Obama On O'Reilly

Obama did an interview with Bill O'Reilly this last week. Evidently this is just the first of four parts, the rest of which air Monday through Wednesday if you want to keep up on that.

John McCain's campaign won't let Sarah Palin answer so much as a question from reporters and Obama goes into the lion's den in what most certainly could have been an interview stacked with cheap questions and then edited in post production to make him look terrible.

Entourage

Good to have the gang back.

True Blood

Ok, so it's a first episode. First episodes of even the best series can be iffy, and especially a show like this that relies on a mythology that obviously will need some time to flesh out. Still, "Six Feet Under" this is most surely not. Anna Paquin is Rogue, and for that there will always be a special place in my heart. But really, let's be honest, she's never had wicked acting chops. The writing has some intriguing aspects, but sometimes it's downright blunt.

After "John From Cincinnati" tanked, HBO really could use a new hit. Here's hoping this show gets a bit of time to breath before they decide whether it's worth the risk or not. I'll certainly give it a couple episodes.

Incidentally

You want to know the difference between kids' sports movies and adult's sports movies? Kids' movies are all about sportsmanship and enjoying the sport. Adult's sports movies are about winning. Also, I guess it's worth mentioning that I'm watching "The Mighty Ducks" now. I know, I'm super lame.

Give Huckabee A Job

Ok, so I have a bit of a crush on Mike Huckabee. Yeah, some of his positions are straight up crazy. That's fine, I can accept that, but damn, every time I see that guy I can't help but like him. He was just on the Daily Show and, like always, just exuded charisma.

So, my quandary is this: is there any job we can give Huckabee in the next administration which would be simultaneously extremely visible and almost entirely without power? Actually, during the primaries Huckabee got tons of flack for his populist positions, so maybe we can find something that plays up that aspect of his politics and, shall we say, de-emphasizes his social conservatism. Department of Labor? Interior?

The Politics Of Conventions

I might have another post in me that's more specifically about Senator McCain's speech accepting his party's nomination for President, but what struck me most about it was tone. The Democratic Convention had some firey speeches to be sure, but the ones that come to mind the most, John Kerry and Joe Biden, got their fire from tying McCain's positions to the clearly wrong positions of the current President. Everyone admitted that John McCain was a patriot and a decent guy who was simply wrong about just about everything. It wasn't jarring then, when Barack Obama came out and hammered John McCain's positions for being wrong and gave his alternatives.

Last night was jarring. After two nights of smarmy, sarcastic speeches implying all kinds of terrible things about their opponents, John McCain comes out and waves his hands at playing nice before essentially talking about his life story for an hour. Now, out on the campaign trail it's possible to claim that you don't have control over people who aren't in your campaign. If Rudy Giuliani gave an interview where he tore apart Obama like he did two nights ago, John McCain, if he felt he needed to, could legitimately say "I don't employ Rudy, so I can't exactly make him stop, but I sure wish he would because I don't agree with him." Now, as we learned with Swift Boaters, a nominee can disapprove all he wants, but the bile gets out into the discourse anyway. Still, at least there's some separation.

What isn't credible, however, is to have these two perspectives smashed together at the same convention. If John McCain truly respects Barack Obama, what didn't he tell Rudy, or Mitt, or Sarah to tone down their speeches? Why not ask them to focus on Barack's policies that you disagree with rather than making fun of community organizers? Why not present a whole convention with the type of stuff that you yourself to say if you were speaking every night?

The answer is that the few nice things John McCain said about Barack Obama last night aren't what the Republican Party believes. They believe the stuff from the last few nights and John McCain had to have those speeches to mollify his base. And he had to say those nice things about Obama last night to try to attract independent voters. So which night of the convention show what John McCain truly feels? I'm betting whichever one is most likely to get him elected at any given moment.

Swing voters breaking for Obama

From Gallup: `The percentage of voters who are "up for grabs" has declined sharply in the past week, from 30% to 21%, according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll.' Assuming no-one has gone from being certain to vote from Obama to certain to vote for McCain (or vice-versa) in the past week, of that 9%, 6% went to Obama and 3% to McCain. This gives Obama a 42%-37% advantage over McCain in the popular vote.

Gallup's description of the methodology is unclear, but I think the comparison is based on surveys done last weekend (30-31 August) and yesterday.

Republican Convention: Day 2

Ok, I lasted an hour or so into last night's convention. When they started up the Reagan video talking about what a "maverick" he was, I just had to turn it off. I know, I was weak but it was just garbage. Maybe I've got rose colored glasses about last week's Democratic Convention, but I don't remember them mischaracterizing Republican positions the way the Republicans are doing. Anyway, I decided to try harder tonight.

Just on the surface, Romney, Huckabee, and Giuliani are such better speakers than McCain that it *has* to have made some Republicans at least a little regretful that this is the guy they've ended up with. I'm not suggesting they won't support McCain, but there have to be a few people out there a little wistful for the primaries.

A little below the surface, I'm getting fed up quick. Yes, there have been some good political lines, particularly from Giuliani, but the substance of these speeches has been maddening. They have been fearless in their complete disregard for things Democrats actually believe. See, Democrats say, "Republicans are too aggressive on foreign policy and they support overturning Roe v. Wade" and that's what Republicans actually believe. Republicans obscure the actual positions of their opponents and rely on paeans to non-partisan ideas like patriotism.

Yeah, I know, they do these things because it works. It's also the job of Democrats to push back against the nonsense that comes out of their mouths. But it's sad that this is what national politics has become: a largely fair dealing party constantly pushing back against a party that always fights in bad faith.

I Love Live Mics

Peggy Noonan gets caught. Link.

Sans titre, Francis Bebey, c. 1998

Je suis venu chercher du travail
J'espère qu'il y en aura
je suis venu de mon lointain pays
Pour travailler chez vous

J'ai tout laissé, ma femme, mes amis
Au pays tout là-bas
J'espère les retrouves tous en vie
Le jour de mon retour

Ma pauvre mère était bien désolée
En me voyant partir
Je lui ai dit qu'un jour je reviendrai
Mettre fin à sa misère

J'ai parcouru de long jour de voyage
Pour venir jusqu'ici
Ne m'a-t-on pas assuré d'un acceuil
Qui vaudrait bien ette peine

Regardez-moi, je suis fatigué
D'aller par les chemins
Voici des jour que je n'ai rien mangé
Auriez-vous un peu de pain?

Mon pantalon est tout déchiré
Mais je n'en ai pas d'autre
Ne criez pas, ce n'est pas un scandale
Je suis seulement pauvre

Je suis venu chercher du travail
J'espère qu'il y en aura
Je suis venu de mon lointain pays
Pour travailler chez vous.

