This is an open thread; use it to discuss whatever you’d like, or to post interesting links. Self-linking is encouraged.
Someone at the AP (or perhaps the Washington Post) is a brilliant geeky headline writer.
Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo
The Associated Press
Thursday, May 3, 2007; 3:34 PMSEOUL, South Korea — They came from all over the world, poles in hand, and feet ready to inch more than half a mile across a high wire strung over the Han River in a spine-tingling battle of balance, speed and high anxiety.
As part of its annual city festival, the South Korean capital staged Thursday what was billed as the world’s first high-wire championship, drawing 18 contestants from nine countries for three days of supreme feats of concentration.
Hat tip: Robert at Lawyers, Guns and Money
While I’m posting, let me point out that two bloggers I’ve often disagreed with have recently written posts I mostly or entirely agree with; David at The Debate Link has written a couple of posts on Israel I mostly agree with, and Daran at Feminist Critics has been criticizing an anti-feminist attack on Mary Koss’ rape prevalence study.
The pun hurts my brane.
In other news, I just made a post that I think is one of my better ones (I have been sniffing at it warily for a couple of days.) It’s called when you walk outside your door, no one speaks your language.
I’ve been writing about feminist ornamentation and feminist jewelry, and whether or not that’s possible, what the inherent problems are with the medium, etc – if anyone is interested :)
Moderately Insane: On children being private, and adults trying to break in to their heads.
“…..our gender expectations already allow us to see boys as “not forthcoming,” so when a boy sets a boundary of something he doesn’t want to talk about, society accepts that. It’s not considered disrespectful, or a personal slight.
Girls, OTOH, are expected to be more forthcoming. What that means is that outsiders expect to be able to “break in” to girls’ heads with relative impunity, backed by socialization and the ability to claim offense. Because girls “like to talk,” right?
No.
It’s a power issue, and it’s a sexist one….”
Before “Calvin and Hobbes” got syndicated, Bill Watterson was an editorial cartoonist, drawing for Cincinatti Post and the Sun Newspapers chain.
Anyway, this guy is uploading some of his ed. cartoons. He has two up so far
http://matttauber.blogspot.com/2008/01/bill-wattersons-post-cartoons.html
http://matttauber.blogspot.com/2008/02/bill-watterson-post-cartoon-2.html
Reminds me when a group of Reformers within the Canadian Alliance party were unhappy with the way the newly-combined party was being handled, and tried to split. The news world’s term for these splitters?
The Rebel Alliance.
God, I thought only British journalists came up with such pun-heavy headlines.
It did make me laugh, though.
With regards to the 2nd Watterson cartoon and the commentary thereupon; wasn’t it the victory of Carter over Kennedy and his subsequent swamping by Reagan in the general election the genesis of the current Democratic structure of both elected and non-elected delegates?
I’m writing a series of posts about sexuality (specifically, about my process of disentangling it from strange and damaging cultural messages, and my idea of what good sex and healthy sexuality look like); the most recent post is here, with the earlier ones linked in it.
Has anyone out there blogged about this recent whiny piece in the NYT about early American cultures museum exhibitions?
It appears the author objects to the evenhandedness that’s becoming more popular when comparing cultures.
Anybody got a toothache?
Come on over and commiserate with me, if you would be so kind.
argh! :(
From the NYT article on Native Americans:
“It is important to remember that there is no best or model culture. All cultures,” we are told, “are equally valid to the individuals living in them.”
What do you think of that? For one thing, it seems to me to presume that everyone living in a given culture is satisfied with the structure of that culture. The very existence of this blog seems to dispute that for our own culture – I doubt that it’s true for others.
Ron, the New York Times implies that the opinion in the quote above is shit.
I would expect that you, of all people, agree. I certainly do. I think that no
culture on Earth, past or present, is nearly as kind to the average individual
as the ones Western Europe and Northern America enjoy. Is our culture
perfect? Hell, no! Does it come closest, and most importantly, is it striving in
the right direction? I think so. I wish I were sure it was also _going_ in the
right direction… but that also may be.
