xMabaitx blogs about race, racial identity, skin color, and Oscar Grant:
I have determined that my former desire to ”fit into” a certain racial or ethnic distinction has very little bearing on my own sense of personal self-worth. The greater issue rather is how the white man’s ideas of race and ethnicity consequently force unwanted social meanings upon my body.
So remember the Katrina story that Bobby Jindal told? Yeah, he was lying.
I’m frankly surprised by this, though I shouldn’t be. Sarah Palin introduced herself to America by lying, too. I suppose when you’re a Republican, lying is preferable to admitting that your party is completely bereft of ideas, and that your core principles have been proven wanting by reality. Even so, one would think Jindal could have found a different, less-false anecdote to use. I think you can scratch the man from Baton Rouge off the short list for 2012. Somewhere, Mittens is smiling.
From an article in Gourmet magazine:
Lucas’s “room” turned out to be the back of a box truck in the junk-strewn yard, shared with two or three other workers. It lacked running water and a toilet, so occupants urinated and defecated in a corner. For that, Navarrete docked Lucas’s pay by $20 a week. According to court papers, he also charged Lucas for two meager meals a day: eggs, beans, rice, tortillas, and, occasionally, some sort of meat. Cold showers from a garden hose in the backyard were $5 each. Everything had a price. Lucas was soon $300 in debt. After a month of ten-hour workdays, he figured he should have paid that debt off.
But when Lucas—slightly built and standing less than five and a half feet tall—inquired about the balance, Navarrete threatened to beat him should he ever try to leave. Instead of providing an accounting, Navarrete took Lucas’s paychecks, cashed them, and randomly doled out pocket money, $20 some weeks, other weeks $50. Over the years, Navarrete and members of his extended family deprived Lucas of $55,000.
Taking a day off was not an option. If Lucas became ill or was too exhausted to work, he was kicked in the head, beaten, and locked in the back of the truck. Other members of Navarrete’s dozen-man crew were slashed with knives, tied to posts, and shackled in chains. On November 18, 2007, Lucas was again locked inside the truck. As dawn broke, he noticed a faint light shining through a hole in the roof. Jumping up, he secured a hand hold and punched himself through. He was free.
What happened at Navarrete’s home would have been horrific enough if it were an isolated case. Unfortunately, involuntary servitude—slavery—is alive and well in Florida. Since 1997, law-enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women in seven different cases. And those are only the instances that resulted in convictions. Frightened, undocumented, mistrustful of the police, and speaking little or no English, most slaves refuse to testify, which means their captors cannot be tried.
The article also discusses tomato pickers who, although not enslaved, are nonetheless working in terrible conditions for extremely low pay. Workers have been able to make some progress by organizing:
Even though the CIW has been responsible for bringing police attention to a half dozen slavery prosecutions, Benitez feels that slavery will persist until overall conditions for field workers improve. The group has made progress on that front by securing better pay. Between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, the rate for a basket of tomatoes remained 40 cents—meaning that workers’ real wages dropped as inflation rose. Work stoppages, demonstrations, and a hunger strike helped raise it to 45 cents on average, but the packers complained that competition for customers prevented them from paying more. One grower refused to enter a dialogue with CIW hunger strikers because, in his words, “a tractor doesn’t tell the farmer how to run the farm.” The CIW decided to try an end run around the growers by going directly to the biggest customers and asking them to pay one cent more per pound directly to the workers. Small change to supermarket chains and fast-food corporations, but it would add about twenty dollars to the fifty a picker makes on a good day, the difference between barely scraping by and earning a livable wage.
The Campaign for Fair Food, as it is called, first took aim at Yum! Brands, owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s, and A&W. After four years of pressure, Yum! agreed to the one-cent raise in 2005 and, importantly, pledged to make sure that no worker who picked its tomatoes was being exploited. McDonald’s came aboard in 2007, and in 2008 Burger King, Whole Foods Market, and Subway followed, with more expected to join up this year. But the program faces a major obstacle. Claiming that the farmers are not party to the arrangement, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, an agricultural cooperative that represents some 90 percent of the state’s producers, has refused to be a conduit for the raise, citing legal concerns.
