tsunami math

American Samizdat notes the US is spending $ 35 million for disaster relief, while the Republicans spent $40 million to buy the presidency.

Juan Cole points out that two weeks of Bush’s post-war war in Iraq costs as much as everything the US spent on emergency humanitarian assistance in 2003 for all the countries in the world.

Oh yeah, we've got our priorities clear.

too much education

Here it is, the xtian right admission that education makes people more liberal.

whiny campus republicans

So, the foolishness about liberals on campus continues. In response to the recent articles about how there are more democrats than republicans on faculties, a colleague started a series of emails about the whole thing. I won’ t post those here, though I will note some of the rebuttal links, from Ellen Goodman and the LATimes. (See also my earlier post on Juan Cole.)

And I’ll respond to a piece forwarded from the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

The pseudonymous Chronicle author reports on his oppressively liberal education:

During an "Introduction to Political Science" class, for example, I was required to write paper [sic] on how to solve global warming. My paper suggested that perhaps there was no reason to, since the scientific evidence was inconclusive. I got a D.

Now, it’s true that the overwhelming scientific consensus on this might not have been as evident when this fellow was an undergraduate-- I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that. But after all there’s something to be said for actually responding to an assignment. And even that leftist cabal, the Pentagon, considers the thought experiment worth engaging.

He also complains

In another class, I fell victim to my own indignation at having to use inclusive language in my papers. Flexing the muscle of my perceived linguistic superiority -- the masculine third-person singular pronoun across many languages functions as the generic, genderless third person, after all -- I argued that "he" should be in and "s/he" should be out. Another D paper.

Well, historically, “he” was not a gender-neutral pronoun in English. It was in the 18^th century that academies tried to regularize the language, and decided it should count for that. But in fact, of course, people do tend to imagine the person referred to as “he” is male. And, again, there’s the responding-to-the-assignment issue.

Finally he bemoans the parking lot at his new job:

the rustless Volvos and Subarus exuded a clear semiotics of inclusion and exclusion. … “here we drive academic cars”

Ok, this one is just whiny. A Subaru only costs about two thousand dollars more than the Honda Accord the writer reports driving himself, and since he was recently out of grad school, well of course he drove a cheaper car than the faculty members who’d probably paid off those grad school debts and gotten used to having a decent paycheck. I mean, assuming the cars’ prices are the issue here. They're "rustless," by the way, because his new job is in the South. And if it’s just an aesthetic thing, well, I drive a Honda myself (okay, it’s a hybrid Insight, but still). Whiny.

fascists r us

Gonzales, loss of habeas corpus, torture, right wing judges-to-be, the lapdog lying press--Elaine Cassel in Counterpunch lists some of the disasters of our fascist state.

happy holidays

military family values

IPS notes that the US army is “considering curbing ‘family-oriented programmes,’ such as one that permits soldiers to extend their tours of duty at particular U.S. bases so their children can finish high school.”

The article observes that the plan to send more troops to Iraq indicates that things are going worse than the administration wants to admit. The article is titled “More Troops Mean More Trouble,” which I actually thought meant it would argue that the more troops we send the more things will get worse, which seems in fact to be how it’s working. For instance, there are now ten times more “rebel” attacks than there were a year ago (150 per day now). Why people fighting for their own home country count as “rebels” is another matter.

our tax dollars at work

Or, sex bad, violence good.

Rep Henry Waxman's report on The Content of Federally Funded Abstinence- Only Education Programs finds that these curricula, meant for children and adolescents, present "false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health" (including assertions that an abortion will make you sterile and that condoms don't protect against STDs) and stunningly outdated stereotypes about gender roles. For example, one curriculum lists 'Financial Support' as one of 'The 5 Major Needs of Women' and 'Domestic Support' as one of 'The 5 Major Needs of Men.' The curriculum states: "Just as a woman needs to feel a man's devotion to her, a man has a primary need to feel a woman's admiration. To admire a man is to regard him with wonder, delight and approval. A man feels admired when his unique characteristics and talents happily amaze her."
(via Girl In The Locker Room)

I don't need anyone supporting me financially, but anyone who's seen my apartment can tell you I could really use some domestic support. Apparently, I'm a man.