Qualified

The issue of who is "qualified" for holding nationwide executive office has come up a lot in this election cycle. John McCain asserts that Barack Obama doesn't have enough experience to be qualified for being president. Various democrats, internet folks, and even a few Republicans argue that Sarah Palin doesn't have enough experience, or perhaps not the "right" experience to be Vice President.

Dictionary.com has several definitions for "qualified," but I like looking at the synonyms better: "able, capable, competent, fitted." The focus isn't on having done anything specific or having any one specific quality, but on being in a position to perform whatever the function is being asked of you with competence. When interviewing for a job, sometimes the successful candidate has extensive experience in the field. Sometimes the successful candidate is a young up-and-comer with interesting new ideas.

I think history has shown pretty well that a long political resume doesn't necessarily equal a good President and being a Washington "outsider" doesn't either. John McCain, with his 30 years in the Senate, is plainly "qualified" to be President. So is Barack Obama, with his four years in the Senate, several in the Illinois state legislature, and his sweeping and exciting plans for reforming the country. Sarah Palin, I don't think, is qualified, or at the very least her qualifications are questionable. 22 months as a governor in a small state which receives incredibly huge amounts of federal largess is not very impressive. Unfortunately for her, she also doesn't, at least not that I've seen, bring much new to the table either politically or charismatically. Does she bring several politically useful features to McCain's campaign? Obviously. Is she qualified to be Vice President or, if something should happen to John McCain, President? I just don't think she is. She may have been a hot Republican prospect for four or eight years, but they pulled her from the farm club too soon and it may destroy her prospects.

One Last Post On Palin Before I Shower

Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall make the most important point: all of this isn't to tear down Sarah Palin as a person, it's about John McCain's presidential campaign. You can pick through all these Palin stories individually and decide whether each impacts Palin's ability to act as an honorable VP, but taken as a whole it's clear that John McCain didn't think that it was important enough to look into Palin's history. He wanted a female VP pick who could be cast as a maverick conservative Washington outsider. There were other, eminently qualified Republican women he could have chosen. Some couldn't be cast as party mavericks. Some couldn't be really called conservatives. Some aren't Washington outsiders. So what he decided to do was go with an unknown quantity in Sarah Palin. She fit what he thought he needed politically, so he gave no thought to whether she would actually make a good VP. Barack Obama chose Joe Biden because he brought some working class cred to the ticket, but also because he demonstrably will help Barack govern better than Barack could have done alone. John McCain put his campaign before the country in his VP pick and that showed a serious lack of judgment.

Edit: Ok, so as to not break my promise of this being the last Palin post for a little while, here's a sneaky edit to point you in the direction of this editorial, which I rather liked.

Rove On Biden

You know, really, calling the opposition a "big blow hard doofus" is certainly rude, but it's not exactly breaking new lows for the party.

Wait...Seriously?

Video of Sarah Palin shooting a honkin' big assault rifle? Not really that big of a deal given that it's a big part of the party platform and it was done visiting the troops in Kuwait.

Embroiled in a scandal where she might have tried to get her abusive brother-in-law fired? Well, as far scandals go, I guess that's not the worst.

Video of Sarah Palin saying she doesn't know what the VP does? Really embarrassing.

17 year old daughter is 5 months pregnant? Well, kids are off limits in politics...kinda, and the base will get a kick out of a kid being "not forced" into carrying a pregnancy to term and marrying the father.

Having been a member of a secessionist group in Alaska? Wait, really? How is she putting country first if she wants to leave the country? I know I live in a bit of a liberal bubble, but it's one thing after another with this VP pick. Are conservatives still excited to have her on the ticket and, if so, are they crazy? (Also, in the video she says "I've always said competition is sooo good." I know this was probably a quickly produced video, but that's just a stupid sounding line.)

Edit: It appears the answer to both questions is "yes."

Edit, the Second: Ok, I was skeptical and it seems to have been born out. That Red State link asserted that "under God" was added because it had been uttered by the founding fathers. According to Wikipedia, and the huge grain of salt that it comes with so I'm ready to be corrected if somebody has better information, the "under God" phrase was taken from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Great as Lincoln was, he wasn't a founding father of the United States. Founding fathers may have put those two words together at some point, but that wasn't where the phrase in the Pledge came from. And given the flippancy of the answer, I'm going to assume that Sarah Palin misunderstood either the question or the history of the Pledge.

Oh Palin...

Sarah Palin really needs a month or four of schooling in the issues of the day. This is stuff you should really really know...Link.

On Teen Mothers

As the whole world knows by now, Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin's 17 year old daughter is pregnant. Evidently she's planning on taking the pregnancy to term and marrying the father. The cynic in me rolls his eyes when considering the chances of a marriage between 17 year olds working out long term, but that's beside the point.

The issue that's come up for Democrats is how to treat this in the campaign. Hilzoy asserts that Palin's child should be off the table, but it's unclear to me what that really means. For instance, Hilzoy states that we shouldn't use this as an example showing that abstinence-only education doesn't work but that it *is* appropriate to discuss how Palin's reaction to this squares with her stated views on abortion.

I just don't see a very bright line distinction there. I mean, we *know* abstinence-only education doesn't work, but Republican's fail to acknowledge that fact based on studies. Just bringing up the topic of abstinence-only education at this point is going to invoke Palin's daughter, so is the whole topic off the table? At some level, this poor girl is going to be in the spotlight no matter what because her mother is running for office. Did the Republicans go overboard with their attacks on Chelsea Clinton? Obviously. Should Democrats do the same thing here? Obviously not. But candidates bring all their baggage with them when they opt to step into the public eye and while there are certain boundaries we should respect vis a vis their families, we also have to recognize that the lives of candidates give rise to legitimate questions of policy. It's unfortunate for this young woman that what would probably be embarrassing in the best of situations is now embarrassing on a national scale, but ultimately politicians have to consider that they're exposing their whole family to public scrutiny when they run for office.

Again, this isn't to say that anything should go, but that a whole host of issues are now sure to make people at least think about how it applies to Gov. Palin's family and that we can't simply avoid those topics in an election year. Ultimately we just have to do our best to stay classy and apologize for any difficulty this may cause a young woman who's already in a bad situation.

Edit: Drew has a much welcomed political post on this up. Link.

Obama's Acceptance Speech

I have no complaints. Pitch freakin' perfect. Yes we can.

For What It's Worth

I just saw a McCain ad where John McCain simply and plainly congratulated Obama on his nomination. Was it politically calculated? Of course. Still, it was still a very small, classy moment in his otherwise crappy campaign. That's the kind of stuff that made me like John McCain back in the early 2000s. Now he was just as conservative back then as he is now, but he did a much better job of not seeming like a total tool back then.