The entire article is well worth reading. It ends with advice for people purchasing tomatoes; you should buy at Whole Foods if you can (they’ve made an agreement with the CIW), or if you shop elsewhere avoid tomatoes from Florida or Mexico.
Most of the comments following the article are reasonable, but one reader wrote:
I found your article “The price of tomatoes” by Barry Estabrook offensive. You are asking me to feel sorry for people who knowing broke our laws to send money home to Mexico. ARE YOU CRAZY?
Curtsy: Boing Boing.
From the SFWA newsletter:
Joss Whedon, creator of such science-fiction- and fantasy-themed television series as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Firefly,” and “Dollhouse,” has been named recipient of the Bradbury Award for excellence in screenwriting, as presented by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
SFWA President Russell Davis made the announcement Feb. 16. Whedon will be honored during the Nebula Awards® Weekend in Los Angeles, California, April 24-26, 2009.
Posted February 16, 2009; for full article, including quotes, see: www.sfwa.org/news/2009/09bradburyaward.h…
Michele Bachmann is keepin’ it real, yo:
As Steele concluded his remarks, Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann—the event’s moderator—told Steele he was “da man.”
“Michael Steele! You be da man! You be da man,” she said.
She’s the duly elected representative from Minnesota’s 6th District, ladies and gentlemen.
(Via Jesse)
I was curious about this book until I saw this little gem by the author on Jewcy:
Whatever we say about women and men being equal now and tomorrow - I have three daughters who I want to see beat the world - throughout the whole human past, including the Jewish past, men and women have had different rules, different roles, different thoughts, and different lives.
Biology and common sense both tell us sex is something women have and men want. We can try as hard as we want to talk our way around this, but we can’t make it any less true–for the Jews or any other people.
But I’m sure your book is very smart. Jewish men? You guys have got a long way to go. (That goes for all you Gentile fellas, too.)
PS - So, when I feel aroused, is that really just the need to unload myself of all that pesky sex? Or maybe Judith Butler has just brainwashed me into imagining that I enjoy it.
Dang, think of the poor lesbians - so much sex and nowhere to put it.
UPDATE: The author has responded to a comment I left on the Jewcy post, defending what he wrote as “an exaggeration, but a useful one.”
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.
First read this on the e-mail list serve I’m on for the website Community Labor News. In an article by Mumia Abu-Jamal, he writes:
In Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, there are 9 judges of the Court of Common Pleas. Two of them just pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to convict and sentence juveniles to a private prison, so that they could get kickbacks from the prison’s builders and owners.
…
At least 22% of their judges have admitted being corrupt, in the sordid business of selling the freedom and well-being of poor children for profit.
And the worst part is that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court originally rejected the petition to hear the case.
The media reports on this outrage and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court expresses a little interest. This is the nature of judging these days; when even kids are expendable fodder for the Prison Industrial Complex.
A few weeks after South African minister Fatima Hajaig set off a firestorm by saying much of the world is under the heel of “Jewish money”, it is becoming more and more apparent that this is not a one-off. COSATU, a major South African union deeply tied to the ruling ANC, recently lead a march to protest Israeli government policies. Not necessarily bad in of itself. Where did they march? On the Israeli embassy? Nope. They decided the best place for their march was a Jewish community center. Bongani Masuku, International Relations Secretary for COSATU, phrased the goal this way:
We want to convey a message to the Jews in SA that our 1.9-million workers who are affiliated to COSATU are fully behind the people of Palestine… Any business owned by Israel supporters will be a target of workers in South Africa.
Well, if you want to “convey a message to the Jews” then targeting a Jewish community center is the way to do it. Of course, it does make it more difficult to take seriously the statement of the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s Salim Vallie (which helped coordinate the march), “We are not going to support the canard that says if you are opposed to the policies of Israel you are anti-Semitic, this does not intimidate us.” As Howard Jacobson put it in another context “No, you don’t have to be an anti-Semite to criticise Israel. It just so happens that you are.”