That's why I pay my taxes to kill Iraqi civilians.

vote, schmote, smote

Well my comrades tell me the vote counting issue was dismissed at the Solidarity meeting not as insufficiently socialist or revolutionary or progressive, but as already taken care of, as not neglected, not the next place to push an analysis or action.

Fair enough.

But isn’t it inconsistent of me to suggest I’m some poststructuralist postmodernist ex-post-positivist, and then the next week or so be saying something is just wrong?

Well, duh.

In other news, more death.

US Marine claims unit killed Iraqi civilians 12/08/04 Agence France-Presse (AFP)

And in other military coverups: Whitewashing torture? A veteran sergeant who told his commanding officers that he witnessed his colleagues torturing Iraqi detainees was strapped to a gurney and flown out of Iraq -- even though there was nothing wrong with him. By David DeBatto. The Department of Defense is currently investigating more than a hundred allegations of prisoner abuse. So far, not a single officer or high-ranking enlisted soldier has been charged in any of them.

vote, vote, who's got the vote?

John Conyers, Maxine Waters, and ten other Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have written to Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell listing voting irregularities there, including counting irregularities and discrepancies, registration "peculiarities," unusual results, spoiled ballots, overvotes & vote discrepancies, machine problems, machine shortages, and rejected registration forms--which together "may have altered and suppressed votes, particularly minority and Democratic votes." Like when they refused to let anyone observe the Warren County vote count, locking down the building because of an alleged level 10 terrorist threat. No one at the FBI seems to have heard about this threat.

At Sunday's Solidarity meeting (the socialist brunch group), the view seemed to be that the socialist reason to care about this sort of thing is to connect with minority voters. Call me naive, but I can't help feeling it's just wrong to be disenfranchising people and rigging elections.

And then there's the affidavit from the fellow in Florida who says he was hired by Rep. Tom Feeny (R-FL) to write vote rigging software.

not by chance

Now let me get this straight, so to speak. MSNBC has no problem airing hate speech against Palestinians, but NBC refuses a message from a church saying it welcomes everyone . They pay Don Imus to insult Arabs in mourning, and they won’t even take money from the United Church of Christ to broadcast a message that Christ wouldn’t have turned away gay people. NBC, owned by GE: weapons manufacturer, major contributor to W’s “campaign.”

adjunct radicals

Juan Cole has addressed better than I’d ever be likely to bother to do the recently recurrent bugaboo about liberals in academe. In short—it’s not clear exactly what counts as a ‘liberal’; it’s probably not true (if one includes conservative programs like engineering and economics) that there are a disproportionate number of them in academia; to the extent that is it true it can’t be a conspiracy but is probably because the pay is so low and right-wingers can make more money in the private sector of business or think tanks. Not to mention that those think tanks and corporate boards are disproportionately republican/right, and no one is talking about rebalancing those by adding some leftists. Also, I would add, maybe liberals have more of a service ethic and are more willing to work for lower pay, and what about the possibility that more education makes people more liberal? How is it that education and intelligence seem to be disqualifying factors in American public life?

the shape of enlightenment

The shape of November is numerically flexible: second Tuesday, last Thursday, dark and cold and those bright yellow leaves against bare black branches. Not like July 4, 14 July, those dates, bright and sunny any day of the week.

Ron Susskind in the Oct 17 NYTimes (with initially unacknowledged reporting from Susan Mazur):

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Jonathan Freeland in the UK Guardian comments about the Susskind piece:

Look hard enough and you can see this mindset in the current Bush campaign. The Bush-Cheney billboards with the single slogan: One Nation Under God. The unwavering certainty of the supporters in Marlton. Bush's inability to name a single mistake of his presidency. There can be no doubt; they are doing the Lord's work.

One of my students (the lone Bush voter in a class of 16, as it happens) wanted to argue in an essay that all notions of justice come from religion. So much for the Enlightenment. (I pointed out to her there were secular theorists of justice, and anyway, she should concentrate her argument on something about the class texts and do-able in 5 pages).

