aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Monday, November 19, 2007
NBC hypes Dubai, ignores rape
Last spring Dubai was one of the destinations for “Where in the World is Matt Lauer.” On the Today Show just now there was a piece hyping all of the construction and growth in Dubai. CNBC correspondent Erin Burnett said, “Dubai wants America to like them.”
Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old...was rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off at home.
There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts ages 35 and 18, according to Alex. He says they drove him past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club, and told him they would kill his family if he ever reported them.
Then they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers.
Alex and his family were about to learn that despite Dubai’s status as the Arab world’s paragon of modernity and wealth, and its well-earned reputation for protecting foreign investors, its criminal legal system remains a perilous gantlet when it comes to homosexuality and protection of foreigners.
The authorities not only discouraged Alex from pressing charges, he, his family and French diplomats say; they raised the possibility of charging him with criminal homosexual activity, and neglected for weeks to inform him or his parents that one of his attackers had tested H.I.V. positive while in prison four years earlier.
Here’s Reuters. Here’s Time. Not word one about it to be found on the NBC Dubai lovefest.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
The Singularity: A Period Not An Event
I’m in complete sync with Rodney Brooks in this podcast of his Singularity Summit Keynote:
Whatever writes future history will look back at what we are calling the singularity not as a single event but as a period of time. The singularity period will encompass a time where a collection of technologies were invented, developed, and deployed in fits and starts, driven not by the imperative of the singularity itself, but by the normal economic and sociological pressures of human affairs. A Hollywood treatment of the singularity would have a world just like today’s, plus the singularity, as a singular event. In reality, the world will be changing continuously due to rapid growth in technologies that are both related and unrelated to the singularity itself. The future will be embedded in a different world than the one we inhabit. And the AI systems we create will not have the same desires, beliefs, and goals as today-us. Tomorrow-us will be much better equipped for the changes that will take place in our world. This talk will explore how things might unfold and how we will transform ourselves along the way.
My notes on his comments begin with his definition of the singularity. Clean, clear and simple, he says it’s “the technological creation of a smarter than human intelligence.”
On predicting the future, he’s a fan of Arthur C. Clarke who said, “When it comes to technology, most people overestimate it in the short-term but underestimate it in the long-term.”
Brooks says he expects accelerated progress for AI and robotics because of a couple trends. First, demographics. The population is aging - the baby boomers are about to hit retirement but they won’t be the last of it - so young people will have to become more productive:
There will be so many market pulls on providing services, things that are currently being done by the working age between 20 and 65 who will be a much smaller portion of the population so their productivity will have to be increased through information technology and robotics… we will get a lot of push, a lot of venture capital, a lot of government research money around the world pushing into AI and intelligence systems. There’s going to be rapid progress.
And there are big issues in labor… we outsource manufacturing labor, we insource agricultural labor in Europe and North America… there’s lots of political pressure here which, again, is going to push us to have different productivity models and AI and robotics are going to be part of that.
That all rings true to me. So now we get to the fun part of his talk, his musings on alternative futures. How the Artificial General Intelligence might be made manifest…
Read the rest of "The Singularity: A Period Not An Event" in the extended entry.
Global Warming Threat to Farming and Food Supply
I fear this will be read as a permission slip for Right leaning American global warming skeptics to keep their head in the sand for a good while longer:
Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years—along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts—will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet’s lower latitudes, where most of the world’s poor live.
India, on track to be the world’s most populous country, could see a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s as record heat waves bake its wheat-growing region, placing hundreds of millions of people at the brink of chronic hunger.
Africa—where four out of five people make their living directly from the land—could see agricultural downturns of 30 percent, forcing farmers to abandon traditional crops in favor of more heat-resistant and flood-tolerant ones such as rice. Worse, some African countries, including Senegal and war-torn Sudan, are on track to suffer what amounts to complete agricultural collapse, with productivity declines of more than 50 percent.
Even the emerging agricultural powerhouse of Latin America is poised to suffer reductions of 20 percent or more, which could return thriving exporters such as Brazil to the subsistence-oriented nations they were a few decades ago.
Tutu ashamed of Anglican homophobia
Blasts Anglican church for gay obsession:
Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu has slammed the church for being “obsessed” with homosexuality, in a BBC radio programme to be broadcast Tuesday.
The South African 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner, 76, said he felt ashamed of his church for its attitude towards gays. [...]
“Our world is facing problems—poverty, HIV and AIDS—a devastating pandemic, and conflict,” Tutu said.
“God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another.
“In the face of all of that, our Church, especially the Anglican Church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality.”
He said the Anglican church had appeared “extraordinarily homophobic” during the row over whether the openly gay priest Gene Robinson should be allowed to become the Bishop of New Hampshire.
Tutu said he was “saddened and “ashamed” of the church over the row.
Death penalty deterrent: let’s test it
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented. [...]
The studies have been the subject of sharp criticism, much of it from legal scholars who say that the theories of economists do not apply to the violent world of crime and punishment. Critics of the studies say they are based on faulty premises, insufficient data and flawed methodologies.
