Please post what you want in comments. Self-links are asked to come right in and sit down in the comfy chair next to the fireplace.
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I haven’t yet read the book, but I love this quote:
Waking up from the dream is the worst part. It always takes a few seconds. It’s like… suppose you were underwater and naked and running out of air, deep down where all the light’s gone, and you have to come up for air. And you spend every last precious ounce of your life’s energy in the effort to rise to the surface and take that badly needed breath, and just as your head breaks from the water you remember, too late, to your horror, that you are a fish.
–Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
I also adore without reservation the cover design.
- Speaking of book cover design, the “Randomize” (or, perhaps, “Ronandimze” or “Rnoizadme”) function of the book cover archive is a very effective time-waster, if you’re in the market for such a thing.
- Gigposters is another good time-waster for me.
- Intersections in undocumented immigrant and LGBT communities
- Cowen, Yglesias, Wilkinson, Douthat, Continetti, Caplan, Kling — who will win the Top Ten Influential Books Game?
- An informal survey of race and gender representation on children’s book covers.
- I enjoyed this Colbert Report interview with dissident conservative David Frum.
- Was the health care reform bill the best-covered news story, ever?
- Kathleen Parker thinks that southern white men who own 1,500 acre estates are “ordinary Americans.”
- It completely sucks that being polite to cops isn’t just ordinary courtesy, it’s mandatory and on occasion enforceable by electric shock torture.
- Political affiliation and TV Watching. The graphs here are just fascinating. I had no idea that pro basketball was watched so disproportionately by Democrats, for example. (I can’t help but wonder if race is involved — although there are plenty of non-white athletes in football, aren’t there?) And the most Republican sport isn’t Nascar, but golf.
- What gets left out of Western discussions of Afghan and Pakistani women.
- Speaking of graphs, this post on partisan differences by age groups at OKCupid is interesting, although I think some of their leaps are dubious. (Especially dubious, as they admit in the post, is talking about age differences as if they represent the life cycle of a single person.) Nice graphs, though.
- More discussion of those polls of the zany things Tea Partiers believe.
- Trans teen kicked out of high school after single day. What the fuck is wrong with school administrators there?
- HYDRA in Plain Sight. So what happens to those chopped-off hydra heads?
- Sexism in coverage of female and male suicide bombers.
- How a citizen’s letter makes it through a zillion levels of bureaucracy to be read by the President. Likely to be enjoyed by those who like Obama, sneered at by those who don’t.
- In the face of racism, distress depends on one’s coping method
- How race hurt Obama in the Democratic primaries.
- Obama’s Moderate Health Care Plan
Excellent list!
I’ve been reading some great stuff over at FWD/Forward lately. I’m also going to take your invitation to self-link at face-value. This week I’ve blogged about:
Not a tragedy, not a hero: models of disability.
A note on terminology and objectification: on language in discussion of sex work and sex workers.
Happy factor, and more on naming and necessity: a more academia-oriented post on supposedly-generic gendered language and examples.
–IP
The link in #11 will be published tomorrow–sorry for the confusion! :S
I have to confess that I didn’t click through the link on “Sexism in coverage of female and male suicide bombers. ” Not because I have any issue with looking at that but because the term “suicide bombers” is one I’m having a bit of a problem with and have wanted to talk about for a while.
Why do we call them “suicide bombers”? When these people do what they do they generally and quite deliberately kill a number of innocents with them, often including children. Why do we call them “suicide” bombers as if the bomber’s death is what’s important here as opposed to those of the people these terrorists have killed? Why don’t we call them “homicidal bombers” and see the victims as more significant than the killers?
Because the term “homicidal bombers” wouldn’t distinguish suicide bombers from other bombers who kill people. So the change you’re suggesting would in practice make it harder for people to communicate.
Soldiers are at risk of dying for their cause, but they generally try to avoid it. The goal is to kill other people but to stay alive yourself. “Normal” bombers are also in this category.
Suicide bombers have committed to dying for their cause. Their goal is to kill other people and also to die themselves. That requires a different type of analysis and a very different level of commitment and personality.
It is an important distinction because many protective measures–like surrender, for example–are designed to take advantage of most people’s innate desire to survive. It’s also an important distinction politically, of course.
Perhaps you are right. But I still don’t like it. It ignores the victims, as if the bomber’s life is more important than theirs.