Wow!

Wow, the Democratic Convention got a ton better tonight. The primary speakers from days one and two (Michelle Obama, Teddy Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton) were very good, but the rest of the speakers were pretty bland and lifeless. But Clinton and Biden were both great and Biden's doing very well too.

Barrack Obama, Pragmatist

From the preview of a piece on Obama's economic policies in this weekend's NYT Sunday Magazine:

Some of the confusion stems from Obama’s own strategy of presenting himself as a postpartisan figure. A few weeks ago, I joined him on a flight from Orlando to Chicago and began our conversation by asking about his economic approach. He started to answer, but then interrupted himself. “My core economic theory is pragmatism,” he said, “figuring out what works.”

This, of course, is not the whole story. Invoking pragmatism doesn’t help the average voter much; ideology, though it often gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into how a candidate might actually behave as president.

I wonder if Obama's read his share of John Dewey, Jane Addams, and William James. His approach to politics certainly sounds like it.

Pragmatism (by which I mean a particular intellectual movement developed primarily in the US between the Civil War and World War II, and not a willingness to sacrifice principle on the altar of short-term gain), as articulated by Dewey, Addams, and James, is built around two key ideas. First, ideas are tools, not absolute truths. Like tools, ideas will be useful in some situations, and not useful in others, and it is this usefulness by which we evaluate them. Also like tools, ideas can be improved and replaced as better, more effective tools are developed. Second, progress comes from honestly examining the successes and failures of previous attempts. If an idea has worked well in the past, then it's worthwhile to try it again in similar situations. But no idea is perfect, and so it's equally worthwhile to try other possibilities. Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of particular proposals -- whether in philosophy or public policy -- is how we develop new proposals, that enjoy as many of the strengths and as few of the weaknesses of its predecessors as possible. Both components combined lead to an opennesses and respect for ideological opponents -- they're the ones who are best situated to identify flaws with our own proposals -- and a willingness to experiment with radical and untested theories.

And Obama has demonstrated these two features of pragmatism again and again. His willingness to appear at a conservative evangelical megachurch, for example, and seriously and honestly answer their questions shows that he cares about engaging with those who radically disagree with his political views. Similarly, his admission that the Reaganite critique of the bureaucratic welfare state was partly right. He doesn't see conservatives as the enemy, to be ignored and shouted down; rather, a thoughtful exchange between liberals and conservatives helps improve the views of both sides. His market-based government initiatives, such as his health care plan and the auction-based cap-and-trade system, can be viewed as the product of such thoughtful exchanges between liberals and conservatives (or, in these cases, welfare liberals and libertarians), and also as the sort of radical and untested theory with which pragmatists enjoy experimenting.

Foxnewsification

On this, my last morning in California for the summer (since my flight leaves at 6:10 tomorrow morning, I'm not going to count it), I come across an article on the front of the Bay Area section of the San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. Democrats take a sharp turn to the left,

Since this is on the front of a prominent section of a still-respectable paper, you would expect at least a certain minimal level of professionalism: an attempt to distinguish between reporting of facts and editorializing, evidence to support claims, a professional tone, etc. All of these are missing from Heather Knight's piece.

The story is fairly straightforward: Democratic County Central Committee of San Francisco released their endorsements for the November election. The endorsements did not include a number of candidates who self-identify as progressive, and did votes on ballot measures that would decriminalize prostution, opposite JROTC in public schools, and challenge a number of Mayor Gavin Newsom's policies. Compare that summary with Knight's:

The San Francisco Democratic Party has veered dramatically to the left, telling voters that on Nov. 4 they should elect a raft of ultra-liberal supervisorial candidates, decriminalize prostitution, boot JROTC from public schools, embrace public power and reject Mayor Gavin Newsom's special court in the Tenderloin.

What makes this slate a veer, dramatic or otherwise, to the left? We're given no explanation. None of the positions of any of the candidates in the various contests around the city -- either endorsed or not endorsed -- is identified anywhere in the article, except one mention that one candidate (who was not endorsed) is a Green. Similarly, the discussion of the ballot measures is cursory; the additional details given tell me virtually nothing significant I couldn't have guessed from the three-word descriptions. This means the entire article rests on Knight's individual assessment that the slate of endorsements is "ultra-left".

The tone of the writing is also surprising. There are the usual problems of contemporary journalistic writing: run-on sentences, with far too many clauses, used as whole paragraphs; gratuitous adjectives; and paragraphs with no clear structure or point. But Knight also feels free to make use of slang and focus her report on individual reactions, making the whole piece sound more like a report on the student government election campaign in a high school newspaper: "Nathan Ballard, the mayor's press secretary, said the committee's endorsements are out of whack with Democratic values."

Finally, this is the internets, so of course there's a comment function attached to the electronic version of the story. Knight can't be blamed for this, but I was surprised at the red-baiting and racism that pervaded the comments. The inanity and irrelevant rants I expected, of course, but not the way `socialist' and `communist' were tossed around as slurs, much less the way several comments blamed `illegal immigrants' for violent crime (?), prostitution and sex trafficking (??), and panhandling (???).

Short Dark Knight Review

It makes "Batman Begins" look bad by comparison.

Hip And Cool McCain

On my way home from work today I was listening to "All Things Considered" on NPR and they were discussing John McCain's attempt to court young voters away from Obama. He's doing all kinds of things like town hall meetings with the youngins and going on "Meet The Press" for their college episode. They also mentioned a game on his website called "Pork Invaders." Yeah, you know what doesn't make you seem old? Punning on a game that's over 30 years old.

Dr. Horrible (Again)

Just one last reminder that Dr. Horrible is not only awesome, and that now all three parts have been posted, but also that after tomorrow it's going to be pulled down off the web. That's right, after tomorrow you'll have to buy a DVD or something if you want to sing along to the cool-ocity that is Dr. Horrible. Of course, I'm going to be unable to avoid buying this thing on DVD. Man, I wonder what kind of special features they'll have. Link.

What do The Feminists believe?

One of the most ironic anti-feminist tropes -- both in the real world and the internets -- is the charge that feminists are dogmatic. We -- so the anti-feminist will say -- are ideological drones, marching in rigid lockstep and rejecting out of hand any attempt to rationally challenge our preconceptions. We're like the Inquisition and the Secret Police, only armed with vaginas. (At least, some of us. I do chuckle a little when my anti-feminists interlocutors start referring to me using female pronouns.) The caricature is so deeply ingrained -- or, if you prefer a metaphor that literally means exactly the opposite thing but makes the same figurative point, so widely dispersed -- that it was even used against me recently by a Princeton philosophy grad student, the sort of person who you'd think would really know much, much better. (For some bonus irony, notice that the charge of dogmatism was used as an ad hominem to support the claim that I was using an ad hominem.)

