllers in the 1970s to WalMart breaking the backs of workers not allowed to unionize today. So while I have the greatest sympathy for the growing number of those with no jobs, it’s possibly more critical that we recognize there’s a lethal cancer invading the vast majority of those who do have jobs, as the top 1% of the Have Mores wring more and more blood out of those Americans who actually make things and make things work. And that’s not just making us tired.

It’s making us dead tired.

("Dead Tired," C&L)

origins of "the Villiage"

2009-10-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

Greg Sargent at PlumLine : traces the origins of "the Village" or "Villagers" as shorthand for inside-the-beltway media elites. Finds it in a 1998 article by Sally Quinn discussing Lewinsky... similar to Broder's "he trashed the place."

From this description of the Beltway the term “Village” was born. It is believed to have first been used in this fashion by Digby, though I have not yet confirmed this. It was popularized, and is still frequently used, by the blogger Duncan Black, a.k.a. Atrios, as well as other bloggers such as Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas, Glenn Greenwald, and many others.

To these bloggers, Quinn’s description of Washington as a “town” gripped with prudish outrage over the behavior of the rude and common impostor Bill Clinton seemed to capture a larger truth about the Beltway. Thus, to the bloggers, the term “Villagers” refers to the Beltway elite and the kind of small-town insularity, prudishness, clubbiness, status anxiety and addiction to catty gossip that D.C.’s elites are prone to on occasion.

And of course, it has political effects in cementing a center-right consensus.

Habitus? ;)

"A speech stuck on repeat"

2009-10-23T06:30:00.000-07:00

Dana Milbank comments in the Post on Mitch McConnell's epic run of anti-health care speeches:

These speeches, about 44,000 words in all, test the outer limits of human stamina. Ninety-four times he warned of the evils of a "government-run" system, according to a Washington Post analysis. Forty-seven times he warned of a "government takeover" of the same. Fourteen times he railed against the Democrats' nefarious "experiment." Thirty-seven times he spoke the phrases "higher taxes" or "raise taxes," and at least 19 times he used the words "slash Medicare" or "Medicare cuts."

Perhaps more accurate than saying that McConnell gave 50 health-care speeches would be saying that McConnell gave the same health-care speech 50 times, with minor changes. And this in itself is a major achievement: Only a disciplined and well-conditioned public orator could repeat himself so often without injury.

Of course, it's part of the longstanding GOPAC strategy of framing and message discipline. Includes the following tag cloud:

Good to assign for the framing week.

wiki DC

2009-10-23T06:24:00.000-07:00

Post article about the self-appointed guardian of DC's wikipedia page. Some 24 year old kid, who delivers some good comments on how the site allows distributed, collective discussion of historical methods.

Lewis has been on the other side of such criticism. Zachary Schrag, a George Mason University historian who studies the District, reviewed the page and found a blunder: the assertion that building heights in the city were limited to the height of the Capitol. Wrong, Schrag said. (The information was attributed to a Washington Post article. Oops.)

Lewis, alerted to the error, quickly made a fix. "That's the problem/success with Wikipedia," he said in an e-mail. "You may have a reliable source that's still wrong. It's hard to weed that stuff out until you have an expert (like Dr. Schrag) take a look at it. But, unfortunately, there are many like him who don't bother with Wikipedia."

Assign for a "use and abuse of history" unit.

german mythmaking

2009-10-21T09:19:00.001-07:00

From The National, "They Need A Hero":

For centuries Germans united around the tale of Hermann, a chieftain who rallied his fellow tribesmen to defeat the Roman army. But this founding national myth, cherished by Romantic poets and Nazi ideologues, was banished from memory in the postwar era. As Hermann-mania returns to a wary Germany 2000 years after his victory, Clay Risen considers the search for national identity in a post-national age.

VDS on 300

2009-10-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

Missed this review at the time, but it is pretty interesting in its defense of the film. ("Last Night at the 300" - at *shudder* National Review) Of course, he was involved in its making, but still he makes some good points about stylization. Matches my own sense that, despite the historical inaccuracies, it actually matches pretty well the mythic significance of the battle for Greek and later western culture. Of course, he has to take his shots at political rivals, and keep up his anti-gay biases. Also loved this part:

Oliver Stone's mega-production Alexander spent tens of millions in an effort to recapture the actual career of Alexander the Great, with top actors like Collin Farrel, Anthony Hopkins, and Angelina Joilie. But because this was a realist endeavor, we immediately were bothered by the Transylvanian accent of Olympias, Stone's predictable brushing aside of facts, along with the distortions, and the inordinate attention given to Alexander's supposed proclivities. But the "300" dispenses with realism at the very beginning, and thus shoulders no such burdens.

Thank you, George Sorel... myths don't have to be true so long as they are useful.

Waving the bloody shirt

2009-10-20T07:20:00.001-07:00

Fascists never change -- the Klan, the Nazis, Rush Limbaugh. Oops, did I say that?

The indispensable Dave provides a post called: Limbaugh, conservatives and the 'bloody shirt': The right has a long history of turning bullies into victims

Starts with discussion about Rush's failed NFL bid, proceeds to explain a few cases of conservatives turning their attacks into attacks on them:

To Bill O'Reilly and Juan Williams and the rest of the Fox crew, the outrage is never the atrocities they actually uttered, only the effrontery of having those atrocities held against them. They all want to make a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim. Their narrative is that the real story is not the atrocities that Rush Limbaugh utters but only the attempt by his political enemies to make political hay out of it.

Very good source cited: Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, (excerpted in the New York Times). Describes the origin of the phrase in the Reconstruction era -- and it turns out to be a myth!!!

financial cycles

2009-10-19T09:47:00.000-07:00

In The Atlantic, article "The Quiet Coup" does a good job contextualizing the US's current crisis as the same one the IMF has dealt with in many emerging economies over the past decades. Basically, oligarchs gamble during a boom, get bailed out by the government, and the costs are pushed onto the lower classes until the whole system breaks down. Once the government is willing to cut loose at least some of its oligarchs (it's a game of musical chairs, really), then the IMF steps in with loans.

Other aspects that are well explained:

the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

Plus, of course, the fact that everyone in charge of the Treasury is or was on the Goldman payroll.

digfighting and football

2009-10-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

Something to possibly link along with the Geertz cockfight: "Offensive Play. How different are dogfighting and football?" by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.

It references "a description of a dogfight given by the sociologists Rhonda Evans and Craig Forsyth in “The Social Milieu of Dogmen and Dogfights,” an article they published some years ago in the journal Deviant Behavior." Get that one too.