Regarding link 8:
The author first describes a fake village that was set up by Marie Antoinette to provide a bucolic setting for what was essentially an aristocratic fantasy. He then extends this to cover a literary device that Kathleen Parker came up with to describe a location in South Carolina she called “Canteyville”. Here’s how the author describes it:
But if you read Kathleen’s actual column, you get this:
Now, is Cantey in fact a wealthy white Southerner? His race is in fact never mentioned in the article. His “forebear” is mentioned as a brigadier general in the Confederate army, so it’s pretty sure that said forebear was white. But how many mixed race children – generally considered black in the South – were fathered by such? Is Cantey wealthy? He’s got neighbors, friends and clients over for dinner twice a week, so presuming that it’s not a pot-luck dinner I’d say the man has some money. But then, quantify “wealthy” for me. Let’s leave it at the concept he’s got more money than average. But for the link
Past that; the author three times referred to the group collectively as being wealthy. But at no point was any clue given as to the income or possessions of anyone at that dinner except the host. We’ve got lots of farms here in Illinois. A whole lot of people who own 1500 acres are just barely keeping their income ahead of their loans and are one bad crop or one burned-up barn away from bankruptcy and watching weeping while generations of hard work are sold off to neighbors and strangers for pennies on the dollar at auction. Simple ownership of 1500 acres means nothing. There’s nothing in this column that would indicate that this man’s friends and neighbors are wealthy. For all we know they’re all growing soybeans and corn (or whatever the heck they raise in the South) next door to him, are one missed crop payment from being out on the road and (as is common here in Illinois) the husband works all day on the farm while the wife works in a factory or meat packing plant or call center nearby to provide a steady income.
Finally, the repeated description by the author of the place as a “fake farm”. Again, read Parker’s column and you’ll find nothing describing what the land is being used for. Given that the man trained horses I’ll guess that it’s a horse farm. Horse farms aren’t fake. Animals are bred, fed, trained, bought and sold. People work there at the skilled labor of training horses and the unskilled labor of shoveling shit. Money is made, payroll and taxes are paid and if it’s not the farm closes. As far as I can tell it’s a working farm providing the man’s sole income. On the basis of what facts the author keeps calling it a fake farm or a phony ranch and compares it to what Maria Antionette set up at Versallies escapes me completely.
Digby asserts a lot of things about this man and his friends and neighbors without bothering to offer the slightest evidence to back it up. This hit piece reveals a lot more about Digby’s biases – and apparent disregard for thinking facts are even worth investigating – than it does about Kathleen Parker’s.
Oh, and he makes a cheap shot about Parker referring to “Joe’s pavilion” as if he thinks she cribbed the term out of a romantic novel. Tell you what; call up the Cook County Forest Preserve and tell them you want to reserve a grove for a family picnic this summer. Tell them you want a site with a pavilion and they’ll know exactly what you mean. They’re not too romantic; there’s a concrete slab and a frame that (depending on age) is either wood beams or metal girders supporting (again depending on age) a plywood and shingle or metal roof. I’ll wager strongly that Joe’s pavilion is a lot closer to what I’ve just described than it is to the filigree and gingerbread structure that digby seems to be imagining.
Somebody here is out of touch. Hint: it’s not Kathleen Parker.
So do you think going to such an event is a good way to find out what ordinary Americans are thinking? Do you think that there may be any sort of bias introduced by Parker’s research method here?
Link 8 is certainly a long winded description to no point. I’d have to agree that it seems a bit odd to refer to these people as “the ordinary Americans.”
Is it too much to ask for a professional writer to know that the word is “victuals?”
I don’t know, Amp. I can’t tell, because Ms. Parker didn’t give us a profile of the people involved other than that they are friends, neighbors and clients of their host. I doubt that any sample size that small can be claimed to be representative of “average Americans”. But that’s not Digby’s argument. My point isn’t that Ms. Parker is right or wrong. My point is that Digby is making claims regarding the characteristics of the people that Parker is talking about that he hasn’t backed up with facts or with commentary from Parker’s column.
Well this is a guest post at my blog – Heteronormativity and FSD and delivers what it promises – a look at heteronormativity in diagnosis and treatment of female sexual dysfunction. Plus more, really.
My company’s head of HR just sent us out an e-mail about how the new health care legislation will affect us.
My company is publicly traded and has annual revenue of about 1.25G$. We have 6,400 employees (none of whom belong to a union) and a high percentage of those are in IT-related work.