Mr. Masuku then got into an email correspondence with the head of South Africa’s It’s Almost Supernatural blog, which is dedicated to identifying and exposing anti-Semitism in South Africa, after leaving this comment:
Hi guys,
Bongani says hi to you all as we struggle to liberate Palestine from the racists, fascists and zionists who belong to the era of their Friend Hitler!
We must not apologise, every Zionist must be made to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our broathers (sic) and sisters in Palestine. We must target them, expose them and doo allthat (sic) is needed to subject them to pereptual suffering until they withdraw from the land of others and stop their savage attacks on human dignity. Every Palestinian who suffers is a direct attck (sic) on all of us!
In the email exchange, he expressed his view “that Jews are arrogant, not from being told by any Palestinian, but from what I saw myself,” and proclaimed that “If the offices of the Zionist Federation and that loud-mouthed Rabbi and his SABJD [South African Board of Jewish Deputies] were in town we would have marched there.” More distressingly, he made and reiterated a call for all Jews who did not actively disavow Israel to leave the country — to wit, “all the people who deny that occupation is wrong must be encouraged to leave South Africa before they infect our society with much more racism” and “none of those who tolerate Israeli apartheid and racism should ever imagine it [South Africa] to be their home.” Mr. Masuku made it very clear that full-throated condemnation was what was required — not “silently consenting or grumbling under tables.” Ultimately, the only permissible Jews are those who “have proven to be reasonable and humane.”
Matt, noting a “both sides suck” article in the Times, writes:
Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false equivalence article <a target=”_blank” href=”http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/02/25/revkin-dead-wrong/”>painting Will with the same brush</a> as Al Gore. Will’s sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore’s sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in <em>The New York Times</em>.
Matt’s correct, of course. But Matt didn’t note another way in which Gore has acted better than Will — a way that reflects, I think, Gore’s superior approach to science. What did they do once the errors were pointed out? Gore acted responsibly; Will and the Washington Post did not.
The critique of Gore’s chart (a new addition to his presentation) came out earlier this month. Gore, presumably because he or his staff felt the critique had merit, removed the chart from his presentation.
Tigerhawk says that’s embarrassing, and I agree, it is a bit embarrassing — but only a bit. Occasional mistakes are inevitable when a book or presentation draws evidence from hundreds of sources. What would be seriously humiliating is if the error were fatal to Gore’s larger thesis, or if Gore refused to correct the error once it was credibly pointed out. But that one chart isn’t the foundation of Gore’s argument about global climate change. And by promptly correcting the error,1 Gore has demonstrated how responsible writers act.
In contrast, George Will and the Washington Post have, so far, refused to admit, let alone correct, Will’s errors. Instead, the Post has compounded Will’s errors. And as for a prompt correction — it turns out Will has been repeating more or less the same error-filled column since 1992.
In another thread, Ron said “this recession is actually less severe than either of the last two in terms of the percentage of people out of work.” I think Ron’s understating the severity of the current situation.
I found this graph on Time’s econ blog. As you can see, we’ve already had greater job loss this recession than we did in either the 2007 or the 2001 recessions; you have to go back to 1981 for a recession that was worse than this one. And this recession hasn’t even reached its nadir yet.
(There’s an even scarier looking graph floating around, but the graph you see above is more accurate because it’s measuring by percentage, rather than absolute numbers that haven’t been adjusted for the growing population.)
I am so excited about having a new Joss Whedon TV show (even though I haven’t been able to write anything else, because I’ve been planning this epic review. I may need to make the reviews a little less epic, if I’m going to ever blog about anything but Joss). Even though dollhouse is not great, by any stretch of the imagination, I’ve missed having a show to watch every week, and there’s huge potential.
I thought this episode was a huge step up over the second pilot (and not as good as the script from the pilot that they scrapped, but that’s the great minds of Fox executives for you). In particular the main plotline wasn’t deathly boring, and there was some connection between that plotline and what we learned about the dollhouse. It seemed to show exactly how much they could fit in an episode, and how much richer the episodes are when they’re full.