How to be a man!

2009-10-13T05:19:00.000-07:00

Salon provides news of a new DVD set, which collects educational films from the 40s-70s on how to Be a Man (and Woman).

As Skip Elsheimer, the man responsible for archiving these films (and whose online collection of vintage television commercials will make your day), explains in a couple of fascinating interviews on the discs, “[These films] seem conservative … but they’re talking about very forward-thinking things. They realized … the parents are not responsibly teaching the kids about these issues.”
Viewed this way, these educational shorts are more than a campy throwback to a time when sex ed videos featured silhouettes of women with bobs and men in fedoras. They are historical documents, insights into the fears and hopes of earlier generations. "Let’s Make a Sandwich" isn’t just a film about how to make an open-faced tuna melt; it's an illustration of the belief that a woman who couldn’t make a sandwich in 1950 would never find a husband. Now that’s educational.

Good use for courses.

two in one

2009-10-12T11:45:00.001-07:00

second one today - via TPM, RedState's chief moran sends out an ill-advised tweet. (God I hate even typing tweet...)

"Linda Douglass really is the Joseph Goebbels of the White House Health Care shop," Erickson tweeted this afternoon. He echoed the sentiment on RedState's homepage, wondering if Douglass "likes" being the Goebbels of the Health Reform Office.

fascism of the day

2009-10-12T06:57:00.001-07:00

Via ThinkProgress, some republican activist fucktard gives the latest inappropriate analogy:

Rather than cite any specific crime, Brown is demanding Obama’s removal for pursuing progressive agenda items like health and clean energy reform. His website blares: “Are you willing to let [Obama] construct a totalitarian regime… fascism, socialism, Obamaism… take your pick?”

Yes... "Take your pick." That's actually a pretty good expression of what's going on here. They want to just pick whichever criticizing term they feel like using at the time, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with anything.

because banning gays is preserving liberty...

2009-10-08T06:20:00.001-07:00

...and preventing Nazism. Because Nazis loved gays.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) goes on a bizzare stream of consciousness rant on the House floor. TPM links the video.

What's wrong with cultural studies?

2009-10-07T06:46:00.000-07:00

Also from CT, Michael Berube links his article in CHE, "What's the Matter with Cultural Studies?" His take: From the 50s through 70s, cultural studies in Britain produced useful analyses of the relationship between culture and politics, society and government. Think Birmingham school. But

Since its importation to the United States, however, cultural studies has basically turned into a branch of pop-culture criticism.

The big questions:

Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), the Birmingham collection that predicted the British Labour Party's epochal demise, is now more than 30 years old. In that time, has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn't had much of an impact at all.

True that. Need to think of ways to make CULP more rigorous and political, and less "let's look at this cultural object and politicize it." As Berube concludes:

But I still have hope that the history of cultural studies might matter to the university—and to the world beyond it. My hopes aren't quite as ambitious as they were 20 years ago. I no longer expect cultural studies to transform the disciplines. But I do think cultural studies can do a better job of complicating the political-economy model in media theory, a better job of complicating our accounts of neoliberalism, and a better job of convincing people inside and outside the university that cultural studies' understanding of hegemony is a form of understanding with great explanatory power—that is to say, a form of understanding that actually works.

PS: This article introduced me to the name Edward Sojas, whose updating of Lefebvre might prove useful to the book. His wiki page is as good a place as any to start.

academic sins

2009-10-07T06:41:00.001-07:00

From the Times Higher Education: Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy

Two points of interest:

1. possible use with a unit on habitus

2. one item on the list, lust, becomes a great controversy when the writer claims "The fault lies with the females." UH OH.... the folks at Crooked Timber respond here and here. Apparently the author is "a rightwing media don and author of pop ev psych books". Great.

Neiwert vs Goldberg continues

2009-10-07T06:10:00.000-07:00

The Doughy One tweets: "Dave Neiwert's a very sad case who thinks that repeating the same dumb argument makes it smarter." Good god, I can't think of a better case against Twitter than how perfect a medium it is for this fool.

Dave responds at C&L:

So this is how Goldberg responds to an actually serious critique.
Evidently, Goldberg thinks that ignoring a sound argument lets you declare victory over it.
Now, just to be clear: Goldberg has never responded to the core of my critique. He's tossed off side issues, but what I have said about Liberal Fascism from the get-go is that its central thesis -- that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left" -- simply does not have any grounding in, and is indeed refuted by, the actual historical facts about the "political space" which fascism historically occupied.

Really makes me sad...

sex and the dictionary

2009-10-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

How sexy words have a hard time getting in the dictionary (By Jesse Sheidlower, Slate.com)

female PUA

2009-10-06T06:27:00.000-07:00

Via Pandagon, Caitlin Macrae tries to turn the tables on pick up artists. Interesting results.

link dump

2009-10-06T06:15:00.000-07:00

"Micro-scripts" -- a few good ideas in the article but generally pretty superficial. ("Guess who's losing the great phrase face-off" in Boston.com, by Bill Schley. By an author of a new book by the same title.

Some good links from Dave Neiwert on how Liberal Fascism transmitted through the discourse. Sad sad sad. ("Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?")

Finally, an article in Columbia Journalism Review that contemplates why some protests get coverage and some don't. (Teabaggers, astroturfed town hall riots = yes. Protests at a health care CEO's house? No -- "too staged" according to the journalists.)

fascism fail

2009-05-13T05:10:00.000-07:00

ORLY tries his hand at Nazi analogies... FAIL. KO takes him down (via Kos). From the transcript:

BILL O’REILLY, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Churchill actually wanted to use poison gas on the Germans, in violation of the Geneva Convention, but was stopped by the British war cabinet. The Royal Air Force killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of civilians by targeting non-military sites. And the British operated a number of interrogation centers during and after World War II, including one called the London Cage, where German prisoners were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with death.
Another center was opened in Bad Nenndorf, on German soil, after Churchill left power. It was almost like a concentration camp.

President Obama’s British example was wrong.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Nope. Sorry. If that were a high school history paper, it would have earned its author a nice round F. It makes Michele Bachmann’s Hoot Smalley spooner-ism from last week look good.

Pretty good, possible use in class for the "how to analogize with history" unit.

(recent) history of american journalism

2009-05-08T06:26:00.000-07:00

Walter Pincus calls out colleagues/the industry on failures since Watergate. A good history.