I imagine that we’ll see more about this down the line. However, what I take from this is:
a) the $2,000,000 lifetime limit on reimbursements is going away,
b) other people’s kids (one of mine is too old and the other has a job with insurance) are going to be able to stay on coverage longer,
c) my premiums are going up to cover all this,
d) I can no longer get re-imbursement for my OTC drugs from my HSA (which sucks, my wife and I have used ours for precisely that) so I’ll have to spend post-tax money instead of pre-tax money on that and they will thus effectively cost me 35% or 40% more.
Oh, yeah, and Digby also presumes that everyone at that gathering was white – something else that was not spoken to in Parker’s column and thus he has absolutely no evidence for.
Digby is a woman, right?
Given that a significant majority of Americans live in urban areas with populations over 50,000 (in fact, over 50% live in urban areas with populations over 200,000), it seems like a reasonable description of ‘ordinary Americans’ would involve urbanites, not country-dwellers.
So the farm maybe isn’t fake after all? That would make this guy even less like an ordinary American, as ‘fewer than 2 percent of Americans farm for a living today’. Most Americans – I’m having trouble finding an exact figure, I’m seeing varying measures come up with anything between 54% and 75% – make their living from tertiary industries. The 2% of Americans who farm for a living are supported by direct government subsidies amounting to $20 billion, so I find it difficult to regard them as hard-done-by. Unless what they want is a smaller government that doesn’t pay them any subsidies, I guess?
More to the point, Digby is a satirist, right? And can you seriously dispute the article’s central point:
Ampersand, sorry to use an open thread as a bug report, but Google Chrome is giving me a warning when I visit this site – telling me this website has elements from hereville.com, which “appears to host malware”. Might be a false positive, but may be worth checking up on.
Thene, Digby describes the people Kathleen Parker ate with as a) white, b) wealthy, c) Republicans on a d) fake farm – but offers neither citations from Parker’s essay nor any information he or she obtained independently to support any of those 4 points. For all we know half of the people at that dinner were black or Hispanic and poor or middle class. And there’s absolutely no reason to think that the farm is not a working farm. Digby seems to think that the racial and economic makeup of that group and the status of the farm is central to his point, as these presumptions are presented 3 different times.
You want to argue that a collection of farmers is not representative of the “average American”, fine. But Parker called them “neighbors, friends and clients”, not farmers. So I don’t know why you’re presuming anyone but the host (and likely the neighbors) are farmers.
As far as considering them “ordinary Americans”, that’s a little shaky. Parker says that these are the kind of people that politicians like to cite as “ordinary Americans”, so it’s not clear if she’s referring to them directly as such or referring to what she sees as the average politician’s image of such.
Again, my point is that Digby has made a rash of completly unsupported presumptions in order to trash Kathleen Parker. His agenda is clearly more important to him than the facts.
I say “his” – I cannot find any reference to his or her sex on the site. I’ll welcome correction.
I’m pretty sure Digby is a woman. It’s certainly standard practice for other blogs to refer to her with a female pronoun, and she’s never objected to that, afaik.
It’s frankly discomforting to see male pronouns used as default on a feminist website anyway. I come here to get away from that sort of bullshit.
If Parker is merely saying that these people are what politicians refer to as ‘ordinary Americans’, then her eulogising of them is frankly credulous. Digby’s assertion that the situation – portraying farm gatherings as Real America’ – is a fake one is still entirely right.
I have to agree with Thene, Ron.
So you have no idea if Digby is female or male. Someone points out to you that Digby’s female, and you have no reason to think it’s not true. In that situation, wouldn’t it make sense to switch to “her,” rather than sticking by “his”? You seem to be saying that you require absolute first-hand evidence before you’re willing to not assume that someone’s male.
Digby is definitely a woman.
Possibly an extension of the popularity of college basketball.
In numerous direct references to Digby I only used the male pronoun twice; the rest of the time I said “Digby” or “the author” , and that was a deliberate effort to avoid the male default. Then I realized I missed a couple and also noted lonespark’s comment, so I made that note at the end of @18. Sorry about that.
Surprise, surprise: Someone threatened Nancy Pelosi.
At the end of some posts is this language:
Could I get an explanation of this? I don’t accept the basic dignity, equality, or inherent worth of rapists or serial killers, or other people whose *choices* and *actions* contribute to my rejecting their inherent worth. But it’s only after they’ve made those choices…it’s not based on their sexual orientation, gender presentation, religion, or body size, etc. So I don’t post on those threads. But sometimes I want to. Clarification please?