The nice thing about those ready to defend the right of every culture to exist
is that they are usually incapable of defending anything at all.
Love this blog, thought you might be interested in a new site thats about a whole new way to unite and get behind what you support. It’s called goodcircle.org. You can benefit up to 10 different causes, like having your own foundation. You can message, organize and publicize events, publish newsletters, share pics and vids, set up stores and auctions. And a big chunk of what you buy online benefits your goodcircle and it’s causes. Put iTunes to work!
I think our culture is going in the right direction overall. There are lurches to the left and to the right on occasion that are off target, and sometimes we take a step backwards. But if you look at it from a long-term viewpoint the United States provides more opportunity for individuals to seize “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” than any country on earth. It is more tolerant and acommodating of individual differences. Differences in class, race, religion, etc. provide a lower barrier to individual achievement than anywhere else.
Is this paradise? No. It’s a human endeavor with human faults as well as human glories. There are some terrible inequities. On an absolute scale there are lots of things to fix. On a relative scale, though, I’d rather be nowhere else.
I think it’s OK to view other historical cultures through a modern lens (“can you believe they practiced human sacrifice? that’s NUTS!”) but only if we also view our OWN history through the same, modern, lens (“can you believe we burned people at the stake? Can you believe we slaughtered entire populations? That’s NUTS!”)
Similarly, I think it’s OK to apply “standards of the time” to other historical cultures, and also to our own: “Sure, we burned people and slaughtered people, but that was just SOP back then,” or “Sure they sacrificed people, but that was just SOP back then.”
It may be that analyzing things through equivalent viewpoints results in a conclusion that we are/were a ‘good’ or ‘better’ culture than others. But for many years, we cheated on the analysis.
Thanks for the links.
I don’t normally take up your invitation to self-link in your open threads, but I was intending to do so with this Koss miniseries, when it’s complete. (I have at least one more planned.) But links posted by you are much better, so again, thanks.
Here’s a new comic that’s actually pretty good. I highly recommend it
http://imaginethiscomic.com
I do not understand why people insist on reading such statements as being assertions of the really dumb version of cultural relativism that gets trotted out when people want to criticize multiculturalism, i.e., that the simple fact of different cultures means that people from one culture cannot speak critically about other cultures because cultural differences places difference itself in a pure domain where any attempt at critical thinking is, by definition, racist or xenophobic or pick-your-flavor-of-oppressive thinking.
Of course any culture will be valid to an individual living in it, in the sense that the culture is the system through and in which that person was brought up to experience the world. This does not preclude individuals from rebelling against their culture, working to change it, looking to other cultures for other models of thinking/behavior, etc. Indeed, any change the person works for will be in response/reaction to the culture that already exists, meaning the culture has validity even to people who want to change it.
Nor does a statement like the one quoted it preclude people from, say, the US from looking at a culture like, say, Iran, and noticing and pointing out, to anyone anywhere else in the world, and acting on the fact that women have more rights here than they do there. It’s when what people from the US say and/or do denies the emotional/psychological/etc. validity of Iranian culture to Iranians that there is a problem.
First cousins marry in Iran; this makes many people in the US–my father and his wife, for example–very squeamish. This pattern of marriage is absolutely connected to patriarchal culture in Iran. When I discussed this with my father and his wife, my father’s wife insisted that once you remove the patriarchy, the pattern of first cousins marrying would disappear as well, because in her mind that pattern is wrong, period. It did not occur to her that even in the absence of patriarchy people in Iran might continue to choose to marry first cousins because that pattern of marriage might still continue to be valid as a pattern of marriage, even in the absence of the male dominant system out of which it arose.
The analysis I’ve read of marriage of first cousins in Iran and other such cultures is that the culture stresses loyalty to the extended family or clan. Marriage to a first cousin preserves property and ensures that the two partner’s loyalties to the clan are strong and that there are not conflicts to loyalties to other clans.