"Newspaper Narcissism" in Columbia Journalism Review.

born to run

2009-04-21T06:43:00.000-07:00

Evolutionary bio and marathon running, at Seed magazine.

We know that roughly 2 million years ago, Australopithecus, with its tiny brain, hefty jaw and diet of rough, fibrous plants, evolved into Homo erectus, our slim, long-legged ancestor with a big brain and small teeth suited for tearing into animal and fruit flesh. Such a transformation almost certainly involved a reliable supply of calorie-laden meat, yet according to the fossil record, spear points have been in use for 200,000 years at most, and the bow and arrow for only 50,000 years, leaving an enormous stretch of time when early humans were consuming meat without the use of tools. Lieberman believes they ran their prey to death, often called “persistence hunting.”

Interesting and usable.

gay agenda

2009-01-25T14:58:00.000-08:00

Some recent stories on upcoming legislative issues:

Box Turtle Bulletin points to story in The Blade: Congress Ready to Move on Gay Rights Bills. (Hate crimes, ENDA, DADT)

speaking of falsified memoirs

2009-01-13T14:42:00.000-08:00

Sparky the Pengiun had one too.

not-so-hidden signals

2009-01-12T09:10:00.000-08:00

Post quoted in entirety from The Slog, since I don't have time right now to be fancy:

In this week's web-only Constant Reader, I join Barack Obama's book club and discover that there might be a secret message or two involved.

Since the election, every book that Obama has been photographed carrying has resulted in a sales boom for booksellers. The first book he was seen carrying after the election, Doris Kearns Goodwin's story of Abraham Lincoln's cabinet Team of Rivals, inspired much talk about his cabinet choices. When he was spotted with a copy of West Indies author Derek Walcott's marvelous, book-length poem Omeros, there was a (admittedly smaller) bump in the book's sales. Even people who don't generally pay much attention to the book world are scrutinizing those long-shot photographs of our president-elect disembarking from car to plane and back again, trying to read the title of whatever is tucked under his arm.

Provided that no president-elect ever has to carry his own shit around if he doesn't want to, it's enough to make one wonder whether Obama is sending codes—like those secret messages, solvable only by decoder ring that used to be included in serial movies for children. The message of Team of Rivals was pretty obvious: It was impossible to turn on a cable news network during the cabinet-selection process without hearing the title slip from one anchor or another's lips in reference to the fact that Obama wasn't going to have a cabinet of yes-men. But if this Secret Presidential Book Club theory is correct, what is Obama trying to tell us with The Defining Moment?

We learn a lot about FDR, including his weird feelings about the Irish and Catholics, too. I hope you'll give it a read.

Nice.

this is why you don't give cameras...

2009-01-12T06:40:00.001-08:00

...to 24-year old soldiers, or inbred royal twits. Prince Harry strikes again.

you don't have to put on the red light

2009-01-12T06:34:00.000-08:00

Tavis Smiley interviewing Frank Langella and Ron Howard on Frost/Nixon:

Langella: Well, I would think the thing I learned the most that I will now never, ever forget is that you see that little red light that's on me now? The minute it goes on, something in me changes. Some imperceptible thing in me changes, because I know I'm being recorded. I'm not exactly 100 percent myself. I am a personality, a character, a sense of self that I choose to put in front of a camera.

And what I learned on working on Nixon and watching him and slow-moing him for hours and hours and hours, is never to 100 percent totally believe the person the politician is when the red light goes on, because he wants to communicate something to us. He wants to communicate power or sensitivity or vulnerability or in Nixon's case, toughness.

Every single politician must stand in the dark a second before the light goes on, and something unconscious changes. So I've learned to watch like a hawk everybody - Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama, it doesn't matter - and all of us, too. We all know we do some things slightly different.

But when you are leading countries, when you are a politician and the red light goes on, you create a character. You have to. You couldn't possibly be yourself. And I think it's second nature. I don't think it's something - after a while, when a politician becomes skilled at it - President Kennedy knew he had charm, Nixon did whatever he thought would look strong, Lyndon Baines Johnson had a wonderful kind of shaggy Texas demeanor, Mr. McCain had a way of behaving.
That's the thing I took away from it the most, was that...

Interesting observations from someone who knows the camera and character. Audio and transcript available at Tavis Smiley's PBS site. (h/t Kos)

Burris exerts authorial agency

2009-01-10T12:22:00.000-08:00

Ezra Klein on Burris' tomb:

A Senate seat is a prize, no doubt, but it's rather less of one if you secured it by abetting a political criminal's desire to obscure his guilt by sparking a racial showdown. Burris, however, is taking the long view. The mausoleum view. Eventually, "United States Senator" will be etched beneath "Trail Blazer." And there will be no asterisk, no explanation of the conditions. Burris will see to that. He'll write it down himself.

Might make for interesting link for week on authorship and authority.

falsified Holocaust memoir slugfest

2009-01-09T07:52:00.000-08:00

HHN: Penguin cancels formerly-upcoming Holocaust memoir ("Angel at the Fence") that historians revealed to be false. As Ken Waltzer, director of Jewish Studies program at Mich State, writes:

This memoir was at the far end of implausibility, yet until yesterday, no one connected with packaging, promoting, and disseminating it asked questions about or investigated it. Some actively resisted such investigation and tried to shut mine down.

The story gets really interesting when you look into how the producers of a film version complained to Waltzer's dean and attacked Deborah Lipstadt for investigating the claims. (TNR stories here)

Lipstadt also adds some interesting thoughts on HBO's recent John Adams, in which they show Adams railing against Trumbull for painting the signing of the Declaration as a great assembly, which didn't happen. But the scene as shown in the miniseries is itself undocumented!

the pace of change

2008-11-26T16:32:00.000-08:00

language and the power to torture

2008-11-26T16:14:00.000-08:00

More on language and power, from Greenwald. On the heels of Brennan's withdrawing his name from consideration in an Obama administration, the traditional media is oh so sad that the DFHes got a scalp. He quotes a sinister NYT article that complains how the DFHes may make it "difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone . . . who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since 9/11." ANY?