The death penalty “is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,” John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005. “The existing evidence for deterrence,â€Â� they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”
Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 and has followed the debate, said the current empirical evidence was “certainly not decisive” because “we just don’t get enough variation to be confident we have isolated a deterrent effect.”
But, Mr. Becker added, “the evidence of a variety of types - not simply the quantitative evidence - has been enough to convince me that capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of offenses.â€Â�
You know, I dislike and oppose the death penalty but I equally dislike life imprisonment. Lock ‘em up and throw away the key seems more inhumane - particularly with the way we treat prisoners - than a quick, painless death. Death is cheaper, too, if we do away with all those pesky procedural safeguards.
So let’s test it. Sex offenders already have de facto life sentences. We can start with them. Murderers next. The list is endless. Why not “three strikes, your dead?” Let’s go ahead and give in to the vengeance we feel to gather the quantitative evidence we need.
Thomas Cahill on Bill Moyers Journal last week:
THOMAS CAHILL: I think that there are many things within the human soul or within the human character that we ignore. There’s a tendency to violence in all of us. There’s even, I believe, a prehistoric desire for human sacrifice. We see it in all ancient cultures… Why have there been so many movies about Romans sitting in the Coliseum going like that? We get a kick out of it. The real evil in the world, it seems to me, is cruelty. That’s-- to me the word evil equals cruelty. It’s human cruelty that is evil. And you-- we all have to deal with that. We all have a tendency to that that we’re not willing - we’re not willing to acknowledge that this is inside of us. It’s there.
Cass Sunstein is quoted in the NYTimes piece, “The evidence...seems sufficiently plausible that the moral issue becomes a difficult one. I did shift from being against the death penalty to thinking that if it has a significant deterrent effect it’s probably justified.”
Meanwhile he was featured last week on TPM’s Table for One where, in an entirely different context for entirely different reasons, he pointed to an experiment involving jury behavior:
That experiment, conducted by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade and me, can be found here and in shorter form in Cass R. Sunstein et al., Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide (University of Chicago Press, 2003). The suggestion is that the experiment has implications for certain uses of the Internet, above all because it helps explain the dynamics of outrage.
To understanding the experiment, we have to begin with an earlier one, involving individuals, not groups (this study, also done with Kahneman and Schkade, can be found in the Punitive Damages book as well)… People are intuitive retributivists, and their punishment judgments are rooted in outrage. (Deterrence is secondary.) And if certain scales are used, outrage turns out to be stunningly uniform across demographic groups (at least in personal injury cases involving corporate wrongdoing).
Emphasis mine: If his finding that “punishment judgments rooted in outrage” have implications for the Internet don’t you guess they’d have death penalty implications as well? I’m no economist, or academic researcher, I’m a lay citizen admirer of both. My lay experience and intuition tell me that economics is no way to make these decisions.
And if those decisions are to be informed by economics, then it should be behavioral economics and the libertarian paternalist economics researched and favored by Sunstein himself.
I understand that these are deep, impenetrable problems with no easy or clear solution. But I expect that the research reported in today’s NYTimes piece (and this WSJ’s piece, too) will be understood by lay people - citizens, who are, like me, overwhelmed by the problem - as reason to give in to their Roman retributive proclivities and justify the pro-death penalty position.
I think that’s sad tragic.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
War on Christmas ‘Naughty’ company list
The Liberty Counsel’s “Friend or Foe” campaign to keep the word “Christmas” alive in holiday advertising has put out a list of retailers who “are profiting from Christmas while at the same time pretending that it does not exist.”
The Naughties:
Ace Hardware: Holiday Decorations section on web site. Christmas Trees are referred to as Trees.
Banana Republic: Web site: Kick off the party season in style, Holiday Gift Guide. No mention of Christmas.
Bloomingdales: Web site: Gifted 2007, one Christmas ornament, one Christmas makeup kit, no celebration of Christmas made evident, no Christmas e-card or gift card, but there is a Hanukkah e-card.
Circuit City: Web site: Holiday Gift Guide, Free shipping by December 24th. Only mention of Christmas is in the shipping fine print.
Dicks Sporting Goods: Web site: The Gift Center. No mention of Christmas.
Gap: Web site: For the Season. Holiday Doggie Pajamas, Sweet Holiday Dreams Long Sleep Set, Holiday Graphic Bodysuit, Holiday Letters Bodysuit. No mention of Christmas.
Giant Eagle Pharmacy: Mentions holiday, holiday cards, Festive Seasonal Boxed Cards, and the slogan Reach for the Stars this Holiday Season on the web site. No mention of Christmas.
Hollister Co: Web site: SoCal X-Mas video, Holiday Beach video. No mention of Christmas.
Home Depot: Web site: Everything is red and green, but its the Holiday Gift Center, Holiday Decorations, Home for the Holidays, Artificial Trees, not Christmas trees. No mention of Christmas.
J. Crew Outfitters: Web site: Holiday Look Highland Holiday, The Very Merry Gift Shop, and Were Going Home for the Holidays.
K-Mart: Web site: Holiday Shop, Holiday Toys, Get it in time for the Holiday, Holiday Planner. They are calling Christmas The Holiday. Some local store managers may be hanging Christmas signs, but the company does not appear to be celebrating Christmas.