I find the charge ironic because I have a great deal of trouble thinking of anything substantive that all feminists believe. After 20 minutes of careful through, and some non-trivial assumptions, I've come up with exactly one:

Most, and possibly all, cultures around the world today are sexist.

Note, for the first, that I haven't defined sexism. This is because I don't believe there's any feminist consensus on what sexism is. While feminists do agree that sexism is a problem, there's no agreement on the nature of the problem, much less on particular policies that will improve things.

With some significant assumptions, it's possible to come up with a second:

There should be some legal guarantee preventing the government from interfering with a woman seeking a voluntary abortion during the first six months of a pregnancy.

But since I know, personally, at least one woman who's a dedicative progressive and devoutly anti-abortion Catholic, the assumptions needed to get consensus around this claim are dubious at best.

Now, it would be easy to come up with many more -- the sky is blue (generally), chocolate tastes good, snow is white, puppies are cute, and other inanities. But none of these is characteristic of feminism or feminists. And in no case do we have clear feminist agreement on whatever policy proposal you don't like and want to blame on `The Feminists'.

Unless I'm leaving something out. Can you come up with anything?

Reconceptualizing underrepresentation

I've spent the past week reading Iris Marion Young's Justice and the politics of difference, and the last day or two thinking about this thread on the underrepresentation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines. (I should say `some STEM fields' or just give the list -- physics, engineering, computer science, pure mathematics, economics, and philosophy -- but I'm just going to use the easier-to-type version and let you know right here that I'm not talking about biology and chemistry, at least with respect to women.) Putting these two thinkings together, I feel the need to reconsider the basics of underrepresentation: the problem is not what we think it is.

We usually think of underrepresentation as a problem of numbers: STEM fields are `disproportionately' male, or white, or straight, or able-bodied, etc. As evidence, we cite facts about the percentage of tenured faculty who are female or people of colour or queer or disabled, etc. (To cut down on the number of lists like these, I'm going to primarily use the generic `group X'. Substitute in your favourite oppressed social group for the X.)

But such facts are insufficient to establish a claim that group X is underrepresented in STEM. In order to establish this claim, we need the normative claim that the percentage of tenured faculty who are members of group X in a STEM field should be approximately such-and-such, or in the range from here to there. And that should causes problems, because (at least in part) no-one seems to have given much systematic through to how we're going to determine what comes after it, or even whether it's the right sort of claim. Nor is it at all clear what's backing up that normative claim: why should the percentage of group X-tenured faculty in a STEM field should be between a and b?

So, instead, I'd like to suggest another (or a novel) way of understanding underrepresentation. On this approach, underrepresentation is a matter of epistemic injustice (I'm drawing on Miranda Fricker here, too). More formally, underrepresentation is about the way certain groups are deprived of access to certain communities of epistemic and political power and prestige. (Namely, STEM communities.) As I see it, there are two aspects to this deprivation:

1. whether members of group X have the same access to membership in the prestigious community as members of other groups, and
   
2. whether the members of group X are oppressed within the prestigious community.

To put these in terms of the underrepresentation of women within STEM, the first aspect concerns whether women can get into the laboratory -- as a group, do they have opportunities to become scientists, engineers, and mathematicians? The second concerns their status within the laboratory -- does the STEM community treat women justly?

With just this much, we can make some preliminary observations. First, the feminist underrepresentation claim is that women are oppressed within certain STEM disciplines. The corresponding opposition claim is that women are not oppressed within STEM. Second, numbers tell us something, but not everything. This parallels injustice in the broader society: looking at the race and gender of poverty can tell us something, but it doesn't give us a complete understanding of economic, racial, or gender injustice. Third, examining the satisfaction of (Humean) preferences (as John Tierney did in the NYT article that inspired the FPh post) is only relevant to the extent that the satisfaction of (Humean) preferences is significant in the theory of justice we are using to analyse underrepresentation as epistemic injustice. Unless you're a utilitarian, this will be at best only somewhat significant -- again, it won't give us a complete picture.

I mentioned Young's book up in the first paragraph. Young has two major goals in this book: to challenge what she calls the `distributive paradigm' in mainstream political philosophy and theory, and to articulate in its place an alternative paradigm of injustice as oppression. The last paragraph parallels the first task: my observations indicate that a statistical examination of the distribution of resources and positions of power gives an incomplete picture of underrepresentation. This distribution is certainly relevant to issues of epistemic justice, but not the whole story.

Young lays out her alternative approach to justice as a taxonomy of forms of oppression. Borrowing this taxonomy as our background theory of justice, we can re-articulate the feminist claim of underrepresentation as epistemic injustice: women are exploited, marginalized, powerless, and sometimes subject to cultural imperialism and violence within STEM.

1. Women are exploited as research assistants, technicians, instructors, test subjects, secretaries, janitors, and other assistants and support staff to primary investigators and tenured faculty. Their work, both creative and menial, is appropriated by and benefit PIs and tenured faculty. I say `women are exploited as research assistants', for example, and not `research assistants are exploited' because these lower status positions are disproportionately held by women or held by women who are less likely to receive eventual returns on their sacrifices than their male colleagues (the leaky pipeline effect).

2. Women are marginalized and powerless is similar ways. (Young is not, to my mind, entirely clear on the difference between these two.) Assistants and support staff to PIs and tenured faculty have little or no power to make decisions about the research they will participate in or how they will participate in it. They might be able to choose whether or not to participate at all, or suggest new directions, experiments, research strategies, etc., but have no real power to shape the course of research. Similarly, instructors and teaching assistants have little or no discretion over their courses -- they are assigned by their superiors to teach this class or that, on a term-by-term basis, and usually based on the department's need to cover teaching duties perceived as menial or boring by tenured faculty (Physics 101, the early calculus sequence, remedial classes, etc.). The content of these courses is usually dictated by official standards and texts or all the sections of a course being linked to a standardized midterm and final.

3. Cultural imperialism and violence, Young's last two categories of oppression, are less common than the first two (treating marginalization and powerlessness as one category for the moment), but still issues of injustice within STEM than need attention. Cultural imperialism refers to the widespread acceptance of stereotypes and biassed perceptions of marginalized groups. In the context of STEM, this would mean the acceptance of scientific theories with, say, sexist content and implications. Uncontroversial historical examples abound -- Stephen Jay Gould's The mismeasure of man has some jaw-dropping ones. More controversial are contemporary theories of, for example, gender- and race-linked differences in the distribution of IQ and problem-solving abilities and still-prevalent `active male/passive female' models of fertilization. (In this post, I'm going to remain neutral on the question of whether any of these theories was epistemically acceptable in its heyday, or is epistemically acceptable today. Perhaps there are genuine dilemmas of epistemic justice.)