Digby noted the same passage and made a similar point: that to object to someone like Brennan -- who advocated and defended the Bush administration's rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- is hardly the same as objecting to anyone who "played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda." And Andrew Sullivan made a related point about an AP article by Pamela Hess which contains this wretched sentence: "Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over Web logs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, which critics call torture." As Sullivan notes: "no sane person with any knowledge of the subject disputes the fact that waterboarding is and always has been torture. So why cannot the AP tell the truth?"
All of this underscores a crucial fact: a major reason why the Bush administration was able to break numerous laws in general, and subject detainees to illegal torture specifically, is because the media immediately mimicked the Orwellian methods adopted by the administration to speak about and obfuscate these matters. Objective propositions that were never in dispute and cannot be reasonably disputed were denied by the Bush administration, and -- for that reason alone (one side says it's true) -- the media immediately depicted these objective facts as subject to reasonable dispute.
Hence: "war crimes" were transformed into "policy disputes" between hawkish defenders of the country and shrill, soft-on-terror liberals. "Torture" became "enhanced interrogation techniques which critics call torture." And, most of all, flagrant lawbreaking -- doing X when the law says: "X is a felony" -- became acting "pursuant to robust theories of executive power" or "expansive interpretations of statutes and treaties" or, at worst, "in circumvention of legal frameworks."

But of course, don't hold breath waiting for them to examine their use of language.

words have power

2008-11-26T16:09:00.000-08:00

Tom Ackerman presents, "A Marriage Manifesto... of Sorts"

I no longer recognize marriage. It’s a new thing I’m trying.
Turns out it’s fun.
Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend.
She says, correcting me, “He’s my husband,”
“Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.”

The impact is obvious. I tried it on a man who has been in a relationship for years,
“How’s your longtime companion, Jill?”
“She’s my wife!”
“Yeah, well, my beliefs don’t recognize marriage.”
Fun. And instant, eyebrow-raising recognition. Suddenly the majority gets to feel what the minority feels. In a moment they feel what it’s like to have their relationship downgraded, and to have a much taken-for-granted right called into question because of another’s beliefs.
Just replace the words husband, wife, spouse, or fiancé with boyfriend, girlfriend, special friend, or longtime companion. There is a reason we needed stronger words for more serious relationships. We know it; now they can see it.

Take that, straight people!!

24 torture

2008-11-26T08:47:00.000-08:00

From the Guardian ("Torture is illegal - and it never works"). Much of the article describes his correspondance with an actor who was offered a part, turned it down, and wrote to the Fox exec in charge.

Gordon also told the actor about his belief that it was "essentially true that ... 24 posits that torture is a necessary evil that works and is therefore acceptable". There was also an indication of concern. "I would hate to think," wrote Gordon, "that I've somehow been the midwife to some public acceptance of torture."
Well, the reality for Gordon, on the account given to me by Diane Beaver as well as others, is that he seems to have become the very midwife he feared. And not just to the public acceptance of torture, but to its actual use on real, living human beings.

He hopes that it "will encourage" a re-thinking of the show's position. Fat chance. (Though my students told me yesterday that the most recent plot involves him being dragged back to Washington to face indictment.)

cost of the bailout

2008-11-26T08:44:00.000-08:00

From the author of the upcoming book Bailout Nation. The bailout -- so far -- costs more than:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

COMBINED.

innocent bystanders

2008-11-20T20:41:00.001-08:00

Because we couldn't possibly have had a role in the problem we're criticizing!!

David Sirota complains about the media:

[T]he Newsweek reporting team is constantly referring to "reporters" and "the press" and "the media" - as if Newsweek reporters aren't a part (and a leading part) of those things - as if they are innocent bystanders. More broadly, the way they portray it, candidates and political operatives are larger than life heroes or villains who make Big Decisions and Face Consequences, while the media is a herd of lobotomized automatons that are so mindless and innocent and pure, that they cannot be held culpable for anything at all. Indeed, according to Newsweek, the entire political media is an innocent bystander to politics. And Newsweek creates this portrayal as if somehow the reporters writing their story have nothing to do with "the press" they are writing about.

They've been doing this forever, with the Clintons as the prime example. Digby notes that they're set to do so all over again:

The press is beside itself concern trolling the Obama administration about how the "Clinton Circus" will ruin him, replete with hand wringing and despair about how unfair it all is. But if it is a circus, it's because the media make it one.

These posts could be useful reading to encourage students to criticize passive voice, assigning agency, and deconstruction.

down the memory hole

2008-11-20T18:32:00.000-08:00

Shred, shred, shred.

Last month, Salon published a story reporting that U.S. Army Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez were killed by U.S. tank fire in Ramadi, Iraq, in late 2006, in an incident partially captured on video, but that an Army investigation instead blamed their deaths on enemy action. Now Salon has learned that documents relating to the two men were shredded hours after the story was published. Three soldiers at Fort Carson, Colo. — including two who were present in Ramadi during the friendly fire incident, one of them just feet from where Nelson and Suarez died — were ordered to shred two boxes full of documents about Nelson and Suarez. One of the soldiers preserved some of the documents as proof that the shredding occurred and provided them to Salon. All three soldiers, with the assistance of a U.S. senator's office, have since been relocated for their safety.

It's sure going to be hard to write the history of this regime. Which is exactly what they want.

BNP bust

2008-11-19T14:08:00.000-08:00

Oops! The British National Party's member list gets leaked to the general public. As in, a list of every member of the party. Evidently it's even being BitTorrent'ed. Needless to say, this is a bit of a problem for them:

[M]ost embarrassingly of all, an assortment of file notes providing information on their members’ employment, hobbies and interests. The former could prove particular problematic for those members of the armed forces and police for whom the BNP is a proscribed organisation. That said, the list apparently also includes construction managers, receptionists, district nurses, lay preachers, company directors and teachers, some of whom could find themselves with much explaining to do if the list remains in the wild and starts to be widely circulated.

Couldn't happen to a meaner group of people. Liberal Conspiracy has some fun with it:

There are some map links too -- a "heat map" too. A whole site full of lolcats.
Funny.

On the other hand, it appears that many on the list are not even in the Party (well, not any more). So they've been inflating their membership stats -- naughty, naughty.

Updates from Lancaster Unity -- which turns out to be the go-to site for all things BNP.

"gay nazis" in action

2008-11-17T20:01:00.000-08:00

Well, queue the outrage from Christianists. Box Turtle Bulletin reports:

San Francisco police had to escort a group of preachers out of the Castro. Those so-called “Christians” are now using this as an excuse to post the most extraordinary claims and garnering vast amounts of publicity and sympathy for themselves on right-wing blogs.

Links to KTVU report on the story here, and also to the raw footage (5 min) that made up the report.