Kohl's: “Holiday shopping list,” no Christmas trees: just Trees, “Hanukkah” section, “Holiday: find the perfect gifts,” “45 days left: shipping deadlines,” “stocking stuffers,” “St. Nicholas station” and “Nativity” section, but never mentions “Christmas.”
Lane Bryant: “Holiday HQ,” “Gift Guide,” “For a truly special holiday gift…” “Holiday Season,” “Holiday Looks,” and “Holiday Style” on the web site. Typing “Christmas” in the search engine brings up nothing.
Marshalls: Front Page of the web site: “Who Wants a Holiday That Looks Like Everyone Elses?” “Holiday Style,” and “Holiday Decorating Ideas.” No mention of Christmas.
Nordstrom: Web site: “Once Upon a Holiday… gifts were given,” “Great Gifting.” No mention of Christmas. Dec 19 “Last day to make Holiday deadline.”
Office Max: Web site: “Great Gifts for the Holiday,” “Snappy Holiday Gift Ideas,” “Furnish your office in time for the holidays,” and “Everything you need this holiday season and beyond.” No mention of Christmas.
Old Navy: “Holiday Favorites,” “Holiday Morning,” “Season in Style,” and “Holiday Gift Guide” sections on the web site. No mention of Christmas.
Pet Smart: Web site: “Holiday Central,” “Photos with Santa Claws,” “Holiday Games,” “Holiday Wrapping Paper,” and “Holiday Shops.” No mention of Christmas.
Sears: Online: December 25 is the “holiday.”
Shopko: Report: Newspaper ad says they are selling “holiday lights”, “holiday trees”, and other “holiday items.” Web site: “Holiday ornaments, trees and lighting.”
Sprint: Web site: “Tis the season to give SprintSpeed,” “Holiday Entertainment,” “Holiday Season,” and “Sprint lights up the Holidays.” No mention of Christmas.
SEE ALSO: Morbo’s urgent War on Christmas update.
Iran, Dubai, Saudi Arabia barbarities
You won’t find me visiting the Middle East any time soon…
Iran:
Amid international criticism ignited by a crusading journalist, Iran’s chief justice has spared the life of a young man who had been sentenced to be executed as the result of a cousin’s accusations of homosexual acts years earlier.
Ayatollah Seyed Mahmoud Hashemi Sharudi nullified the imminent death sentence of Makvan Mouloodzadeh, 21, for violations of Iranian law and Islamic teachings, Saeid Eghbali, the defendant’s attorney, told msnbc.com this week.
Had Sharudi not intervened, Mouloodzadeh would have joined hundreds of his fellow Iranians, some of them just children when they committed their alleged crimes, who are hanged each year in jail yards and public squares. The executions are often carried out via a method designed to enhance and prolong their suffering: A rope is placed around the condemned person’s neck and he or she is hoisted from the ground with an industrial crane.
Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was...rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off at home.
There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts ages 35 and 18, according to Alex. He says they drove him past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club, and told him they would kill his family if he ever reported them.
Then they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers.
Alex and his family were about to learn that despite Dubai’s status as the Arab world’s paragon of modernity and wealth, and its well-earned reputation for protecting foreign investors, its criminal legal system remains a perilous gantlet when it comes to homosexuality and protection of foreigners.
The authorities not only discouraged Alex from pressing charges, he, his family and French diplomats say; they raised the possibility of charging him with criminal homosexual activity, and neglected for weeks to inform him or his parents that one of his attackers had tested H.I.V. positive while in prison four years earlier.
A court in Saudi Arabia increased the punishment for a gang-rape victim after her lawyer won an appeal of the sentence for the rapists, the lawyer told CNN.
The 19-year-old victim was sentenced last year to 90 lashes for meeting with an unrelated male, a former friend from whom she was retrieving photographs. The seven rapists, who abducted the pair and raped both, received sentences ranging from 10 months to five years in prison.
The victim’s attorney, Abdulrahman al-Lahim, contested the rapists’ sentence, contending there is a fatwa, or edict under Islamic law, that considers such crimes Hiraba (sinful violent crime) and the punishment should be death.
“After a year, the preliminary court changed the punishment and made it two to nine years for the defendants,” al-Lahim said of the new decision handed down Wednesday. “However, we were shocked that they also changed the victim’s sentence to be six months in prison and 200 lashes.”
The judges more than doubled the punishment for the victim because of “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media,” according to a source quoted by Arab News, an English-language Middle Eastern daily newspaper.
Imagine scrapping the Farm Bill
Annie Myers went to an NYU panel entitled ”The Farm Bill 2007: Understanding the Political, Agricultural, and Nutritional Impact” and came away wondering why we don’t rethink the Fram Bill from the ground up:
We who are up for it sludge through the Farm Bill, and the best of us - whether we’re organizations, institutions, or just crazy individuals - come up with proposals that cut subsidies, end subsidies, fund specialty crop research, or at least somehow cut down on this CORN production, that we’ve all learned from Michael Pollan is a major reason for why we’re stingy, fat, and hated.