4. Violence is exactly what you would expect. I suspect -- though I could be wrong -- that violence is a pervasive or systematic problem only in medical and pharmacological treatment and research, and not other STEM fields. (Although perhaps medicine and pharmacology should not be classified as STEM fields at all.) Violence in medicine is closely linked with race and class, and with powerlessness: women of colour and living in poverty have been subject to forced sterilization as recently as the 1970s, they are less likely to receive proper medical care and due respect for their autonomy as patients, and so on.

Similar observations apply to racial groups, and of course disability. (I suspect there's a whole thesis to be written on the ways disabled people are the victims of violence within medicine.)

I have one final observation. One especially persistent feminist criticism of STEM fields with underrepresentation problems (I've heard this about philosophy, physics, mathematics, computer science, and economics) is the prevalence of a macho, aggressive, or `duelist' culture (the phrase is Janice Moulton's) that is supposed to drive many women away from these fields. In such a culture, one is supposed to be a vigorous and aggressive defender of one's views in a such argumentative context; the thought is that this creates a great deal of competition, effectively weeding out the weakest (and, presumably, therefore untrue) ideas. Traditional feminine attributes of pleasantness and self-abasement create a catch-22: either women cannot adopt these aggressive norms (they conflict too much with the way they have been taught to behave), or they are punished and disparaged by their male colleagues for being too aggressive.

This is, I think, an extremely important criticism. But I'm not sure where to place it in Young's taxonomy of oppression. Perhaps one side of the dilemma is marginalization -- women who do not adopt the aggressive stance are denied standing within the community -- and the other is cultural imperialism -- the successful imposition of masculine norms of behaviour on women.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Back during the writer's strike, Joss Whedon and his pals were bored. So bored were they that they started coming up with ideas for projects that they'd like to do just for fun. One such project was Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. After the strike ended Joss rounded up some money to do it right and got pals Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion to do some sweet super-powered musicality. It's the awesomest thing since I don't know when. Check it out. Rumor is that after this initial run you won't be able to see it for free anymore.

Also, so you know, new favorite song = "With My Freeze Ray I Will Stop The World".

Update: I can't stop watching this thing. It's so awesome.

Update 2: Neil Patrick Harris should be in everything filmed from now on.

Update 3: Part 2 is out now! Part 3 will be out Saturday.

Darwin

There's an opinion piece over at the NYT today arguing that we should abolish terms based on Darwin's name (Darwinism, Darwinian, etc.). The points made are largely good; mostly that use of terms based on Darwin's name narrows discussions and gives skeptics a 19th century target to attack rather than 21st century data. My only objection is that if my memory is correct it's almost always people who are attacking 21st century science who invoke Darwin's name. In my experience the people who are trying to undermine modern scientific theories/data are the ones who invoke Darwin's name most frequently. The people who would be most likely to be convinced by this piece, and who support the scientific community's evolving understanding of nature, are the ones most likely to already use more accurate terminology. Link.

Review: Hellboy 2

Poor Hellboy. He's such a great character. More pulp detective than super hero, he is almost always in over his head but doing his best to get the job done. And he's so charismatic while doing it! The first movie wasn't exactly art house fare but it knew what it was and seemed to enjoy just being a fun action romp that didn't take itself too seriously. Hellboy was, and is, brought to life pitch perfect by Ron Perlman who showed that he can have an entire movie rest on his shoulders after a career as a character actor.

And the first movie was a success. Not a runaway smash hit, but a success nonetheless. You can almost hear the pre-production meetings as you watch Hellboy 2: "So what we'd like is some of that Pan's Labyrinth art style, but without all that dreary drama and with a lot more wire work and explosions! Don't worry, we'll balance it out with more jokes." Hellboy 2 is inarguably gorgeous. In fact, I think del Torro outdoes Pan's Labyrinth in character design and perhaps even cinematography. Ultimately though, Hellboy 2 suffers from the most common sequel syndrome: more. They decided they were going to take the first movie up a notch to eleven and what was a neat little fun action movie turned into a special effects extravaganza with a fight scene every five minutes broken up by mostly funny but pretty forced humor bits. Ron Pearlman is still great, but Selma Blair gets a bunch more meat to her part and chokes hard. She couldn't be more wooden if she put down roots, but even then she's out acted by the Giving Tree.

It's hard to admit that I'm as disappointed as I am about this movie. It's not what I'd call bad. After all, the plot dragged but it made sense and though the action scenes were done well but were just far too plentiful. Sequels don't have to be the first movie on steroids. It's ok to just tell the next chapter of the character's lives and tell it well. I *want* to hear about Hellboy's continuing adventures but I don't necessarily need to see every slow motion punch he's ever thrown.

Jesse Jackson

I know that by now I should be over this, but I just can't help but be frustrated by the utter lack of honest dealing that conservatives show in discussions on the internet. I'm sure many conservatives, maybe even some of these same conservatives, are completely reasonable in real life, but every time some Democrat says something even mildly objectionable they act like they shock might just knock them down.

Was assuming that he was off the record stupid on Jackson's part? Of course it was. Indeed it was super stupid. Is the phrase "cut his balls off" a phrase that warrants women fainting and men wiping their brows with handkerchiefs? Not unless we're a country of children.

But hey, while we're at it did you hear that McCain thinks killing Iranian civilians with our increasing cigarette exports is a super funny joke? Probably not because some guy who's not running for office used a metaphor when he thought he was off the record. After all, why cover what the candidates say?

Scroll Down

Don't miss Czar's post, which was the newest post until I buried it under a mountain of Wizard World pics, and has a quite funny video imbeded. I'm already trying to think of funny things to do while my girlfriend is sleeping. Also, today is his birthday. Happy birthday Czar!

Review: Doctor Who Season 4

Unfortunately, Russel Davies' swan song season was the worst of the bunch. There are some great episodes in there ("Midnight" is right up there vying for a top 5 episodes of the new series spot) but most of it was pretty rote. And then the finale, oh, the finale. If I didn't like Dr. Who so much and there weren't some great bits of writing in there I'd say this was one of the all time worst offenders of fan-wank-itude of all time. "What's that? Russel's leaving and we're losing the Dalek license? Well let's bring the Dalek's back. Oh, and Davros, because he's a character with great motivation. Oh, and every companion so we can have this big goodbye scene. Again, there were some great bits in the finale, the cast was good, and ultimately I love Doctor Who so I enjoyed myself, but if the scientists could harness the power of my eye rolling the country would be energy independent overnight.