Ron, there’s no question (except among the reality-denying set) that inequality in the US is unusually large and growing. And there’s an increasing consensus that things aren’t so great here as far as mobility goes, either. Read this recent article in the IHT — note in particular that even the Heritage Foundation scholar (who is presumably solidly right-wing) doesn’t dispute the numbers, although he does dispute the causes.
From a review of academic research on social mobility:
So it’s not true that we have the lowest barriers to individual (economic) achievement of any nation — unless you assume that the barriers here are lower, but people in other countries are trying harder and so overcoming their higher barriers. But the data I’ve seen on productivity per worker hour, and on total hours worked, doesn’t support the idea that Americans are lazy — quite the opposite, in fact.
I don’t know of any research at all comparing racial barriers to economic attainment internationally, but if you know of any such research I’d be interested in seeing it. I certainly see no reason to assume that racism is a greater or lesser barrier here than in (say) Canada without seeing evidence.
Charles, that comic does seem pretty good — the drawing, in particular, is wonderful. I’ll keep an eye on it.
Ron:
“It is important to remember that there is no best or model culture. All cultures,” we are told, “are equally valid to the individuals living in them.”
What do you think of that? For one thing, it seems to me to presume that everyone living in a given culture is satisfied with the structure of that culture. The very existence of this blog seems to dispute that for our own culture – I doubt that it’s true for others.
Acually, the existince of thic blog is probably fairly indicitive that some people always have a problem with any given culture they are in, thus makign them equally valid to the individuals living in them – that is to say, including the option of “not valid at all” for some members.
The existence of trickster figures and rituals which bend the rules of culture in many (if not all) cultures points toward not only this dissatissfaction, but also built in ways to express it and sometimes alter the society.
Wow, a pro-basketball player who shares many of my political views and has the time & money to act on them. That’s a rare thing.
http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080307/SPORTS/803070332/1002/SPORTS
So it’s not true that we have the lowest barriers to individual (economic) achievement of any nation…
Well, perhaps not. On the other hand, in which of the countries that are putatively outperforming us on these mobility metrics, is the leading candidate for head of state a member of a racial minority? I think there are aspects of mobility and opportunity that are not reflected in the statistics, and differences of outcome are not necessarily differences of opportunity.
On cousin marriage, by the way, the United States is out of step with the rest of the world. We are one of only a few countries that prohibit the practice of close cousin marriage, and it is the historical norm for most cultures. (That’s a vast oversimplification, of course; we have plenty of cousin marriage here sub rosa, and plenty of other places it’s not all that common.)
Hey Charles, thanks for the plug on my new comic!
On the other hand, in which of the countries that are putatively outperforming us on these mobility metrics, is the leading candidate for head of state a member of a racial minority?
Of course Great Britain, Germany, Indonesia & Pakistan have had a woman as PM. So I suppose that they are all outperforming us on mobility metrics. As are Iraq & South Africa because they had minorities as their heads of state.
I can think of a lot of exceptions when talking about heads of state wrt mobility metrics. I don’t think that, on its own, head of state is a leading indicator of mobility metrics.
Robert, is there any reasonably convenient way of finding out if Finland, Sweden, or Norway has ever had a person in a racial or ethnic minority run for head of state and come close, whether or not they won?
I’m not the one who made grand claims about one nation being better than another — RonF is. If I had ever claimed “differences in class, race, religion, etc. provide a higher barrier to individual achievement in the US than in other wealthy countries….” then it would be reasonable for you to ask for me to provide such evidence, but I didn’t say anything like that. In fact, I said that I have no idea if the US is more or less open to minorities.
And while I agree that there’s no absolute way of measuring a concept as broad and nebulous as “advancement,” or to find out if there’s ever been a politician in a position similar to Obama’s in other countries, on the claims we can measure, Ron doesn’t appear to be correct. (Or would only be correct if his terms were defined very carefully and narrowly to guarantee a U.S. win.)
Which isn’t to say that the US sucks on all those measures. It’s just not the Best In The Whole Wide World.
As for heads of state, is France less anti-Semitic than the US because they’ve had a Jewish (by birth — Léon Blum) elected head of state, while the US has not? Are you going to say that Chavez’s election proves that minorities are more able to advance in Venuzuala than in the US?