Plus it seemed more like a Joss show in general, it was more twisty, and the dialogue was snappier (”Four brother, none of them democrats” being the standout line). I thought the crash cut between the shooting of the deer and the sex, was obvious, but in keeping with the themes of the episode.
Clearly the heart of the episode was about Echo’s relationship with Boyd, and how he came to see her as human. I thought they tied the threads in together thematically really well, with the violence of Alpha reflecting (and possibly not just metaphorically) the psychopath’s mission. We learnt more about how the dollhouse operated quite organically.
Most importantly I really liked that they showed that Echo and Boyd’s relationship had started off with him contemptuous of her. To get explicitly political: The dollhouse was trying to divide its employees - the actives and the minders - by encouraging the minders pre-existing inclination to see the actives as lesser. To see Boyd and Echo overcome that was pretty awesome.
The big question for me is the politics of the engagement. One of the big questions that other people have asked is: ‘what makes depicitions of sexual predation exploitative?’ and ‘does the fact that the woman wins in the end matter?’. And I can’t really comment that much, because I don’t watch the crime shows and horror movies where this sort of stuff happens, so I don’t really have a feel for the parameters. As a single episode this didn’t bother me from that perspective, although I would have a big problem if it happened all the time. But that might change if I knew just how bad things are in the land of TV and movies I don’t watch.
The question I was more interested in was about the psychopath. I saw his psychopathic behaviour as a natural extension of buying the perfect woman. If you see people as commodities to be brought to order then of course you want to test them, of course you see them as yours. But another reading could be to see the fact that he’s a psychopath as endorsing what went before. “Well it’s a problem now he’s trying to kill her, but building her to spec is totally shiny.”
Having rewatched the ep, I think the show did actively undermine the second reading and support the idea that wanting to buy someone was part of him being a psychopath. In particular, he comes across as creepy from the first moment and his entitled misogyny is apparent from the way he talks about women with Adele. Although any understanding of this episode is challenged by the revelations about the psychopath’s connection with Alpha, and my reading could be uncompatible with what will be revealed in future episodes (which was the one thing I didn’t like about the way the stories came together, I liked the psychopath as a psychopath and wouldn’t like anything to undermine that).
The point of the story turned out to be that Echo overcame her programming in her relationship with Boyd. I think that that, combined with the fact that the psychopath is portrayed as an extension of men who feel entitled to women’s bodies, makes me more generous towards the general creepiness of men writing stories about men who want to kill women. But I would be worried if it was going to be like this lots.
Although this episode was much stronger than the pilot, I think the show still has a long way to go. I’m still unconvinced about Eliza Dushku’s acting range. Although I don’t think the scripts really helped her. The two male fantasy characters she’s played in the first two eps are Faith like (you can imagine either one of them saying “I’ve got mad skills” like Faith to Robin in the final of Chosen). I think she’s doing an excellent job as Echo, unimprinted, but I’m not sure about the idea that she can be anyone.
The FBI plotline just goes from bad to worse. You can tell that the writers on Dollhouse have spent their entire writing life constructing plotlines where they get to set the rules “Don’t touch the Flabotinum in jar C ”1 and don’t know how to make plots from real life. It’s not just that everything they know about cop-shows they’ve learned from other cop shows. It’s not even that they’re telling a story about a cop and have no interest in cops and nothing to say about cops (and I’ve watched the Wire, they’ve watched The Wire, there’s no excuse). It’s that they don’t seem to care that they’re regurgitating scenes we’ve all seen hundreds of times before.
I actually enjoyed Lasagna Girl AKA Mellie. But I was more than a little distracted that this was the woman who was originally cast as November. The casting description called for:
20’s, any ethnicity, beautiful and heavy.
And like a chump I got all excited, just like I did when Kaylee was described as zaftig in the Firefly pilot (and I’m not saying a word about Jewel Staite who was unbelievably awesome as Kaylee). I knew that they’d cast Miracle Laurie, so I wasn’t surprised when I saw her, but I still spent most of that scene going “What?”. I think it was underlined by the fact that the costuming people appear to have taken the same tack the Buffy people did with Tara “This is a real person, she will wear real people clothes that emphasise her real-ness”.2
I forget what the point of this rant was? I’ll be interested to see where Mellie goes, but her character will have to develop quite a way before I stop ranting in my head everytime she’s on screen.