Here's hoping for better things next year after the loooong break.

Wizard World '08

A fine Doctor costume all the way down to the trainers. But he's a sad Doctor because he has no companion, so he's going to commit suicide by using the sonic screwdriver on his face.

Ah, what a fine way to end my Wizard World '08 pictures! Less than a year until Wizard World '09! Hooray!

Wizard World '08

This guy was waiting in line to meet Katie Sackoff (aka Starbuck of Battlestar Galactica). Crossover!

Side note: You *never* see people dressed as Trek character at Wizard World. Weird.

Wizard World '08

Coincidentally the Hellfire Club was meeting in the other wing of the Philly Convention Center on the same day as Wizard World. Emma Frost seems to have gotten lost on her way to the bathroom.

Ugh, two bathroom jokes in one day...

Wizard World '08

It's a little known fact that Iron Man once got drunk on a thirty pack of Miller Lite and then made a nuclear powered suit out of the cans.

Wizard World '08

The recent rumors are that Jesse Ventura is going to step into the Colman/Franken Senate race in Minnesota. He should announce his candidacy as either Blain from Predator or Captain Freedom from The Running Man. Then he should endorse Franken and bow out.

Wizard World '08

The best part of this picture is that you can see my reflection in his dome.

What purpose does that ridiculously long neck (which is accurate to the comics) serve? Bonus points though for Aquaman's tattered cloths on his trident. Somewhere the King of the Oceans is looking for something to hold up his pants.

Wizard World '08

I don't even know what the Hell these guys are. But damn, that's got to be hell in the bathroom.

Wizard World '08

Best costume of the show. Hands down. Inside was a girl who looked like she was about to melt. After the second day of the show she was killed and replaced by Wheelie. Damn you Wheelie!

Wizard World '08

Three Spideys! A new record! You know, as much controversy as the Iron Spidey suit created when it appeared, in a few years it's just going to be another Spiderman Armor, which is to say, a footnote.

Wizard World '08

Blue Beetle here did a great job of recreating his broken goggles from the Countdown to Infinite Crisis and OH MY GOD ARE THOSE HIS BALLS?!?

Wizard World '08

I honestly can't tell if this is the same Wonder Woman from earlier or if there were just two of them walking around. Also, that's a small Amazon!

Wizard World '08

Riddle me this...how does a super villain maintain a secret identity when he signs his Wizard World badge?

Note to Riddler: You got something on your chin pal. You might want to wake it up and shoo it along.

Wizard World '08

When the Baroness tells you to smile for the picture "or else," you smile for the damn picture.

Also, I asked her how Dr. Mindbender ran a clean lab with no shirt on. She said he sweated in a lot of experiments.

Wizard World '08

"Ah ha!" Cyclops thought, "I'll jump into this frame when he asked the girls for a picture." Three Spidey's are ok. You only ever need one Cyclops.

Wizard World '08

As part of Poison Ivy's parole from Arkham, she was required to spend five hours a week helping blind former-superheroes do their shopping.

Wizard World '08

You know it's time to retire from the superhero game when you can't even muster the energy to be excited about putting the costume on anymore.

Or if you'd prefer: Man, she's been spending too much time in the Danger Room. Get that girl some sun!

happy birthday?

My brother-in-law made a peculiar birthday gift for my sister. Had to share.

Wizard World '08

Upon touching the Monolith Drew experienced a leap forward in evolution.

Wizard World '08

You know how ubiquitous Star Wars characters are at Wizard World? There's a freaking Death Star wall for the Star Wars characters to hang out in front of. You probably can't tell in the downsized version that I can post on Blogger, but you can tell that this scene is from the Battle of Endor because there are both Star Destroyers, Mon Calamari cruisers and X-Wings flying around out there.

Wizard World '08

Ah, fanny pack Spider-Man. He's a Wizard World fixture and uses a fanny pack to cover up his junk. Plus, he's almost always surrounded by hot ladies.

Note: This is our second Spidey.

Wizard World '08

This picture has the whole spectrum of Wizard World costumes. On the one end of the spectrum you have people foregoing rent money to add that extra dose of space marine realism. Then you have people that splash some makeup on their face or throw on a brown robe.

Wizard World '08

The best part of this costume is that I'm assuming Jean Grey is still dead.

Wizard World '08

A gamorian guard from Return of the Jedi...snore. Granted, it's better than another Storm Trooper.

Wizard World '08

Ah ha! I figured it out! Harrison Ford was too busy to make Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull so they got this guy instead! That explains it!

Wow, on top of some great costumes, check out Henry Jones Sr.'s diary in his pocket. Now that's attention to detail!

Wizard World '08

This was a cute picture of Jay with our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man until I noticed Harley Quinn.

Wizard World '08

Jamie comes all the way up from the Magic Kingdom to be rude to V. Poor V, he's a rebel leader!

Wizard World '08

Ah, the *REAL* Mystique! Not that sex naked Mystique from the movies. You know she's an evil mutant because she has tiny skulls on her belt.

Wizard World '08

After years of hiding in plain sight, Waldo is caught and tortured by The Batman. His plot with Clayface foiled, Waldo began plotting his escape from Arkham.

Wizard World '08

That's right, I spent some time with the Princess of Power, Wonder Woman. Of course, I had suspicions that she was in the country illegally so I called in a tip to Homeland Security and they deported her back to Themiscyra.

Wizard World '08

I don't know who this woman is, but she was not impressed by Jay's antics. Shortly after this picture was taken she summoned a great beast to humble him.

Wizard World '08

That's right, after selfishly hording the joy of Wizard World to ourselves for three years we permitted the ladies to come along with this year! They got to take it all in for the first time. Lucky!

Here's part of the gang posing with a Republican. Jay was surprised by his plans for reforming health care.

Wizard World '08

Yeah, I'm a month late getting these things up. Anyway, expect tons of pictures now that I'm motivated!

Let's start it off simply. Two chums awaiting my arrival for the happiest weekend of the year! Hooray!

September 10th

I've been meaning to post this for a couple weeks, but, you know, lazy. Anyway, a while back someone from McCain's campaign asserted that Barak Obama's foreign policy was a "September 10th mindset." I can't believe that after almost seven years Republicans can still get away with calling dissenting opinions naive and not worthy of substantive response, so I've decided to come up with my own glib reply.

After September 11, many people jumped right through grief to wild anger. There were any number of people who asserted that we should just bomb the whole Middle East; make it into a parking lot; turn the sand to glass. Many people considered all Muslim's suspect and considered Islam an inherently evil, violent religion. Diplomacy was a quaint feature of an all too distant past. Over time people calmed down. They worked through their grief and they learned a lot about that region of the world and the people who's roots travel back there. They came to understand that few problems are as simple as "us" and "them"; "with us or against us." They realized that we couldn't fight the whole world even if we wanted too, and even if it would help. They also found that we don't, and it wouldn't. They figured out that fear isn't the best state in which to make decisions.