Here's a report from one of the prayer people, provided in the YouTube description:

Since it was a long night, I can't even begin to remember all of the things that were shouted and/or chanted at us. Then, they started throwing hot coffee, soda and alcohol on us and spitting (and maybe even peeing) on us. Then, a group of guys surrounded us with whistles, and blasted them inches away from our ears continually. Then, they started getting violent and started shoving us. At one point a man tried to steal one of our Bibles. Chrisdene noticed, so she walked up to him and said "Hey, that's not yours, can you please give it back?". He responded by hitting her on the head with the Bible, shoving her to the ground, and kicking her. I called the cops, and when they got there, they pulled her out of the circle and asked her if she wanted to press charges. She said "No, tell him I forgive him." Afterwards, she didn't rejoin us in the circle, but she made friends with one of the people in the crowd, and really connected heart to heart. Roger got death threats. As the leader of our group, people looked him in the eyes and said "I am going to kill you.", and they were serious. A cop heard one of them, and confronted him. (This part is kinda graphic, so you should skip the paragraph if you don't want to be offended.) It wasn't long before the violence turned to perversion. They were touching and grabbing me, and trying to shove things in my butt, and even trying to take off my pants - basically trying to molest me. I used one hand to hold my pants up, while I used the other arm to hold one of the girls. The guys huddled around all the girls, and protected them. Soon after, the cops came and stood between us and the mob. When it was getting more heated, the cops were like "You guys should leave." and Roger said "We want to stay." Someone tried to steal my backpack, but I tapped a cop on the shoulder, and said "Hey, that's my bag." and he got it from him and gave it to me. Others weren't so lucky. Probably half our team got their jackets stolen. Eventually, as the crowd was getting more and more uncontrollable, the cops were afraid for our lives, so they escorted us to our van. (The cops were very nice to us from start to finish.)

Story is a bit implausible to me... Okay, mean chants and whistles, sure. But notice how the account quickly descends into stereotypes: The gays are peeing on them somehow. They try to molest the narrator. They're afraid for their lives, but somehow one of them is able to brave the mob and "connect heart to heart" with one of the fallen, without being molested or killed of course. All in all, a great opportunity for the Christians to display how much they love these fags and just want to help them, but they are so depraved that they resist it:

We can't hate the people because they are just broken and blinded by the spirit of this age. Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against Principalities and Powers. It's not a political thing, we just love the people.

Comments on that story are fuckin scary. ("God will judge that city soon!" "Fucking faggots. I hope for a backlash so severe no fag would dare come out of the closet. Chase the sick liberal faggots to the shores. Icky pervert deviants. Kill them all. ")

Classic Nazi tactics: invade the enemy's neighborhood and insult them, provoking a reaction that can then be propagandized to show how "hateful" they are.

daily Godwin

2008-11-17T19:52:00.000-08:00

Gay Nazis! But not the kind you think. Take it away Newt Gingrich:

"I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion."

Teh Gheys are coming! Watch out! If you take away their rights they will speak out against you -- just like Hitler!

In other right-wing Godwin goodness, Michael "Savage" Weiner turns over a rock to find Hilmar von Campe. He's an old aristocratic HJ basterrd whose thing appears to be writing the same book over and over again -- "I was a Hitler Youth and so I know firsthand that [the Soviet Union/globalization/Muslims/Obama] are about to take over America JUST LIKE HITLER DID!!" O NOES!!

anthropic multiverses

2008-11-17T11:30:00.000-08:00

Some recent articles on the possibility of a multiverse.

Jason Rosenhouse wonders, "Is the Multiverse Real?" and conveys the speculation of theoretical physicists on that point.

Gets interesting when the original source, Discover magazine's "Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: The Multiverse," muses on the history of the so-called "anthropic theory" of the universe and its creation:

The idea that the universe was made just for us—known as the anthropic principle—debuted in 1973 when Brandon Carter, then a physicist at Cambridge University, spoke at a conference in Poland honoring Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer who said that the sun, not Earth, was the hub of the universe. Carter proposed that a purely random assortment of laws would have left the universe dead and dark, and that life limits the values that physical constants can have. By placing life in the cosmic spotlight—at a meeting dedicated to Copernicus, no less—Carter was flying in the face of a scientific worldview that began nearly 500 years ago when the Polish astronomer dislodged Earth and humanity from center stage in the grand scheme of things.

So it's a chapter in a much larger story. Could be interesting early reading.

in the sausage factory

2008-11-16T10:37:00.000-08:00

You don't want to know how right-wing radio works. Well, sure you do. You just don't want to consume it. Milwaukee Magazine provides "Secrets of Talk Radio", and it's a sad story whose sad result have been plaguing us since 1994 at least.

lost photos from a lost city

2008-11-16T10:25:00.000-08:00

Design Observer (online magazine?) reports on an exciting discovery - lost photos from Hiroshima. There were previously very few due to the clampdown on photography and any reports on the bombings.

But the War Department created a Physical Damage Division to go over and record the details for official purposes. They did, but even their evidence has been largely unknown for decades... until somebody found a huge stockpile of them in a surburban garbage bin. The story of their recovery is interesting enough in itself, and can be found here. The photos themselves, of course, are awe-inspiring.

decline of conservative intellectualism

2008-11-08T14:27:00.000-08:00

WSJ has an article about how Palin represents the Republicans' 20 (40?) -year slide into anti-intellectual populism. What once was a movement of ideas and exchange has (long) become about denigrating knowledge, the people who have it, and the institutions that produce it:

For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. In 1955 sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on "The New American Right" that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force, a view echoed a few years later in Richard Hofstadter's influential "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (1963). But over the next decade and a half all that changed.

He chronicles the rise of conservative intelligentsia, and describes it as a refreshing alternative to then-ascendent liberalism and the post-60s craziness of leftist politics. But then, in the 80s, "leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an 'adversary culture of intellectuals.'"

Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

And with Palin they reached their apotheosis. The question is where it goes from here.

past promise and future hope

2008-11-08T08:52:00.000-08:00

Trying to just bask in happiness and enjoy a newfound freedom from political blogs. But of course there's commentary out there to be read!

CT is an interesting place for reflection, given its Canadian base. Kieran relays an article by a Canadian historian Rob MacDougall, who might just be on to something about America:

“We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” said Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. … King went on: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note … a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

And here Sancho [Panza] or Sacvan [Bercovitch] whispers to the guy standing next to him, “Were they? Really? If we went back in time and asked the architects of the republic–Jefferson and Madison and Washington and the rest–did you mean for this to apply to your slaves too, would they agree? … Because it would have saved a lot of trouble if they’d spelled all this out in 1789.”