What we DON’T consider, is scrapping the Farm Bill altogether. It’s demonstrably ridiculous, in and off itself. To address 3 million square miles of land with 1 Farm Bill simply doesn’t make sense. Agriculture is regional, for one thing. Not only are the culture and politics different in Iowa than in New York, but the land is too, and the climate. A bill with provisions for avocados in California should not be legislating the cows in Maine. Nutrition and Hunger and Agriculture and Trade may be much like adults playing Twister - mischievously intermingled, entirely inseparable, and always (somewhere) hurting - but these forces of the economy need not share the same budget and bed. Money to support agricultural research should not detract from Emergency Food Programs, and whomever pens provisions for popular exports should not simultaneously sign off on subsidies deemed illegal by the WTO… we need to think bigger than a Farm Bill proposal. We need to take the twister-playing issues in the Farm Bill and get them interacting through a different game: synchronized swimming, perhaps, or a maypole dance.
In response to my concerns, [NYU Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health professor Marion] Nestle said that election funding really has to change. As long as we have the Iowa Caucus, she said, no presidential candidate is gonna stick their neck out for truly progressive agricultural policy. Maybe she’s right. I’m not sure what we need. But we can at least take the new, trendy interest in the Farm Bill further than the “Buy this! Buy that! Vote with your dollar!” mantra, and foster some truly innovative, political thought. If people did it in the ‘30s, and the ‘70s, we can sure as hell do it now.
I think Nestle’s exactly right. And so long as Annie’s looking for a new hero - “with all due respect [to Michael Pollan] we need a new one,” she says - I point back to a hero of mine.
Eric Schlosser closed his keynote speech at last year’s Food, Ethics and the Environment Conference at Princeton with the same optimism expressed in Annie’s last sentence.
But on the way there he made a vitally important point of a kind with both Annie and Nestle’s:
I think that changing the world by what you buy is only going to go so far. And it only works to a point. And after that point I think it is delusion that as consumers we are going to change that system fundamentally or we are going to change the world.
Missing from the discourse, missing from the dialog over the last twenty-five years have been a couple of other phrases. One of them is “corporate responsibility” and the other one is “collective responsibility.” And I stand here honestly saying that I’m not pure, my purchases are not ideal, and maybe some of you in this room are pure but it’s hard to be pure in this country in the year 2006. But ultimately the problems that...I’ve tried to outline are not due to individual faults. They’re really not. They have been caused by big systems. Systems of belief, systems of production, systems of making a profit. And without looking at them from a systemic approach there is no possibility of meaningful change...what we do as consumers isn’t going to make a profound difference. And I think we cannot allow this movement surrounding ethical eating to focus only on our personal responsibility and on consumer power.
Emphasis mine. I’m with Annie! The only way to meaningful change is to take on and fight the system.
Barrow, Marshall and the contempt citations
Back in July, the House Judiciary Committee approved a contempt of Congress citation against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers for their refusal to testify in response to congressional subpoenas over the firings of nine federal prosecutors.
For months it was unclear when, or if, Democrats would hold a vote on the full floor. A couple weeks ago things got moving again.
The vote had been scheduled for this week, but then was put off until December. This latest delay, they say, is attributed to strategic timing and not a lack of votes.
So where do our local Bush Dogs stand?
It looks like we might see the reverse of the SCHIP vote with Barrow bucking the leadership this time:
Democrats who have been quietly whipping the bill say they found only one or two vulnerable House Democrats wary of voting for it on the House floor.
One of those is believed to be Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.). But the former law professor said in a brief interview that he just wasn’t familiar with the measure.
“It hasn’t been widely discussed in the meetings I attend,” he said.
Still, Marshall said, he understood the logic of such a measure.
“If it’s appropriate for a witness to testify, and he or she doesn’t testify, then contempt is the remedy that’s available. I don’t know of any other.” [...]
Only one vulnerable Democratic member, Rep. John Barrow (Ga.), openly expressed serious reservations about moving forward with the bill.
“There has been a serious lack of oversight of this administration,” Barrow said. “But at the same time, I don’t think we should be picking fights we can’t win.”
Of the fourteen endangered and centrist Democrats asked about their support for the politically charged provision, Barrow was the only no.
Flyig spaghetti Monster at Academy of Religion confab
A panel on FSM-ism is on the agenda at a gathering of the world’s leading religious scholars 
in San Diego this weekend:
The title: “Evolutionary Controversy and a Side of Pasta: The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Subversive Function of Religious Parody.”
“For a lot of people they’re just sort of fun responses to religion, or fun responses to organized religion. But I think it raises real questions about how people approach religion in their lives,” said Samuel Snyder, one of the three Florida graduate students who will give talks at the meeting next Monday along with Alyssa Beall of Syracuse University.
The presenters’ titles seem almost a parody themselves of academic jargon. Snyder will speak about “Holy Pasta and Authentic Sauce: The Flying Spaghetti Monster’s Messy Implications for Theorizing Religion,” while Gavin Van Horn’s presentation is titled “Noodling around with Religion: Carnival Play, Monstrous Humor, and the Noodly Master.”