But not McCain. Nope, he's stuck in a September 12 mindset.

Genre

Hey there stranger! I'm sure you're here because you were googling for Indiana Jones, but this here's a not very well maintained blog about comics, politics, and all kinds of nerdity.

Anyway, I was driving home today and heard an excerpt from an interview between Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese from the late 90s. At one point Ebert says, "movies aren't about their subject; they're about how they're about their subject...I don't want to see a bad cowboy movie, or a bad boxing movie, I want to see a good boxing movie." And then, and I'll paraphrase because he wasn't very diplomatic here, that he doesn't understand people that say they don't like movies about subject X.

I've never heard it described so perfectly. I've never understood people that avoid genres because I've always thought that what they really meant wasn't that they disliked the genre, they just dislike the bad examples of that genre. The same goes for video games or comics: When people say they don't like comics, I hear "I haven't really tried very hard to find comics that I like."

Blogging Heads

I've been meaning to link to Blogging Heads for a while now, and with Ezra in it I think the time is now. Also, this conversation is very interesting, but who has time for 50 minutes of conversation?! Fortunately, Blogging Heads offers 1.4x speed which is both fascinating and hilarious. From here on it shall be called "Gilmore Girls Mode." Link.

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull [Review]

Verdict: Good
Review Affected by my pro-archeology bias: Yes

There's no power on Earth that could have made me dislike this movie. Well, I guess they could have made "Indiana Jones And The High School Musical" costarring Justin Guarini. Still, if it's the Indy brand I'm hard pressed not to at least have a good time.

Nostalgia is both the movie's greatest strength and biggest weakness. I mean, if this had been National Treasure 3 I wouldn't have gone to the theater in the first place. Nostalgia softened my mood going into the theater, and several scenes really did tug at the youthful fondness I still have for the series and its characters. On the other hand, there are scenes where the film is intentionally playing the nostalgia card, and by "plays" I mean "shoots you in the face with a nostalgia bullet." The movie takes the fantastic set pieces and action scenes of the original trilogy and tries to outdo them with almost nonstop stunts which frankly get a bit excessive and over-the-top. It's bizarre that this movie has the most scenes at Indy's college and makes him seem the least academic.

But it's not all critiques. Like I said at first, the prognosis overall is good if you're inclined towards this type of movie. Commies make a good enough baddie to keep the series going forward for several films if they want it to. Shia LeBouf doesn't give a great performance, but he's pretty good with a script that doesn't give him much. The effects are good and the stunts, though a bit overused, are good.

I've been waiting my entire adult life to have Indy come back and I had a fun time with him again. It's not all I could have hoped, but it was still plenty of fun.

California makes two

California State Supreme Court says same-sex couples have right to marry: "Gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry in California, the state Supreme Court said today in a historic ruling that could be repudiated by the voters in November."

The last clause is due to a potential ballot initiative that would change California's constitution, forbidding same-sex marriage. The Chron article explains the relevant history:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed same-sex marriage bills, citing a ballot initiative approved by more than 60 percent of the state's voters in 2000 that reaffirmed California's opposite-sex-only marriage law. That initiative was not a constitutional amendment, which requires more signatures to qualify for the ballot.

I believe a constitutional amendment in California also requires a 2/3 majority. Given that attitudes towards same-sex marriage have moved steadily left across the country over the past decade and the fact that a less radical law could only muster 60 percent of the voters, I'm pretty optimistic about this ballot initiative failing.

Lawyerly types can get the opinion here, In re Marriage Cases, S147999, available in both PDF and DOC formats.

We now return to your regularly-scheduled blog silence.

Idioms

Twice in less than a day I've seen someone online use the idiom "X is Y at best." and both times the person said something like "Saying X is disingenuous at best!" That leaves a remarkably narrow band of things that it could be at worst and seems to overlook the possibility of laziness, ignorance, or mistake. I guess, however, that my annoyance is based on a culture which places those latter three possibilities as better than lying. Maybe the people online come from a land where up is down, crime is good, and following the rules is only for the weak.

Also, The Ra is now four years and four days old. Hurray!

Summer Movies

Batman and Iron Man try to reach an accord regarding this summer. Link.

Rob Liefeld Sucks

Rob Liefeld is to comic art as Chris Claremont is to comic writing. If you're looking for the connection, it's that they're both among the most over hyped A-list artists in their field. They both got incredibly popular on a couple skills that helped them sell books like gangbusters. They both totally suck. Here's a list of Rob Liefeld's crap. I have to say that I haven't had a good laugh like that at the internet in a long while. Link.

Taking a break

Every time I go to write a post, it's either (a) a completely inadequate response to the immolation of the feminist blogosphere, or (b) utterly trivial. I'm going to take this as a sign that it's time for a blog vacation. I'll be back sometime in May.

30 Rock

They just mentioned "The Uncanny Valley." Rad.

So Tender

I love bad photos of John McCain. Let's put some good captions in the comments!



Link.

Quick debunking: The rape rate

Myth: The rape rate in the US has fallen 25% over the last 25 years.

Example: I found this rather bizarre claim on a YouTube video arguing that, first, the rape rate had fallen, and second, this was because of the increased availability of pornography. Hence, third, YouTube should allow pornography. Not only is this a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, but it didn't even sound true.

Response: Historical statistics on rape are surprisingly hard to find online. 1960-1998 data are here, and 2004 data here. In 1980, the rape rate was about 36 incidents per 100,000 people. In 2004, the rape rate was 32 per 100,000. That's a decrease of about 9%.

Now, in about 1992, the rape rate peaked somewhere around 42 or 43. This makes for a 25% reduction. But focussing on this period of time is completely disingenuous. In the early 1960s, before the lifting of indecency laws allowed the pornography industry to flourish, the rape rate was less than 10 per 100,000. So, since pornography became easily available, the rape rate has seen a net increase of 200%.

This is evidence supporting the claim that pornography encourages, rather than discourages, rape. But it's far from conclusive. There are simply too many other factors that aren't being taken into account to draw that conclusion.

Martha Nussbaum is omnipresent

How is this woman so prolific? Does she just not sleep?

Obama/Jay-Z '08?

Link.