Don’t get me wrong, I do think it matters which groups get to be political rulers — but I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all, nor a reason to ignore economic evidence which contradicts the “We’re Number One!” thesis.
> Wow, a pro-basketball player who shares many of my political views and has
> the time & money to act on them. That’s a rare thing.
Heh. He’s a foreigner. I know exactly one pro-basketball player, and he will talk
your ear off if you start talking about politics. And if you just say the word ‘Kosovo’… It would be a rare thing only if he were born and raised in the US.
Hi Amp,
Just stopping by to say hello. Hi to bean too!
Haven’t been able to visit the site for ages because cubefarm firewalls block it.
But now I have my own Macbook!
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Love this site.
Hope you and yours are well.
Damn Blogger to hell! It’s crashed again. So nothing to read at my site or others who have been victimized by this latest crash. I was trying to leave a comment at Donna’s site when it went down. It reminds you of how many outstanding blogs are on Blogger.
I recently started a new blog and zine called Dissension, mainly about feminism and veganism though there are other topics scattered about as well. Issue 1 of the zine, What is Dissension, is out now. Issue 2: Body Image will be out later this month.
Interesting links, Amp. I’d like to see one on how inequality in the U.S. is growing. I’m not disputing it, I just haven’t seen any studies on the matter. And when you say “unusually large”, do you mean in comparison to previous times in American history, or with other countries, or both?
In looking at those countries that are rated ahead of the U.S., it strike me to ask if anyone has done a correlation between mobility in and cultural homogeneity of a given country?
I’m definitely on board with the issue of education availability and how necessary it is. While I’m obviously not a proponent of government involvement in general, I strongly support education support – it pays off. I wonder if you’ve been following some of the stories lately about university endowments and disbursements thereof. Without going out right now and looking up links, apparently it occurred to some Congressman to ask “Hey – Harvard has about a $30+ billion endowment, why do they bother to charge tuition?” Apparently it’s a standard that a organization with a large endowment (e.g., a foundation) should disburse at least 5% of it every year, and Harvard doesn’t come close, while making over 15% on it’s investments. Harvard was a bit stung by this and is ramping up financial aid. Now the Congressional Finance Committee has asked about 150 schools to fill out a questionnaire on their endowments, what they use them for, what their admissions and financial aid policies are, etc. In MIT’s response they point out that they’ve got a strong financial aid program (to the point that it can be cheaper than a state school for a low income family) and have decided to make MIT tuition free to any family earning less than $75K a year, about 30% of incoming freshmen.
Talk about mobility; about 1/6 of their incoming freshmen are the first generation in their family to go to college. Think about the difference a degree from MIT will make between them and their parents. Of course, MIT’s incoming class is only about 1100 or so a year. I’d be curious to see what other schools do in that regard.
The U.S. needs to do a better job in this regard. Of course, it needs to do a lot better job in K – 12 education too. Too many kids are going though school thinking that excelling in academics is uncool and put a lot more emphasis on sports and pop culture, but that’s a rant I won’t bore you with. I’ll just point out that American kids’ entrance into engineering and science has been dropping for years, which is a huge threat to our economy.
So – since this is an open thread – what do you all think of Geraldine Ferraro’s comments?
Edit: RonF is talking about this:
http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_8489268
(hey, do you notice that Obama is calling for Hillary to denounce Ferraro? Makes sense, right?)
There’s a reason that I often need to look at a comment’s header to see if it is by Sailorman or by RonF. The biggest difference between the comments by you two is RonF’s obsession with the purity of the Boy Scouts (wow, has that ever creeped me out). And that there are increasingly rare instances in which you agree with my position.
Alas comments are now mostly a haven for racism denial, sexism denial, denial that the US provides anything other than a level playing field and a host of other right wing dogma (bootstraps, anyone?). Even the insightful, well written comments by folks like Silenced is Foo, sylphhead, Bjartmarr and others (including the several, currently infrequent commenters like CrysT) don’t provide for anything like a balanced debate. RonF, Robert & Sailorman absolutely dominate nearly all the threads and that just isn’t readable for me any longer.