Using a framework developed by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Van Horn promises in his abstract to explore how, “in a carnivalesque fashion, the Flying Spaghetti Monster elevates the low (the bodily, the material, the inorganic) to bring down the high (the sacred, the religiously dogmatic, the culturally authoritative).”
The authors recognize the topic is a little light by the standards of the American Academy of Religion… But they also insist it’s more than a joke.
Indeed, the tale of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its followers cuts to the heart of the one of the thorniest questions in religious studies: What defines a religion? Does it require a genuine theological belief? Or simply a set of rituals and a community joining together as a way of signaling their cultural alliances to others?
In short, is an anti-religion like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism actually a religion?
For $33 you can get a very cool Flying Spaghetti Monster ornament for your Christmas holiday tree.
Via Steve Benen, “Philosophy majors in the audience are no doubt enjoying this modern version of ’Russell’s teapot.’”
RELATED: The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster website, the American Academy of Religion website and a Nova look at the 2005 Dover, PA battle over teaching evolution in public schools, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, which follows the federal case that resulted, Kitzmiller v. Dover School District. You can watch the full 2 hour program online. An outstanding documentary, here’s the trailer.
Copyright Charts
Cornell’s Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States is a terrific reference:
This chart was first published in Peter B. Hirtle, “Recent Changes To The Copyright Law: Copyright Term Extension,” Archival Outlook, January/February 1999. This version is current as of 1 January 2007. The most recent version is found [here].
The chart is based in part on Laura N. Gasaway’s chart, “When Works Pass Into the Public Domain,” [found here], and similar charts found in Marie C. Malaro, A Legal Primer On Managing Museum Collections (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998): 155-156.
A useful copyright duration chart by Mary Minow, organized by year, is found [here]. A “flow chart” for copyright duration is found [here].
See also Library of Congress Copyright Office. Circular 15a, Duration of Copyright: Provisions of the Law Dealing with the Length of Copyright Protection (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2004) [here].
Friday, November 16, 2007
Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer
Via Boing Boing, Daily Show writer explains writers’ strike—if digital content isn’t worth anything, how come Viacom is suing YouTube for $1 billion?
In this youtube, Daily Show writer Jason Rothman delivers an hilarious monologue about the Writers’ Guild strike against the studios, who claim that they can’t compensate writers for digital media because no one knows how much this stuff is worth. The clip delivers a Daily Show-style montage of coverage from the $1 billion+ Viacom lawsuit against YouTube, including clips of Viacom’s CEO talking about how digital content is worth tons of money and getting paid is the name of the game. The clip includes a nice guest appearance from Daily Show correspondents, too.
In a related irony:
The WGA strike has put an end to TV Guide’s plans to air its first-ever Online Video Awards show on its cable channel. But no fear, the results in 18 categories will still be announced online on November 26th.
The parties go duck hunting
The New Republic’s Eric Rauchway says both parties have a history of catering to white racists. The Democrats stopped. Have Republicans?
In the 1890s, southern states began to amend their laws and constitutions to keep black people from voting, in part because they wanted to stop poor whites from joining the Populist Party, which sought to implement an income tax and break up business monopolies. Democrats, then the reigning political power in the South, figured that they could keep some large number of poor whites from worrying about their economic status by appealing to their racism. They proved correct. Thus the South solidified behind the Democratic Party and white supremacy.
Cracks opened in this sectional foundation when the Democrats nominated Al Smith for the Presidency in 1928. The multi-ethnic, Catholic, Manhattanite Smith represented “card playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, divorces, novels, stuffy rooms, dancing, evolution, Clarence Darrow, overeating, nude art, prize fighting, actors, greyhound racing, and modernism,” as one Protestant minister raved. As H. L. Mencken noted, these fears would get “Methodist Ku Kluxers of every state south of the Potomac ... building forts along the coast to repel the Pope.” The Republicans benefited, and picked up a few southern states.
These cracks opened wider in 1948 and 1960, both close elections in part because white southerners punished Democrats for taking small steps toward civil rights. In 1948, Harry Truman’s effort ”to secure these rights“ prompted Strom Thurmond to run on a “states’ rights” ticket, costing Truman electoral votes he could scarcely afford. In 1960, some southern electors fled the Catholic and tepidly tolerant John Kennedy for a ticket with states’ righters Harry Flood Byrd and Strom Thurmond on it. These southerners whose votes had kept Democrats in office--southerners who for generations had been poorer than their northern counterparts--nevertheless let race-baiters woo them away from the New Deal, whose political programs had done them so much good.
By the 1960s it had become clear that the white South would bolt the Democratic Party under the right circumstances. As Barry Goldwater told fellow Republicans in 1961, owing to the New Deal, the GOP would never “get the Negro vote ... so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.”
With that the catering-to-white-racist baton is handed off to the Republicans. But I’m not seeing how Goldwater’s strategy is a whole lot different than Tom Schaller’s prescription for Democrats in Whistling Past Dixie. The Dems is a sin of omission rather than of commission:
For a generation the Republicans have benefited from keeping Mississippi burning, just as the Democrats did before. Both hoped that racist populism would trump economic populism. The coming year will likely bring more of the same, and the results will tell us whether Americans will be so simply fooled again.