The black belt rhetorical jiu jitsu of the “I Have A Dream” speech is that King pulls it off. He convinced the better part of a nation that dismantling segregation was not so scary, not so radical, but really what they’d all meant to do all along. They just hadn’t gotten around to it, like the laundry I need to sort, or those slaves Jefferson never quite got to freeing. … And this is an old and hallowed American trick. On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass blistered the ears of his white audience with prophesy … Douglass reveals that, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” the Constitution is in fact “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” He embraces and celebrates the Constitution as a bulwark against slavery. …

At Seneca Falls in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton cribbed Jefferson’s words for her Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, the intimation being that “of course” the patriarchs of 1776 must have intended equal rights for women. … And so on and so on down through history, with every kind of American reformer looking backward to move forward, couching their goals as nothing more radical than America’s alleged founding ideals.

Maybe this is why we're not the center-right country that the conservatives and media claim we are after each election. The US Constitution, Declaration, and other founding documents provided an aspirational model of progress, which allows change to take place as the fulfillment, not the negation, of the nation's founding promise.

It almost doesn’t matter what Jefferson “really meant” by “all men.” No, that’s not it. It matters. It matters each and every time great and noble promises are broken. But here’s an idea Greil Marcus put in my head: the promises made in the Declaration and the Constitution are so great that their betrayal is an inevitable part of the promise. And that’s what makes them work. Marcus … calls that betrayal “the engine of American history.” The “more perfect union” is a limit approaching infinity. As each generation discovers–inevitably!–that the promises made to them were false, they battle to make them a little more true.

USA! USA!

unacceptable!

2008-11-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

Via a Detroit Fox station... Grosse Point woman "accused of denying children candy" if they or their parents support Obama. And that is just too much! LOL. Love that phrasing there -- "denying children candy" -- what a villain!!

and another one gone, another one gone....

2008-11-03T07:26:00.000-08:00

Another one bites the dust. Well, dust not bitten yet. But this last-minute homophobia might finish of Mitch McConnell in KY. As always, I'm torn about the situation. No pity for Mitch himself, who whether gay or not sold his soul to the Republican right a long time ago. (And geez, is his record poor across the board!) But it's another chapter in the exploitation of homophobia by traditional labor faction of the left (who it appears is responsible for this).

Biblical literalists

2008-10-30T07:32:00.001-07:00

EPIC FAIL.

girls!

2008-10-30T07:30:00.000-07:00

Many Sarah Palins at this week's high heel race.

voter suppression guide

2008-10-30T07:29:00.001-07:00

TPM roundup of current status, state-by-state.

More American terrorists

2008-10-27T15:54:00.000-07:00

Missed this originally from Neiwert.

Memo to Palin: Here are some other domestic terrorists.

Oy.

2008-10-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

Skinheads arrested in murder spree plot. AP:

The ATF says it has broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a Tennessee murder spree. In court records unsealed Monday, agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target an unnamed but predominantly African-American high school by two neo-Nazi skinheads.

That's all they have, but look for more developments over the next few days. Further reports relayed by TPM say that the 102 number comes from 88 + 14. They were going to shoot 88 blacks and decapitate 14. Christ.

So, as we asked last time skinheads on meth were arrested with an anti-Obama plot: Were they just hopped up on drug-inflated plans, or actually serious? Well, so far it seems like they seriously planned to kill 100 people; they didn't think they could get Obama but planned to die trying.

And of course nobody could have anticipated that the Republicans' rhetoric of anti-americanism and racial agitation would have potential violent consequences.

UPDATE: More details from AP. ("Feds disrupt alleged skinhead plot to kill Obama")

eager to incite

2008-10-26T08:43:00.000-07:00

TPM has been all over the Todd hoax and the McCain campaign's role in spreading it (which they of course deny, lying about this as they have everything else in this cycle). Oh, and Todd herself is upset with the media for "blowing it out of proportion." Wow.

Now some may to treat this as No Big Deal: Unbalanced girl gins up hoax on her own, without the campaign directing it. But the point of radical right politics is and always has been to set the tone and let the most extreme supporters draw their own conclusions. They then act to make real what the propaganda has told them already is real, but is not being paid attention to because of the biased media.

And as Eugene Robinson said on the Countdown coverage (paraphrase of around 3:40 in):

If the McCain communications director got out ahead of the police in spreading this story to the press, as it appears he did, it indicates not only a willingness to believe it, but an eagerness to incite racial backlash against the Obama campaign in a part of PA where race can be a very raw and divisive issue to this day.

He properly contextualizes it as the age-old "blood libel" of black predators against "the flower of white womanhood." It's sick, as is the camp's eagerness to spread the hoax.

Update: Perp walk!

Update 2: Youtube guy - "What Ashley Todd did wrong". Funny and understated ;)

McCain, Pinochet, and torture

2008-10-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

Digby relays complaints by anti-torture blog After Downing Street, that the liberal blogosphere is giving McCain a pass on torture. (As Digby points out, its more properly the traditional media that has given the pass. The bloggers have been all over it.)

HoffPost has discovered that McCain met with Pinochet. PINOCHET.

recanted

2008-10-25T08:27:00.000-07:00

Ashley Todd recants. Blames media. CBS:

Ashley Todd, 20-year-old college student from College Station, Texas, admitted Friday that the story was false, police said.

Maurita Bryant, the assistant chief of the police department's investigations division, said Todd is being charged with making a false police report.

Police doubted her story from the start, Bryant said.

"She just opened up and said she wanted to tell the truth," Bryant said, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "She was upset with the media for blowing this into a political firestorm."

Waah waah. Seems like she might have some mental issues though. Hope she gets help.

As the police say, this wasted a lot of time on their real cases, but it's good that they got to the bottom of it before it turned into a national incident. Meanwhile, the campaign can continue. Too bad the McCain campaign and Palin herself jumped on this one. Nothing like overreacting to poorly sourced intelligence about a pseudo-threat. Pittsburgh will greet us as liberators!!

poor persecuted conservatives

2008-10-23T16:59:00.000-07:00

This story looks fishy. Even Malkin is calling bullshit.

Take a look at the B supposedly cut - with a knife! - into her cheek. That's no knife wound. That's a fingernail scratch. And it's backwards.... like somebody did it in a mirror! LOLZ.

Now, of course somebody did give her that shiner, so that's worth sympathy. But there's no reason to falsely politicize the way she seems to. After all, it's not like young republicans haven't tried this before.