It was really noticeable to me that this episode did not pass the Bechdel test (none of the female characters talked to each other). More than that the women in Dollhouse don’t seem to have relationships with each other, in the way Topher3 and Boyd do (or Boyd and Echo) do. While I’m hopeful that Sierra and Echo will develop some sort of relationship, that’ll be long and slow. All the other female characters seem very isolated from each other. But, unlike on say Battlestar Galactica, where you got the feeling there must have been heaps of relationships between women that existed and the show just really wasn’t interested in them, I can believe that the women who work in the dollhouse are atomised, it seems like the place that would do that to people. I think that could be interesting, as long as they show the relationships developing over time (and at this point Adele DeWitt and Dr Saunders could have a huge history, but we wouldn’t know abuot it).
I’m worried about different things than I was after the first episode. I think this episode showed that they could write an interesting stand-alone story, that we weren’t just going to be bored with a procedural of the week.
But, in my head Echo’s coming to conciousness would be about forming relationships with other people.4 And in this episode it seems to be about violence. The first sign we had that she remembers everything was the horrific-ness of “shoulder to the wheel/do you deserve to live.” It seems to undermine the idea that she’s overcoming her programming if all she takes with her is something from one of her programmers.
This episode was, for me, still more rocket launchers than emotional resonance.5 The Echo/Boyd plotline was cool, but it didn’t hit me in the gut. It was a story about trust and a growing relationship, but it seems strange and unusual, not resonant. I think the premise is very rich in emotional resonance, but mining it might be a challenge, because the leap to identify with an Active, or someone’s relationship with one, is a big one.
It’s frustrating, because the more I watch and think about the dollhouse, the more excited I am about the premise. Because at it’s heart it is a criticism of commodification, and (presumably) a statement that people cannot be commodified. It could be an amazing statement about resistance. And I know Joss’s work well enough to be reasonably confident that that will be part of the story he’s trying to tell (but probably not all of it). I’m just worried that Fox was more into the sex and violence, and not at all into the collective resistance, and they’re going to cancel it before we get to see the bits that I’m most interested in.
I’m going to have a post up later about Bobby Jindal’s Republican Response of last night — it’s taken me that long to get over my anger at him for using Hurricane Katrina as an example of why we need less government — but before I do, I wanted to take note of a name I’m seeing a lot on liberal blogs of late.
The name is Piyush.
Piyush is Bobby Jindal’s official name, the one given to him by his parents at birth. Like many second-generation immigrants before him, Jindal has chosen not to use that name in his professional life. Instead, he uses “Bobby.” Why does he do this? For the same reason that millions of second-generation immigrants have chosen to go by John instead of Juan, or Margaret instead of Mulan, or Barry instead of Barack, or Hank instead of Hans — because using a more traditional American name allows one to avoid some of the anti-immigrant, nativist hatred that has been a part of American society since the first Americans came to this country illegally and stole land away from its rightful owners.
Calling Bobby Jindal “Piyush” comes from the same dark part of the American soul that motivates some conservatives to always include Barack Obama’s middle name when speaking of him. It’s a way to “other” him, to make him sound less like an American, and more like a foreigner. It’s a way to attack Jindal’s ethnicity, and to argue subtly that he should be taken less seriously because he is an Indian-American, and therefore not a “real” American.
And that is, quite simply, abhorrent. There are many, many reasons to dislike Bobby Jindal politically, from his retrograde positions on women’s rights to his Norquistian, drown-it-in-the-bathtub view of economics. But these have nothing to do with his ethnicity, or where his parents were born.
Bobby Jindal has chosen to call himself Bobby. Polite and decent people call a person by the name they ask you to call them by. So feel free to call Bobby Jindal a sexist, a Christianist, and a disaster for the economy — but call him Bobby Jindal. Because that’s his name.