Dems may rightfully claim they’re not the party catering to white racists but so long as they use that fact as a benefit to win rather than actually doing something on the ground to counter and change it, they are complicit in the ongoing structural racism. And that’s not much to be proud of.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
So maybe Sonny should pray every day
Gov. Sonny Perdue said Thursday morning that he’s not gloating over the fact that it rained a day after he held a prayer vigil at the Capitol.
“This is hopefully the beginning of more,” Perdue said from Canada, where he is on a trade mission. “One rain won’t refill the reservoirs. It is great affirmation of what we asked for.” [...]
“As we do all we can from a conservation standpoint, virtually all of us know we are dependent on rain. I am just a person who believes it comes from God,” Perdue said.
While almost all of metro Atlanta got rain, most rainfall totals were only around a quarter-inch or less.
Big whoop! He pulled this stunt last July, too, but in Macon instead of on the statehouse steps so it got less press.
He got a quarter-inch last time, too. And some noticed that, just like this time, the forecast was calling for the drizzle that came when he scheduled his event.
We deserve to be the laughing stock we are because this is what passes for good-government in Georgia.
The Older Boyfriend
WSJ Online on the Older Boyfriend episode:
One early-episode joke was a crash course in dealing with viewer feedback and balancing the show’s tone with acceptable taste. In “The Older Boyfriend” episode, Ms. Hasler says, “If you’re in junior high and you’re dating someone who’s out of high school, he’s a pedophile. And pedophilia’s a disease. Would you date someone with cancer? No.”
The remark drew a torrent of angry responses on the program’s Web site, and in emails. But Ms. Hasler remains unapologetic. “We have no intention of changing our style or changing the type of humor we use,” she says. “We’re going to make the same jokes that cause the same amount of controversy.”
WSJ on The Midwest Teen Sex Show
They call it frank, funny and controversial:
[The] wry, pointed presentation has helped the show lure thousands of viewers since its debut this past summer. Some may have been attracted by the provocative title, but this isn’t pornography. Instead, it aims to teach teenagers about sex using risqué sketches, explicit language and anecdotes that draw on the teenage experiences of its two 28-year-old creators—host Nikol Hasler, the aforementioned woman, and Guy Clark, an aspiring filmmaker.
The two felt that existing sexual-education efforts were far too prim—and boring—to be useful to teens. Their podcast focuses less on birds-and-bees basics and more on real-life scenarios teens are likely to face. [...]
Amy Bryant, the editor of Planned Parenthood’s site TeenWire.com, says she has mixed feelings about the show. “On the one hand, it’s edgy and gets teens talking about their health,” she says. She’s concerned, however, that the content isn’t medically reviewed. (The show’s Web site has a disclaimer that “all advice given is simply opinion and should not be taken as fact.")
It’s the show’s tone, not overall subject matter, that has drawn more criticism. Deborah Roffman, a sex-education teacher who works in Baltimore schools, says, “I can see why it would be very popular with kids. It’s daring, it’s very open, and it’s funny, and it has information that they would find very useful. “At the same time, it is satirical in nature,” she says, adding that unless teens are intellectually sophisticated, it’s not “the right vehicle.” She says further: “The entertainment value of this material is not the same thing as its educational value.”
I have to agree that by itself it certainly isn’t enough. But to get things going and, er, fill the void left by the adult abdication of our obligation to educate and given my objections to criminalizing kids I think they’re absolutely right on!
What’s good for the Goose…
Alan Wexelblat points to Kay Reindl for a writer’s perspective on the strike.
His copyfighter’s emphasis is on her indignation that the studios don’t want to share download revenue with the writers:
When you illegally download something and the network doesn’t get any money for it, they call it piracy. But when you download something or watch streaming video with commercials and the writers don’t get any money for it, the networks call it promotion. DON’T LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS. Steal from the networks. You KNOW how much they hate it. But we’re not supposed to hate it if they steal from us.
Alan cautions, “I’m not particularly keen on a recommendation to steal, even from the Cartel thieves, but it definitely captures the spirit of what this debate is about.”
Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
I’ve been making my way through Nova’s look at the Dover, PA court case brought by parents after the school board voted to include a statement about Intelligent Design in the biology curriculum.
I’m watching with my nephew - a product of Dover schools - who now lives with me. He was there for the fourth through seventh grades (and yells at the screen, “I know him/her!"). His brother still lives in Dover.
The Nova piece is available for viewing online beginning tomorrow. My antipathy to reenactments aside, it’s an excellent portrayal of what happened. Here’s the preview:
The Market and Intelligent Design (reprise)
As I watch Nova’s Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, I am reminded again of a piece by John Allen Paulos.
Paulos says that evolution’s been proven and Intelligent Design refuted, but “rehashing the refutation” isn’t his goal because “those who reject evolution are usually immune to such arguments.”
