University Fences In a Berkeley Protest, and a New One Arises - New York Times
In Berkeley, Calif., a protest in the trees outside Memorial Stadium at the University of California has been business, and Berkeley, as usual.
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
UPDATE: An excellent tear-down in Slate: Rigging a study to make conservatives look stupid.. This is why I don’t blog much… because to say anything I can stick to takes more attention and mental energy than I have to spare for a blog. Sometimes that censor takes a break though.
Human Nature is a great column in Slate Magazine. The following is from the most recent: (see the original for better formating)
A study says liberal brains “are more responsive to informational complexity.” Test: You sit in front of a computer screen and wait for a letter to appear on it. You’re supposed to tap your keyboard if it’s an M, but not if it’s a W. The experimenters mix it up but give you more M’s than W’s to see whether you get lulled into tapping when you shouldn’t. Results: 1) On M’s, liberals and conservatives responded equally well. 2) On W’s, liberals were twice as likely to be among the more accurate responders. 3) On electrical measurements of the brain area that monitors conflict “between a habitual tendency … and a more appropriate response,” liberals were five times more likely to show brain activity. Unofficial scientist/media spin: Liberals are smarter. Official scientist/media spin: Liberals are smarter, except when circumstances call for a knee-jerk ideologue. Knee-jerk liberal spin: We’re smarter because we have more agile brains. Thoughtful liberal spin: Then again, maybe we have more agile brains because we’re smarter. (Human Nature’s view: Liberals are smart, except when their knees jerk.) To tap a reply on your own keyboard, enter the Fray.
I cringe to think how this is going to play out on talk radio. I hope Liberals don’t reinforce their stereotype as supercilious and arrogant by touting this and denigrating Conservatives. It should be dealt with soberly and not as a partisan matter. (Like so many things that aren’t.)
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Our strategy works. When we all work together and channel the power of the progressive grassroots - we win! But we aren’t done yet. We have more work ahead to remove all Republican corruption from Washington.
Leaving the Democratic corruption behind?
It’s kind of annoying how these blatantly partisan PACs take on names like Democracy for America. Can they at least pretend to be bipartisan? Or, heavens, non-partisan?
City Pages - Savage Love
With nothing but time on my hands this week, I slipped out of the office and went to the movies. Have you seen 300 yet? It’s about a handful of lightly armed ancient Greeks—the Spartans—who take on the mighty and massive Persian army. Some feel the film is homophobic; some feel it’s a conservative, pro-war piece of agitprop.
Homophobic? It’s Ann Coulter on a meth binge.
The Persian army is an armed gay-pride parade, a threat to all things decent and, er, Greek. The king of the Spartans—among the most notorious boy-fuckers in all of ancient history—dismisses Athenian Greeks as weak-willed “philosophers and boy lovers.” The Persian emperor? An eight-foot-tall black drag queen—mascara, painted-on eyebrows, pink lip gloss. Emperor RuPaul is positively obsessed with men kneeling in front of him. Why gay up the Persians? So that straight boys in the theater can identify with the Spartan king and his 300 soldiers—all of whom appear to have been recruited from and outfitted by the International Male catalog.
What isn’t up for debate is the film’s politics. The only times the Persian army doesn’t look like a gay-pride parade in hell, it looks like a crowd of madly chanting Islamic militants. And if the Spartan king has to break the Spartan law to defend Spartan freedoms? Well, sometimes a king’s gotta do what a king’s gotta do. Because, as the queen of Sparta points out, freedom isn’t free. And, yes, she uses exactly those words. George Bush is going to blow a load in his pants when he sees this movie.