David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch have written the week’s most talked-about op-ed, “A Reconciliation on Gay Marriage.” It’s an eye-catching byline, because Blankenhorn - a marriage equality opponent I’ve criticized once or twice in the past — and Rauch, one of the country’s leading marriage equality proponents — seem unlikely bedfellows.
We take very different positions on gay marriage. We have had heated debates on the subject. Nonetheless, we agree that the time is ripe for a deal that could give each side what it most needs in the short run, while moving the debate onto a healthier, calmer track in the years ahead.
It would work like this: Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.
Pam, who I usually agree with, has misunderstood what the proposal is:
I have a problem with this already, though I see where they are trying to accomplish — getting same-sex couples access to the rights and benefits of civil marriage and cede the word marriage to those who cannot decouple it from religious marriage in their heads.
But the compromise doesn’t cede the word “marriage.” Blankenhorn and Rauch aren’t trying to end debate over the word “marriage.” What the B/R compromise (as I shall now call it) attempts to do is put aside two sub-debates associated with marriage, while leaving the primary debate — over formal marriage equality — untouched and ongoing.
I think marraige equality proponents should take this deal, if it becomes a real legislative possibility.
First of all, Federal recognition of same-sex marriages and unions is worth a lot, even though the fight for full marriage equality would still go on. The benefits for couples currently torn apart by unjust and bigoted immigration laws, for example, would be incredibly important, and that’s just one example — there’s also tax law, social security, etc..
Second of all, the anti-marriage-equality movement relies on saying “booga-booga! Teh gays are coming to take away your religious liberties!” in order to drum up donations and votes. This bill could be an enourmous boon to us, because it would let equality proponents say “not only is that not true, it’s against a Federal law that was passed just last year — and the law was originally proposed by the guy who wrote the book on opposing equal marraige!”
Would that, alone, be a game-changer? Would it stop some marriage equality proponents from lying about what marraige equality would do? Of course not. But it would help. Not a guaranteed win, but also not nothing. As David Link writes,
The compromise tests the veracity of the claim that religious believers worry civil recognition of same-sex relationships will invade their belief system through the enforcement of civil rights laws which require gays to be treated equally. The right has been able to scare up a few anecdotes about this misuse of civil rights laws: a wedding photographer forced to photograph a lesbian wedding; a same-sex couple who wanted to take advantage of a church-owned gazebo, which the church offered for use to the public; and churned them into a froth of paranoia about governmental intrusion into religion.
I’m with Jon in offering this proposal up publicly. I am happy to let the right know that we are dedicated to stopping this cascade of anecdotes. If they want additional assurance that the first amendment’s separation of church and state means what it says, I will be on the front lines to add a statutory “and we really mean it” clause.
In fact, the B/R compromise doesn’t go far enough. Can we also add another “and we really mean it” clause, saying that parents have the right to withdraw their children from any class in which the teacher is teaching about same-sex marriage?
Because if those two clauses had been federal law a year ago, I very much doubt Proposition 8 could have passed.
* * *
There is a danger here, as Nan Hunter points out:
…satan is truly in the details of their proposal for a “robust” exception for religious belief. It was striking to me that the op-ed completely omitted any discussion of the impact when non-church (etc) entities – like charities or hospitals with a religious affiliation – accept public funds. When all of our tax dollars are supporting these organizations, then all of us have a legitimate concern about the services they provide.
I wondered about this too, and emailed Rauch asking about it. Rauch told me that he’s imagining broad federal guidelines, with freedom for states to make their own religious exemption rules within those guidelines.
That’s conforting, in a way. If the “robust” exception for religious belief would mean that Massachusetts can set its own standards, then Massachusetts wouldn’t have to accept Catholic hospitals refusing to acknowlege same-sex marriages. Of course, homophobes in states like Florida would use the exemption to screw over same-sex couples — but that’s already happening, so it’s not clear how the B/R compromise would make things worse.