Rather, what he does is point to what he calls ”a surprising crossing of political lines:”
Let me begin by asking how it is that modern free market economies are as complex as they are, boasting amazingly elaborate production, distribution and communication systems? Go into almost any drug store and you can find your favourite candy bar. And what’s true at the personal level is true at the industrial level. Somehow there are enough ball bearings and computer chips in just the right places in factories all over the country. The physical infrastructure and communication networks are also marvels of integrated complexity. Fuel supplies are, by and large, where they’re needed. Email reaches you in Miami as well as in Milwaukee, not to mention Barcelona and Bangkok.
The natural question, discussed first by Adam Smith and later by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper among others, is who designed this marvel of complexity? Which commissar decreed the number of packets of dental floss for each retail outlet? The answer, of course, is that no economic god designed this system. It emerged and grew by itself. No one argues that all the components of the candy bar distribution system must have been put into place at once, or else there would be no Snickers at the corner store.
So far, so good. What is more than a bit odd, however, is that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution ó for example, many fundamentalist Christians ó are among the most ardent supporters of the free market. They accept the market’s complexity without qualm, yet insist the complexity of biological phenomena requires a designer.
They would reject the idea that there is or should be central planning in the economy. They would point out that simple economic exchanges which are beneficial to people become entrenched and then gradually modified as they become part of larger systems of exchange, while those that are not beneficial die out. Yet some of these same people refuse to believe natural selection and “blind processes” can lead to biological order arising spontaneously.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Sonny Perdue: “We acknowledge our wastefulness.” Rome doesn’t.
Political Insider on some honest admissions of failure during yesterday’s interfaith (huh? with only three Protestant ministers?) prayer for rain on the steps of the Georgia capitol:
In his prayer, the Rev. Gil Watson, pastor of Northside United Methodist Church, said this:
“We have not been good stewards of our land. We have not been good stewards of our water,” he said.
And Gov. Sonny Perdue said this:
“We acknowledge our wastefulness. We acknowledge that we haven’t done the things we need to do. Father, forgive us and lead us to honor you as you honor us with the showers of blessing.”
You can spin some of the people all of the time, and you can spin all of the people some of the time. But you don’t dare spin God.
In Atlanta they pray; in decadent Rome they’re aghast at the thought of raising water prices:
The City of Rome may not be able to pay their bills if it abides by the 10% cut in water consumption asked for by Governor Perdue. Rome has spent the last three years updating its water treatment plant. This process racked up 40 million dollars worth of debt, which is paid in most part, by citizen’s water bills. To scale back 10% is about a million gallons of water the city won’t make money on.
The Director of Rome’s Water and Sewer Department, Lee Ross, says something has to give.
“We would not be able to meet our fixed costs and our debt payment with out making some severe changes to the way we operate or to our rate structure.”
So raise prices! Our Republican state wants the fed to declare us a disaster area to bail us out of our drought but we can’t even contemplate a price hike. Pathetic.
RIAA v Georgian who was 13 or 14 at time of infringement
Recording Industry vs. The People:
We have just learned of a case being prosecuted in Columbus, Georgia, in which the RIAA is pursuing an 18-year-old girl based on infringements she apparently committed when she was 13 and 14, Elektra v. McDowell.
The RIAA moved for summary judgment.
The Court granted the motion to the extent that it sought an injunction against further infringement, but denied the motion as to damages, holding that there were factual issues concerning the defendant’s defense of innocent infringement.
RIAA’s Statement of Material Facts*
Defendant’s Opposition to Motion for Summary Judgment*
November 6, 2007, Order, Granting in Part, and Denying in Part, RIAA’s Motion for Summary Judgment** Document published online at Internet Law & Regulation
Youth Radio on Genarlow Wilson
Youth Radio did a piece on the Genarlow Wilson case:
ALIX
I asked my friend Alix Joslyn, who is a high school senior in Atlanta, what she thinks about Genarlow Wilson having been prosecuted as a sex offender.JOSLYN (On Tape)
I just think that it’s one of the most absurd things in the world.ALIX
I asked Alix because a few years ago, Alix herself had been a 15 year-old dating an 18-year-old guy at her high school. Alix doesn’t think that Wilson’s sexual partner was a victim…JOSLYN (On Tape)
It’s not like she hadn’t consented to this. It’s not like he took advantage of her. And it’s not like she was young enough to not understand what she was doing. You know they were both young…and it’s ridiculous to think he is in any way a criminal at all.
Genarlow nemesis Eric Johnson is interviewed:
ALIX
Many of my peers complain that legal age limits seem to be randomly assigned. Eric Johnson is Republican president pro tem of the Georgia Senate. He admits that age limits are arbitrary, but says that they have to be set somewhere…SENATOR (On Tape)
Some 13-year olds may be perfectly capable of driving a car and some 40 year-olds probably ought to be banned from the roads, but we can’t do that when we create laws. We have to establish at what point is the community standard for making certain decisions.ALIX
Senator Johnson says laws need to apply to everyone. Age of consent statutes are designed to protect those who are physically but not emotionally ready for sex, from being manipulated by people who are older and more experienced.SENATOR (On Tape)
A young female may feel, well, if I want this football player to be my boyfriend I’m gonna have to do something to keep him. She may not have the ability to make that informed decision of what the risks are of having sex, what the long-term effect on her psyche is just like drinking and smoking. I mean sex is far more dangerous than some of those other things.