I would just like to, once again, thank Amp and his co-bloggers & moderators over the years for putting together a blog that gave a lot of value for several years. It was a difficult task and it was done as well as could be reasonably asked for. I learned a lot and I read a lot of comments by intelligent, knowledgeable people that I don’t think that I could have gotten anywhere else.
I agree, although I actually find RonF’s comments to be sometimes interesting. It seems to me that he’s less belligerent and hostile, and more likely to be interacting with other posters in a way that actually takes their arguments into account, than the other two on your list.
The options at this point appear to be:
1) Do nothing, and allow the comments to continue being a haven for denialism which is actively hostile to progressive commenters. The result of this will clearly be the loss of even more progressive commenters, including Jake Squid, and probably many of the people who moderate and host here, including myself.
2) Ban those who currently dominate the threads and change the moderation policy with the hope of eventually being able to reconstruct a progressive community. (Is it too late at this point to do so? Is there enough healthy tissue here to survive an amputation of what’s dead and rotting?)
3) Turn off comments entirely.
Jake: your reasons are why I only drop by occasionally to make a small comment, generally on the more noncontroversial topics. After all, if the only thing that’s going to happen is that the Far Right commenters will jump en masse and stop any chance at real debate cold, why bother writing something I actually have to think more than a minute about?
Mandolin: I can think of another option, but it would require all of us to engage in some serious self-discipline. We could simply pass over the comments written by people we know are not here to argue with progressives in good faith, and only respond to people who are truly engaging in the debate.
I still don’t get why a whole group of people whose beliefs are so extremely divergent from that of Alas’ authors, and who are so obviously not inclined to really listen or engage or in fact do anything other than make kneejerk denials of every progressive position expressed feel the need to hang out here. It’s weird.
I tend to like all the individuals who post regularly on “Alas,” including the folks who are well to the right of my views. I like having dissenting views here. I like hearing how people who are far to the right of me respond to my views. And I don’t think some of the dismissals of those posters, or the stereotyping of their views, is always fair. (For instance, in the voting rights discussion going on right now Sailorman is arguing a position that I think most liberals and progressives would agree with.)
At the same time, I’m bothered by the way “Alas” has turned into a place dominated by relatively right-wing posters. For years, critics were falsely claiming that the “Alas” comments were dominated by right-wingers, and I didn’t give a shit because I could see that it simply wasn’t true. But now it is increasingly true, and now it bothers me.
It’s the total pattern that I object to, not the participation of any individual poster.
But I’m not sure what to do about it. Mandolin and I have been discussing options but have yet made a decision. One possibility is that I might start cross-posting my posts on some other blog, and “Alas” will become a much more restricted place in terms of who can post here.
Unfortunately, at least from up here in the cheap seats it appears as though your right-wing posters are the ones who didn’t mind the domain sale. If 90% of your right-wingers stick and 90% of your left-wingers bail…not sure how to rectify that.
But if you would like me to comment less frequently, I will.
I’d like to add one more point that slipped by me earlier: responding to Mandolin’s suggestion 2, though there have been occasions where specific Rightwing posters have deserved to be banned*, I think would be extremely unfair to ban them solely for their political stances.
Yes, having to wade through comment after comment of racism/sexism denial and “USA! We’re Number One!!” to find only one or two people actually engaging with the issues is annoying, it’s not banworthy behaviour on the Righties’ part. Like I said before, it’s really, really weird that they feel the need to dominate a blog that in no way represents their beliefs, but the truth is that they were permitted to make Alas into their He-Man Woman-Haters clubhouse. They didn’t bully their way in, they’ve been treated like valued guests for a long time now.
*and yes, I am well aware that many lefty commenters, including myself, have crossed the line at times
Eh. It’s not that I dislike the 3 folks I named. (Well, that’s not strictly true. I really do dislike one of them.) I certainly find many of their views to be odious and destructive, but that’s not the same thing. I certainly find some things that each of them do to be dislikable, but that’s not the same thing either.