Assuming it doesn’t become a trojan horse for eviserating anti-discrimination laws (as Kate Harding thinks is Blankenhorn’s intention), I’d like to see this compromise become law. It could provide substantial benefits for same-sex couples nationwide, and also blunt one of the anti-equality side’s favorite attacks. And I think that the more experience the country has with legally recognized same-sex unions, the better the odds of reaching full marriage equality. (Maggie Gallagher agrees with me, although in her case it’s something she fears.)
Curtsy: Eve at the Marriage Debate blog.
Paul Berman gets at something important in this interview:
We like to think of hatred of the Jews as a low, base sentiment that is entertained by nasty, ignorant people, wallowing in their own hatefulness. But normally it’s not like that. Hatred for the Jews has generally taken the form of a lofty sentiment, instead of a lowly one - a noble feeling embraced by people who believe they stand for the highest and most admirable of moral views.
In the Middle Ages, Christians felt they were upholding the principles of universal redemption, and they looked on the Jews as terrible people because the Jews had refused the word of God - had insisted on remaining Jews. And so, the loftiest of religious sentiments led to hatred of the Jews.
In the 18th century, the Enlightenment philosophers looked on the Enlightenment itself as the loftiest form of thought - the truest of all possible guides to universal justice and happiness. The Enlightenment philosophers detested Christianity because it was a font of superstition and oppression. But this only led them to despise the Jews even more - no longer because the Jews had refused the message of Christianity, but because the Jews had engendered the message of Christianity. And the damnable Jews insisted on remaining Jews, instead of repudiating religion altogether.
The religious wars wreaked all kinds of damage on Europe. But the Treaty of Westphalia came along in 1648 and put an end to religious wars by establishing a system of states with recognized borders, each state with its own religion. The new Westphalian system embodied yet another Enlightenment idea of lofty ideals - the grandest guarantee of universal peace and justice. But the Jews were scattered throughout Europe, instead of being gathered together in a single state. The new state system was supposed to be a comfortable shoe, and the Jews were a pebble. And they insisted on remaining Jews, instead of helpfully disappearing. So one hated the Jews for failing to conform to the new system of states.
Today we have arrived at yet another idea about how to bring about universal peace and justice - the loftiest, most advanced idea of our own time. Instead of looking on well-established states with solid borders to keep the peace, Westphalia-style, we look on states as a formula for oppression and war. Lofty opinion nowadays calls for post-state political systems, like the European Union. Unfortunately, nowadays the Jews possess a state. Thus one hates the Jews in the name of lofty opinion, no longer because the Jews lack a state but because, on the contrary, they have a state. They seem keen on keeping their state. And once again the Jews are seen to be affirming a principle that high-minded people used to uphold but have now rejected as antiquated.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people with advanced ideas began to look on Christian hatred of the Jews as a retrograde prejudice - and the advanced thinkers embraced, instead, the pseudo-science of racism. They no longer hated the Jews on religious grounds - they hated the Jews on racial grounds. The word “racism” originally applied to hatred of the Jews. Racial hatred seemed up to date. Today, however, racism itself has come to seem like a retrograde prejudice. And so, people with advanced opinions hate the Jews on anti-racist grounds, and they regard the Jews as the world’s leading racists.
And so forth. The unstated assumption is always the same. To wit: the universal system for man’s happiness has already arrived (namely, Christianity, or else Enlightenment anti-Christianity; the Westphalian state system, or else the post-modern system of international institutions; racial theory, or else the anti-racist doctrine in a certain interpretation). And the universal system for man’s happiness would right now have achieved perfection - were it not for the Jews. The Jews are always standing in the way. The higher one’s opinion of oneself, the more one detests the Jews.
[...]
To be sure, lofty disdain comes in different versions. In its respectable version, lofty disdain right now adopts a position of long-faced sadness over Israel for being such a reprehensible place, for existing at a moment when states ought to fade away, for being racist, for perpetuating religion, for being an example of European imperialism, and so forth. One shakes one’s head in sorrowful regret that the Israelis are the way they are.