McCain's many narratives

2008-10-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

NYT reports on the McCain camp's inability to come up with a sustained narrative for their candidate. ("The Making (And Remaking) of McCain" by Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain.)

I'm kind of pissed that 'narrative' has become the buzzword this campaign, yet nobody ever talks with historians. Waah. Let's have some Hayden White!!

torture comes home

2008-10-23T16:10:00.000-07:00

Pat Fitzgerald continues his reign of righteousness, this time taking down a cop who'd gone on a 20+ year torture tour through the CPD. FDL:

That's right, you read it correctly, torturing suspects while they were in custody. Twenty years of torturing suspects. The statute of limitations had run out on the physical assaults on the victims and the city of Chicago had not tried to rescind his pension. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald had retired Chicago police commander Jon Burge arrested this Tuesday morning.

TAPPED notes that he got these ideas from his military career:

Wilson said Burge wired him up to a black box and turned a crank that generated an electric shock. This technique bore a striking resemblance to what American troops in Vietnam called "the Bell telephone hour"--shocking prisoners by means of a hand-cranked army field phone. In defending himself against Wilson's suit he said he'd never seen a black box, and though he'd served as a military policeman in the Mekong delta in 1968 and '69 had never heard of field phone interrogations. He bristled at the suggestion that Americans in Vietnam had conducted them.

Burge's peers from the Ninth Military Police Company, however, remember such torture in considerable detail.

See The Chicago Reader's story "Torture Tools" for the full deal.

And see also this interview with Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy.

We're gonna have some big problem in the future, Freikorps-style.

another one bites the dust...

2008-10-23T16:04:00.000-07:00

Jorg Haider. GAY. Turns out that the drunk part of his drunk-driving crash was acquired at a gay bar. And that the young hottie he turned the party over to was his lover. According to The Guardian ("Leader says Haider was his lover"):

The successor to the Austrian rightwing populist Jörg Haider, Stefan Petzner, has shocked the staunchly conservative country by revealing in a tearful interview that they shared a "special relationship".
Petzner, 27, who was confirmed yesterday as the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO) after Haider's death in a car crash two weeks ago, made the admission on Austrian radio, effectively confirming long-standing rumours that he and Haider were lovers.
Attempts by the party to stop repeats of the broadcast failed after the state broadcaster ORF insisted it would not be gagged.

See the Guardian for more details on their relationship. Why do the closet cases always act out so hatefully? It's sad.

generations

2008-10-21T13:33:00.000-07:00

Yglesias is trying to form a "Generation Oregon Trail," which is a good idea but makes the crucial Gen-Y error of thinking they are the first to discover something. (Comment 81: "Maybe we could call Gen Y the hey-check-out-this-cool-thing-I-just-discovered-that-nobody-else-has ever-seen-it’s-called-Star-Wars Generation.")

Other links he serves up:

Boston.com - Brainiac's Guide to generations. His system is idiosyncratic and arrogant (see comment on this post for the latter). Here's his replacement for X.

tires slashed at Obama rally

2008-10-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

It's hard to make too much of single incidents, but they do bear recording to see if there is really a change in political extremism this cycle. According to the Fayetteville Observer:

Someone slashed the tires of at least 30 vehicles parked outside the Crown Coliseum on Sunday during a rally for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, authorities said.
Sheriff’s deputies are investigating.

Hope so.

image and reality

2008-10-20T09:58:00.000-07:00

More on the Atlantic cover controversy, plus Newsweek's horrible evil non-retouching of Sarah Palin on their cover. "Politics of the Retouched Headshot" in The Atlantic.

Consider a recent political controversy involuntarily involving this magazine. After taking a series of shots for a conventional cover portrait of John McCain, Jill Greenberg tricked the candidate into having a picture taken in which she lit him from below, a classic technique to make the subject look evil. Neither the candidate nor his staff noticed that the photographer had literally cast McCain in a bad light. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she told the online magazine PDN, boasting further that she hadn’t retouched the neutral shot she sold The Atlantic. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she said.

As this story illustrates, having a portrait taken for publication demands a great deal of trust in the competence and good will of the photographer and photo editor. Greenberg deceived not only McCain but The Atlantic, which objected strenuously to the abuse of trust. But suppose the magazine had been in on the ruse. Does a portrait subject have a reasonable expectation of normal lighting?

Maybe. What's funny is when Fox starts to whine about things NOT being retouched. So honesty is now dishonesty - the epitome of Bush-Rove!! Woo!

Proconsul Petraeus

2008-10-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

We might want to re-think our org chart here... looks like Petraeus is our chief diplomat too now. (WaPo: Petraeus Mounts Strategy Review)

hey, go smack around a reporter

2008-10-17T09:14:00.000-07:00

Report from a recent Palin rally. Get those reporters!!

There are certain things that get me really concerned when I hear them from someone I'm working with. Joe Killian (who blogs for the paper here and on his own time here) added a new one to my list:

Joe was working with me on a package for tomorrow's newspaper covering Gov. Sarah Palin's visit to Elon and Greensboro.

"Dude," he says when I called to check on him. "Some guy just kicked me in the back of the leg."

And it goes downhill from there. Sieg Heil!!

Whose empire?

2008-10-13T17:26:00.000-07:00

Mark Mazower's book Hitler's Empire gets reviewed in the Washington Post. ("Axis of Incompetence") Sounds like a good book, but the review itself is noteworthy because of how popularity-seeking it is. Mazower gives it a snappy title, the Post puts a snappy headline, and the body reads like the Nazis wore blue suits and red ties.

The reason: Nazi articles of faith amounted to grotesque fantasies about how the New Order would function, and they couldn't possibly survive prolonged, or even relatively short, clashes with reality.

An interesting fixation on photography and humiliation, meant to evoke Abu Ghraib.

In the midst of a widening conflict, German officials methodically photographed and examined Polish families, discriminating in favor of those who appeared to have "the soundest German blood." All of which was guaranteed to stir resentment. Even Colonel-General Johannes von Blaskowitz, one of the German commanders in Poland, noted: "The idea that one can intimidate the Polish population by terrorism and rub their noses in the dirt will certainly prove false."

Will have to check out the incidents that the review describes. Have never really encountered foced pseudo-medical photography before (but of course it makes total sense if they did).

Possible assignment in combination with book-review paper, or for own paper about historicity.

Millenial YouTube

2008-10-09T18:21:00.000-07:00

"Citizen's Cry" - An Internet Video Produced to Inspire the Youth of Today to Vote.