Economist.com - Cities Guide
While helping the homeless has become a cause célèbre, one group managed to turn it into a controversial act. For the past few years Solidarity of the French, a far-right group, has run a soup kitchen offering pork soup to Paris’s homeless. Critics complain that the organisation chose pork as the main ingredient in order to exclude observant Jews and Muslims, whose dietary restrictions preclude eating pig. On its website, the group stated it would only serve full meals to those who first accepted the soup. The city’s police chief to suspend the soup kitchen’s operation on December 28th. An administrative tribunal reversed the decision, so Mr Delanoë urged France’s highest court, the Conseil d’Etat, to weigh in. In January the court banned Solidarity of the French from serving meals.
Canada’s Parliament overwhelmingly gave its approval to a motion proposed by Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister, to recognise French-speaking Quebec as “a nation within a united Canada”. Canada (1) | Nation bidding | Economist.com
In other news, I’m ending my e-mail subscription to The Economist. It’s part of my recent personal mandate to trim my attentional sails. They’re fraying at the edges and tearing at the seams.
I’m a scholar now, right? Time to get narrow-minded focused.
Check out this
Washington Post article with an interactive map of farm subsidies. It’s a good thing, making this map. It helps people see where these pork subsidies are going.
Unfortunately, it does a lousy job of representing the relative distribution. Look at Tulare County in Cental California. It’s received $27.9 million. Then look at Hale County in western Texas. It received $32.9 million. Pretty close, except about 7 Hale Counties fit inside Tulare County. If you add up the agacent counties that match the land area, you see over $100 million payout.
But what is a county anyway? Do we really care about county borders? Wouldn’t a more interesting analysis show congretional districts? Those are implicitly per-capita since each district is supposed to have about the same number of people. That’s something I’d like to see.
Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up,
at least a little bit.
-Edward R. Murrow, journalist (1908-1965)
Caveh Zadeh, maker of the new film I Am a Sex Addict, shares
I recently met a writer of some repute who had been in the army during the first Gulf War. We got to talking about the film and he was moved to share some of his own prostitute experiences. He told me that the U.S. military provides prostitutes for its troops, and that the prostitutes in question are paid for with tax dollars.
I had never heard of such a thing, but then again, I don’t know a lot of people in the military. Still, I was shocked to hear it. It’s one thing for the U.S. government to tolerate American soldiers having sex with prostitutes, it’s quite another thing for the U.S. government to actually pay for it.
I couldn’t help thinking of the far right’s perpetual attempts to cut arts funding in this country, and their insistence that the arts should be funded exclusively by private philanthropic organizations. In that case, perhaps the far right should set up private philanthropic organizations to provide complimentary hookers to our military personnel as well.
I remember visiting my friend Johanna in Hamburg and having dinner with her, her boyfriend, and his friend. The friend was very talkative and engaging. He asked a lot of questions about the nuances of English, which I was pleased to answer. That’s always fun, thinking about aspects of your language as an outsider.
Anyhow, over dinner he started railing into me about U.S. foreign policy and America’s atrocities. Living in France a year, I developed a tough skin and came to terms with my sliver of responsibility for what the U.S. government does and has done in the world. He didn’t seem to accept this. He kept extending his list, as if I had something to do with it.
He told me that the U.S. ran brothels in Vietnam for the troops. This I didn’t know, and didn’t quite believe. This post from Caveh reminded me of it and I looked into it. This article on Reference.com about Comfort Women claims it to be so. It’s clearly a copy of a Wikipedia article, but the current Wikipedia article makes no mention. Evidently, there’s some dispute over the facts. This other article from a questionable source is probably most responsible in saying, “Allegedly, there were also brothels for the use of U.S. soldiers inside certain camps during the Vietnam War.”
I’m guessing they did, which is bad, but not the worst thing ever in war. The German friend disagreed, saying something to the effect of “it’s the worst war crime in the 20th century.” I was stupified, as were my friend and her boyfriend. She cried.
From my friend Andrew, writing (at length) about his trip to Israel.
Propaganda – birthright is total propaganda. The way they described the UN partition plan as a joke and Palestinians as “foreigners” is nausea-inducing. The trip is about mating and donations. I am not sure it’s a wise use of resources to send overprivileged people abroad to drink and screw.