What I do mind is the domination of threads and, due to the various argumentation styles they utilize, the derailments that inevitably follow.
The denial thread is just the latest example. Basically the comments from the Dominating Peanut Gallery just trot out the old, “but life can be hard for X, too, therefore what you say isn’t correct or important. Hey! Look over there. It’s a pony!!!!” Boring. Irrelevant. Shows lack of understanding the message. Who wants to converse with that?
In the past, when I knew that there was support for bringing the thread back around to the issue (or some relevant tangent), I would have made a comment longer than the one that I did. Now, as Crys T says, it isn’t worth the effort.
What Robert says about the results of the sale of the domain is undoubtedly true. That seriously impacted the community and environment of the comments. While Amp was still incredibly active wrt posting & moderating, however, it was still a viable space. Part of the loss from Amp’s concentrating on his art is the loss of the many well-researched & written posts on politics & feminism & weight issues, etc. The other loss is his moderating which, for all my complaints, really did accomplish his goal for making the sort of space he was looking for and, as a side effect, created a space that I found enjoyable and educational. It was, really, a unique blog & I haven’t found another that approaches the level of discussion that there used to be here.
I have no complaints with the posts made by Mandolin & Maia & Rachel and others. They’re just not as interesting to me as the kinds of posts Amp is prone to make. But that’s my taste and should not be read as saying that there is anything wrong with the posts of the other bloggers.
The big problem is, I think, to do with moderation. It is clear that Mandolin moderates differently than Amp does, which is fine. I don’t think that (keeping w/ the example of Mandolin as moderator) that style of moderation has been as successful in terms of balancing the community of commentors. Why? I dunno. I could be entirely wrong about moderation being the larger problem, but that’s my impression right now. I guess that part of it is because there is so much less interaction from the more progressive folks – it seems to me that that used to function as a form of moderation itself.
Alas can certainly be turned into the kind of space that Mandolin & Amp & Rachel & Maia (and any other co-blogger) would want it to be. That will take a clear statement of the goals of the blog and the moderation policies followed by a lot of hard work moderating. Yeah, the ownership of the domain will always be a problem for a number of folks & they, quite likely, won’t be back. But by reducing the domination of comments by a few folks, I think that there can be a vibrant community to discuss whatever posts are done here. I hope that the bloggers are up to doing the moderation required as I find comments to often be just as interesting & educational as the posts. Perhaps you could find more non-blogging volunteer moderators? I don’t know.
Whatever you decide to do, I’ll still probably read most of the posts. I just won’t be reading the comments until a change is made. Good luck with whatever you guys decide to do.
I mostly read these days. Some days I have energy for dealing with the “What about the White and/or White men?” on the racial issues threads or how sometimes the MRA perspective seems to dominate the women’s issues threads. Every discussion is about “winning” an argument and sometimes it’s just having a discussion. But there’s a lot of good reading too.
You can’t always control your audience and often blogs attract the opposite of the audience they might have been intended for. Feminist or women’s site often have to address MRAs trying to control discourse. My site wasn’t the first addressing police issues who’s had to deal with visitors who claim to be LE doing the same.
I wish people like Crys T were here more. I wish a certain Ms_Xeno would return but I understand why they aren’t or don’t.
I don’t know if I’m part of the problem or not. I know there are a number of progressive points were I disagree with Amp et. al. I’m not really shy about posting them.
I post here because it’s interesting, people seem less interested in winning than in discussing, and it’s polite. I know some people don’t like the civility thing, but I like it. If you want a progressive blog where divergent viewpoints are met with vitriol, profanity, and rage they’re out there. I don’t read them much but they’re there.
I know that the technology is an obstacle but I think comment ratings would be a good fix. Get a bad enough score and you’re auto banned from the thread.
Also, say this about Robert. He’s smart, he obviously likes to talk about these issues, and he ‘s willing to put a LOT of time into the debate. I have no idea how he finds the time to post all of the comments he does. Same is true for the other people mentioned. Maybe they just write very very quickly.
just my 2 cents.