Anyway, various bloggers are now declaring themselves proud members of the reality-based community. Me, too, but maybe in a poststructuralist kind of way. Talk about strange bedfellows. I mean, I saw a PBS documentary about Rumsfeld’s “war with the Pentagon” a few weeks ago and it made me all sympathetic to the military. Jeez.

blgprblems

Perhaps I need a new cmputer. That wuld be computer. That would be would. The O key sticks. The space bar sticks. And I am a crummy typist anyway, even on the best of keybards. Uh, keyboards. Though a keybard would come in handy. Singing, bardically, everytime I sat down to type. Anyway writing turns out to be a little more work than it might otherwise be, if I had either a keybard or a keyboard that worked. A little more work than the usual ease that Dorothy Parker so well described (“writing is easy, you just sit down and open up a vein”). Oh, yeah, otherwise I’d be churning out those essays and letters and lectures and stories. Yeah. And this blg, blog, whatever, which I must have started because I had so very much spare time on my hands? Nah, I just had some spare outrage on my hands.

Anyway, the outrage is fading into numbness as the catastrophe piles up.

This from Walter Benjamin:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

selection update

Investigations into voting irregularities, election problems, possible fraud, in Florida, New Hampshire , Ohio.

Q: What do you think of US democracy?

A: I think it would be a good idea.

hell in a handbasket, film at 11

Baghdad Burning says "Things are deteriorating swiftly"--and that's still before the video of an American soldier shooting a wounded Iraqi in a mosque. And yet there they are, having dinner and watching tv.

The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and yet most of the time I am thinking about the books I am teaching and the committee I'm on and the courses I'm planning and the people I talk with and quotidian life as though people weren't being shot in the head, bombed, buried under rubble or pierced with shrapnel or . . . you get the idea. Not to mention the constitution being gutted. Not to mention tens of thousands of children dying of curable diseases, of people starving to death.

red dreams

So now he's appointing Alberto "the-Geneva-Conventions-on-torture-are-so-quaint-and-outdated" Torquemada--Gonzales, whatever-- as Attorney General.

Mostly at this point I want to stay in the hut and dream red dreams. Bloody dreams. Commie dreams. Stateless dreams.

has god spoken, or was she just clearing her throat?

So, Wisconsin will be teaching creationism and US soldiers are getting pumped up with prayer before they enter Fallujah to kill the barbarians and philistines. You know, those evildoers who run hospitals. By all means what we need is more sense of our own righteouness and more disdain for those strange heathens who don't seem to want us to liberate them.

man and wife

Texas schools will be getting new textbooks. To conform with state law banning gay marriage, they'll replace texts that use phrases like "married partners" instead of "husband and wife." So it's not just anxiety about gay people having great sex (was it Mencken who defined a Puritan as someone haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying something) but about making sure gender roles are clear. "Husband" and "wife": those terms conjure up a world where women defer to men and do all the housework.

we was robbed

Thomas Paine wrote, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery"--or, y'know, to make him like a woman, since it was another 150 years or so after he wrote before women were enfranchised in the US.

This week's US election didn't meet international standards for clean elections


paperless electronic voting
No paper trail, no recount. Diebold delivers the votes. The ghost votes in the machines. Exit polls (which were accurate in paper ballot states) showed Kerry winning Florida and Ohio.


absentee ballots
Plenty of people never got theirs--college students, military folk in Iraq, sundry expatriates.
In a course I teach, out of 16 students, one didn't get her absentee ballot fromAlaska. Another has a friend stationed in Iraq, who didn't get his ballot; neither did any of those he's stationed with.


registration problems
Sproul was hired by the republican party to register voters, and apparently encouraged workers to ditch, destroy non-Republican registration forms.


polling access
People turned away for lack of identification. It happened in New Orleans, I hear. Voter intimidation & supression was not infrequent, and worst for students and, of course, in communities of color.


disenfranchisement
felons, former felons, possible felons, people with names that resemble those of felons, people who might vote democratic--purged, purged, purged.