Image of an old woman sitting in a crappy shack, who turns out to be a Millenial regretting her generation's failure to prevent America's decline - because they didn't vote! O NOES!

realignment myth?

2008-10-08T07:15:00.000-07:00

Another from Yglesias, who relays:

Via Henry Farrell, a provocative argument from Larry Bartels that the FDR realignment was basically just a coincidence.

From the original article:

The 1936 election has become the most celebrated textbook case of ideological realignment of the American electorate. However, a careful look at state-by-state voting patterns suggests that this resounding ratification of Roosevelt’s policies was strongly concentrated in the states that happened to enjoy robust income growth in the months leading up to the vote. (As usual, voters seem to have been quite myopic—huge variations in income growth in 1934 and 1935 had no discernible effect on 1936 voting patterns.) Indeed, the apparent impact of short-term economic conditions was so powerful that, if the recession of 1938 had occurred in 1936, Roosevelt would probably have been a one-term president.

Basically every party in power when the Depression lifted then dominated for a decade, and it was just luck, and any patterns are our human need for pattern recognition acting up. So goes the theory.

culture (war) and economics

2008-10-08T07:06:00.001-07:00

From Yglesias, a George Packer story in the New Yorker on the disaffected Ohio working class ("The Hardest Vote"). Short story, they're pissed because they can't afford to get married and raise a traditional family.

The American Prospect ("Remapping the Culture Debate") describes how this anxiety does not lead voters to Democratic economic policies, which they see as alien to their concerns, but rather to cultural issues as markers for who cares more about their problems and thus, presumably, will solve them:

When it came to defining themselves in the nation's ongoing cultural battles -- such as the battle over “family values” -- Democrats had virtually ceded the field to Republicans, presenting an uncertain face to the public. Voters, the research showed, were looking to cultural and lifestyle markers to determine whether or not a candidate was, in fact, going to do right by the economy, the Democrats' one persistently strong area. The Democracy Corps pollsters concluded that voters saw traditional Democratic economic concerns as having little to do with them, being mainly “manifested in costly government social programs or political alliances with labor unions and minorities.” The party's inattentiveness to cultural matters had, paradoxically, left these voters with “absolutely no sense that Democrats have a viable alternative vision that would truly promote broad economic growth or increased prosperity for working Americans.”

But it looks like that may be turning around... now that things are going in the shitter. Prospect:

The new Puritanism and cultural conservatism Frank described can also been seen as symptoms of how, in today’s society, traditional values have become aspirational. Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle class people they want to be like. It should come as no surprise that the politics of reaction is strongest where there is most to react to.

Sound like any dissertations you've read recently? Heee...

political violence 2008

2008-10-07T10:01:00.000-07:00

Welcome to 1932 -- oh wait, 2008. The GOP returns to its "ugly roots" (Salon: Gary Kamia) in racist paranoia and violence against elites and urban faggotry.

Palin supporter yells out "KILL HIM!!" at rally. Others racially taunt a media sound man.

McCain supporter responds to his question "Who is Barack Obama?" with answer, "A terrorist!"

Looks like it's spreading to Canada too: Cars in front of houses with liberal yard signs have their brakes cut in St Paul. (Digby)

Meanwhile, a porn producer is sentenced to 4 YEARS PRISON for filming consensual activities... while the Abu Ghraib perpetrators in the White House walk free.

Make-believe Maverick

2008-10-07T07:19:00.000-07:00

From Rolling Stone, a fairly complete and thoroughly devastating history of John McCain:

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.
In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

All in all, "a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty."

talk radio 2005

2008-09-15T06:30:00.001-07:00

David Foster Wallace just killed himself. Ezra Klein links a piece he did for the Atlantic on talk radio circa 2005. Good details on a scary subculture.

consolidating frame

2008-09-13T20:51:00.000-07:00

Some recent DailyKos posts to add to AS and others - we may be at a moment where a new liar frame is emerging about McCain. Not because the bloggers are calling out lies like they've been doing, but that the traditional media is shifting (finally) to ignoring the superficial content and going for the real pattern - the consistent lies on all subjects. And if you believe that elections are decided on things like framing, then this is devastating.

What is surprising this election season is that a piece of the megamedia actually seems to be starting to call out campaign lies, as Chris Carlson points out. Some of the traditional media - the old and established media so calcified and concentrated and craven that it failed to examine the lies of the men and women of an administration whose policies McCain and Palin would like to continue for another four years - actually are saying, "wait a minute, that’s frakkin’ bullshit."

Well, they've not gone quite that far.

Also, the loss of intellectual authority then gives other figures cover to oppose you on principle, like Alan Greenspan has just done. (AP: "Greenspan: Country Can't Afford McCain's Tax Cuts")

Cool chart of the tax plans btw. Send to friends!

Les Misbarack

2008-09-13T20:44:00.000-07:00

check out Palin as the Thernadiers ;)

Youtube

quoted in entirety

2008-09-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan brings it:

If McCain were a blogger, he would have had to retract by now. But he's running for president of the United States, so he can say anything, lie about anything and not have to answer for it. Yesterday, John McCain lied on national television about something that no one disputes in the public record. He was challenged by the only serious journalists on television right now - the hosts of "The View" - about the large number of pork barrel earmarks Sarah Palin sought and secured as governor of Alaska, including the "Bridge To Nowhere" that Palin and McCain lied about and are still lying about in public. Here was his clear and irrefutable statement:

Palin's comments came after McCain sat for a feisty grilling on ABC's "The View," where he claimed erroneously that his running mate hadn't sought money for such pet projects. "Not as governor she didn't," McCain said, ignoring the record.
It has now been a day since McCain lied this explicitly in public. And he hasn't yet retracted his lie. This AP piece is dated as of this afternoon. Why not?

Because if he has to retract this lie, he will have to retract his multiple other lies? While the media demands that Obama respond to things he never said and never meant, McCain is not even asked to retract a bald-faced, massive, obvious, refutable lie.

In the last month, McCain has become the biggest liar in the modern history of presidential politics. He makes Bill Clinton look like George Washington.

Word.

creeping falangism

2008-09-13T18:03:00.001-07:00

Ha. Nice title for this story from TPM. McCain campaign caught making up crowd size numbers.

Also from TPM, a reader's comment on the consequences of politics based on lies. Possible end stage campaign theme seems to be shaping up. Josh: "This campaign has shown that while we know McCain has physical courage, he has bad moral character"