But the disdain takes another shape, too, which is cruder, though it follows more or less from the first version. In the cruder version, the Jews are not just regrettable for being retrograde. Much worse: the Jews have done something really terrible. By forming their state and standing by it, they have set out actively to oppose the principle of universal justice and happiness - the principle that decrees that a people like the Jews should not have a state.
This, I think, helps fuse together points I made in my Superseded Jew post, and the ones I explored in I Think You’re Insulting Me Wrong.
I’m really tired of media depicting atheists as joyless, grouchy people whose lives are characterized by a lack of human connection, and a disdain for other people’s happiness.
Some of us laugh and are silly and enjoy being social.
From Petpluto at Art at the Auction:
House is problematic in the way above, but also for the reason articulated by MaggieElizabeth, a poster at Television Without Pity:
Ninety percent of the time, the woman gets to be the normal one.
Sure, she’s competent, she’s tough, and she’s strong — but she’s ordinary, and all the while she’s surrounded by weird and unpredictable male characters with funny, charismatic personalities.House is the eccentric; he’s the genius, he’s the mastermind, he’s the guy who does not conform to society’s standards and doesn’t have to because he’s so damn brilliant. Cuddy may have been the youngest Chief of Medicine around, but she is still nothing special when compared to Gregory House. This isn’t House’s problem, not really. I’m not advocating a world in which men are always the normal ones and women get to be the weird, charismatic unpredictable ones. Just like the problem with a movie isn’t that it in particular can’t pass the Bechdel Test, but that most don’t. The problem isn’t that Star Wars in particular doesn’t have two women discussing something other than men; the problem is that a significant portion of the films made don’t. The problem isn’t that House is a surly misanthrope genius, but that there are a bevy of male characters in House’s shoes and very few women. The problem with the genius man or the man with incredible gifts is that there is no counterbalance. The Pie Maker on Pushing Daisies with his power to wake the dead; Chuck from Chuck having the incredible ability to see and remember hundreds of data-encrypted pictures; House; Walter Bishop; the guy on The Mentalist; the guy on Lie to Me; the guy on The Eleventh Hour; the guy on Journeyman. The women who are on these shows are sometimes capable, sometimes not, but almost always ordinary as well.
Petpluto acknowledges some exceptions (Buffy, Starbuck, etc) but adds:
But these shows (most of which are off the air) don’t carry enough weight to strike a proper counterbalance to the overall spectrum of shows where the opposite is true. And that is the issue with most of these problems. On their own, a show with stronger male characters, or smarter male characters, is not inherently problematic. But when most shows employ that narrative, it becomes more so.
From the New York Times:
Prof. Marshall Grossman has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers in his English classes at the University of Maryland.
“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”
He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.
“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”
A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.
…
James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “
In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.
Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.
“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”
“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”
What else is there really than the effort you put in? Well… you know, there’s the finished product. The one thing that I, the educator, actually see? But that’s inconsequential, right?
Here’s the bad news - I originally wrote a pretty detailed response to this article, including both my outraged reaction as an adjunct who has experienced this sort of behavior, and a more thoughtful response on how race and gender play into student entitlement. But I found I couldn’t write it without divulging details about past jobs. So no commentary for you!
Instead, here’s an education-themed tab dump (it’s been a fertile week at NYT):
The humanities continue to have to justify their existence to college administrators. The best justification, in my opinion: the humanities explore what it means to be a human being. It’s true that you don’t need to go to college to do that, but college would be a pretty barren place without it.
18 students have been suspended from NYU following a sit-in. The students were demanding, among other things, an annual reporting of the university’s operating budget and the right of TAs to organize. Oh, the horror.
Speaking of university labor and operating budgets, coaches, star faculty members, and administrators can make millions of dollars a year while adjuncts and TAs - you know, the people doing the actual teaching? - subsist on salaries as low as $4,000. (That last part’s not in the article - it’s the salary I received my first year as a TA, after tuition was deducted.)
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
This kid is the master of facial expressions. I’ve caught him making some of the goofiest faces. He was making this face over and over again a few weeks ago. Believe it or not he actually likes the spinach, but he just has a funny way of showing it.
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