That Johnson quote says it all. Sex is dangerous. Period. And so it must be outlawed. Those of us on the other side of the issue believe teens must be educated and the laws must be changed.
Some resources:
- William Saletan writing in Slate distinguishes between physical, cognitive and emotional maturity and offers up a thoughtful starting point for changing statutory rape laws.
- the Midwest Teen Sex Show creates a safe space for frank discussion of all things related to teen sexuality.
- In March Youth Radio did an excellent piece on the need for parents to talk to kids about sex.
For people like Johnson it’s easier to make kids into outlaws when it looks to me like the problem is the parents and we’re blaming the kids. They need us. Talk to your kids!
What liberal Wal-Mart critics are missing (again)
I’ve been meaning to fume about liberal entitlement to poor/working class rural voters, most recently embodied by Matt Stoller’s Bush Dogs Voting Against Their Districts? post. Much as I like and admire Matt, when was the last time he was anywhere near Macon, GA?
Everyone likes to rail against our two Bush Dog Dems (Marshall and Barrow), but it is my observation that they are about as good as we’re going to get around here and the way to move them in the direction both me and Matt want (Tondee and DownWithTyranny!, too) is to get into their districts, understand the people and their issues here, and demonstrate to the voters how liberal policies are in their own best interest.
For all the money poured into attack ads here, I don’t see a whole lot of insight into how the people here see things. With that intro, I am re-posting in its entirety my post, What liberal Wal-Mart critics are missing, from last April...
In his New Yorker piece, Selling Wal-Mart, Jeffrey Goldberg does a fine job of generally skewering the company and in the process demonstrating why, as he phrases it, “there is great mistrust of the press at Wal-Mart headquarters.” Morbo offers a good bullet point list of the piece’s complaints, though I’d say that its larger theme is to wonder how any Democrat, most particularly a liberal Democrat, could, ethically and in good conscience, work at Wal-Mart.
The embodiment of that wonder, held up for ridicule to fine effect, is Leslie Dach, who worked for liberal pols Kennedy and Dukakis (Goldberg helpfully reminds us of the tank ride; Dach, communications director, “...was thousands of miles away in my office at that famous moment” ) and the green non-profit National Audubon Society and Environmental Defense Fund. Here’s the last paragraph of the nearly 6,000 word piece:
“It was very smart of Wal-Mart to appoint him to this job,” Kenneth Adelman, the former Reagan Administration arms-control official and one of Dach’s former colleagues at Edelman, said. “He’s brilliant at what he does. He’s a great advocate for Democratic causes.” Each election year, Adelman recalled, he and Dach would stage a mock debate before employees in the Edelman office. “It would always start out seriously, and then get funny,” he said. “I would argue the Republican line, and Leslie played the part of the Democrat.”
Emphasis mine (though it was hardly needed). The fun passage that I, myself, had picked out to highlight for ridicule comes from Wal-Mart’s chief spokeswoman Mona Williams, “a former A. T. & T. executive:”
Wal-Mart’s executives are angry about Democratic attacks on the company. Tovar’s boss, Mona Williams, told me, “Wal-Mart is taking care of the people the Democratic Party says it represents-the poor, the middle class. The Democrats are not taking care of them. We’re like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”
Read the rest of "What liberal Wal-Mart critics are missing (again)" in the extended entry.
A less stingy health plan for Wal-Mart employees
Speaking of Wal-Mart, their new health plan made the Business Section of the NYTimes yesterday:
For much of the last decade, the retailing behemoth Wal-Mart Stores has been associated with stingy health care as much as low prices.
Across the country, politicians and labor groups derided the company’s health plans for their high expense and bare-bones coverage. Two states, California and Maryland, even passed laws demanding, in effect, that the company spend more on employee health benefits.
“We want this giant to behave itself,” one Maryland legislator, Anne Healey, said at the time.
The giant, it turns out, was listening. All the criticism was hurting its reputation and its ability to expand. So now, after spending two years seeking advice from everyone from Bill Clinton to executives at Starbucks, Wal-Mart is overhauling its health plans.
The company, according to data available for the first time, is offering better coverage to a greater number of workers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, provides insurance to 100,000 more workers than it did just three years ago - and it is now easier for many to sign up for health care at Wal-Mart than at its rival, Target, whose reputation glows in comparison.
One Laptop Per Child sale
You may have heard about the $200 ubuntu desktops at Wal-Mart. They’ve sold out online:
it looks like the early results of putting Linux in front of Middle America are overwhelmingly positive—Wal-Mart’s online warehouse has already sold out of the cheapo Linux box, and users both savvy and new are filing enthusiastic reviews. Of course, it’s still early and we can’t imagine anyone getting too down on a $200 computer, but it certainly looks like Team Ubuntu is making a strong play to shift the balance in those OS wars.
So maybe you should consider an XO from OLPC:
The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege. Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution.
For a bunch of good reasons why this computer is a dazzling piece of ingenuity, here’s David Pogue’s review.