Anti-intellectual and the classism of American education

In the context of the clucking about Obama saying that poor, rural Americans are bitter (which, hello, is entirely true, as anyone who's lived in a community populated in large part by poor, rural Americans can tell you), nojojojo shares the hypothesis of progress author, Joe Bageant:

The result of all this [the class divisions in the American education system], according to Bageant? People from rural, poor communities have been virtually programmed for generations to listen not to their own reasoning, but to whoever speaks loudest and most authoritatively on any subject. They respond to simple, emotionally charged messages — even when the the issues that the messages involve are complex and nuanced. They resent, and therefore distrust, those Americans who had greater access to education, or who were taught to question as they were not; Bageant believes this is less about anti-intellectualism/anti-elitism than it is simple schadenfreude [sic; I think the blogger means `resentment'] towards the more fortunate. And they’ve developed the perfectly reasonable survival mechanism of listening to whoever seems willing to help them, regardless of whether those people actually are helpful. Bageant notes cases of conservative politicians who visited rural areas and shared a beer with poor constituents — then turned right around and instituted policies that made health care, housing, food, and education unaffordable for those same people. Frequently these politicians got elected multiple times in spite of this. Loyalty, after all, is one of the values their constitutents were taught in school.

In certain respects, this is very much like the thesis of Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American life. Hofstadter would disagree, though, with the claim that anti-intellectualism isn't, well, anti-intellectualism. There is, he thinks, a close link between anti-intellectualism and egalitarianism.

Supes

Every time I hear someone argue why Superman sucks, I suspect they haven't read many Superman stories, have a lack of imagination, or both. Link.

Gamers Dissapoint Me Once Again

I know, it's the internet, and I really should have expectations in the basement as far as good debate goes. Still, the reactions to this interview with N'Gai Croal about the controversial Resident Evil 5 trailer are pretty abysmal. It's not that most gamers seem to disagree with Croal that bothers me, it's that they seem completely incapable of engaging his points directly. The number of people that respond with "it's just a game" when he explains in the interview itself why that's not a sufficient answer it just disheartening.

A weird argument from Clinton supporters

I've seen this line from Clinton supporters before, and it was just as bizarre:

Obama's advantage hinges on a system that, whatever the actual intentions behind it, seems custom-made to hobble Democratic chances in the fall. It depends on ignoring one of the central principles of American electoral politics, one that will be operative on a state-by-state basis this November, which is that the winner takes all. If the Democrats ran their nominating process the way we run our general elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton would have a commanding lead in the delegate count, one that will only grow more commanding after the next round of primaries, and all questions about which of the two Democratic contenders is more electable would be moot.

How do you infer from `Clinton would beat Obama in a winner-take-all electoral system' to `Clinton would beat McCain in a winner-take-all electoral system'? Or from `Obama would not beat Clinton in a winner-take-all electoral system' to `Obama would not beat McCain in a winner-take-all electoral system'? Obama is not McCain. Clinton is not McCain. And a majority of Democratic voters is not a majority of registered or likely or expected or actual voters.

Bad Meme, Bad!

Ok, I was not an early Obama supporter. I was an Edwards guy first and was concerned that Obama was a really good speaker with not a lot of substantial policies backing up the oratory. This was, of course, a year ago. Then the primaries began and bit by bit, whether through the necessity of having to answer a grilling by the press or just because he was releasing plans as they came together in his policy shop, Obama filled out his policy initiatives. After Edwards' ship sank I spent a while not supporting either Obama or Clinton because I believed, and still believe, that they're both similarly liberal and would both make fine executives. Then I got moved by a couple Obama speeches and Clinton's campaign started doing some really indefensible things, like advocating that she get delegates from Michigan where Obama wasn't even on the ballot and continuing to employ the odious Mark Penn, and I became an Obama supporter. I still think Clinton herself would be a fine executive, but I won't support the campaign that she's running. Anyway, it was endlessly annoying to me to hear a Clinton supporter at dinner last night use the old "Obama is all rhetoric" meme. Sadly, this is also something I hear other supporters online and even the Clinton campaign itself argue sometimes. Look, he was a relatively new politician at the start of this process and his policies were admittedly thin, that that's simply no longer true. I think there's plenty of room to disagree with Obama's specific policies, and indeed on some I do, and it's completely legitimate to argue that he won't be able to pass some of his initiatives, but let's have that debate rather than recycling arguments from 2007 which aren't relevant anymore.

The warm, fuzzy, unthreatening sort of radical

I love Martin Luther King. First, he is without a doubt in my mind the most brilliant American orator of the twentieth century, and quite possibly the greatest since Abraham Lincoln. Second, he words are not just moving; they are deep and insightful. `Letter from Birmingham city jail' is one of the great philosophical treatises on civil disobedience.

And third, King was truly radical in his opposition to racism, poverty, and war.

That last sentence might be kind of surprising. In the narrative I got in high school American history, King was the moderate, keeping the civil rights movement from spiraling off into the violence and destruction of Malcolm X and, later, The Black Panthers. King was the safe alternative, who wanted us all to get along. He wasn't going to shoot at you, or burn your house down, or make a pass at your wife. He was the Nice Black Man who, after centuries of being stomped on, was politely asking for those evil racists to please take their boot off his face.

This narrative is almost 100% bullshit. It's true that King and X disagreed deeply over the use of violence. But King didn't speak with a voice of submissive pleading. He didn't ask for improvement. He demanded justice, at whatever costs necessary. Jim Crow was his most famous enemy, but it was far from the only one. King fought the de facto apartheid of the Northern cities, the invasion of Viet Nam, and the way capitalism ground down communities into a fine, atomic powder of poverty. (Obviously, I'm not as good with the metaphors as he was.) King was systematically and radically opposed to virtually every aspect of the American and international power structure. And on the fortieth anniversary of his death (which was yesterday, but I was busy and the past two weeks have been exhausting -- sorry Dr. King) it's vital that we respect the radicality of his vision.

Some links:

1. Kai Wright with more on this theme:




His 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' is in fact a blunt rejection of letting the establishment set the terms of social change. 'The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation,' he wrote, later adding, 'We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.'





2. The NewsHour segment from last night, with three academics who work on race issues and Cory Booker, the progressive mayor of Newark, NJ. (Booker is undoubtedly someone to keep an eye on. I predict that this man is going to be one of the great activists of the 21st century.)

Pregnant husband

Watching the news last night, I was horribly depressed to find out that Iraq is, once again, on the verge of a civil war, and a large chunk of antarctic ice is about to break off.

This story, about a transman carrying his child, cheered me right up:

To our neighbors, my wife, Nancy, and I don’t appear in the least unusual. To those in the quiet Oregon community where we live, we are viewed just as we are -- a happy couple deeply in love. Our desire to work hard, buy our first home, and start a family was nothing out of the ordinary. That is, until we decided that I would carry our child.

I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy. Unlike those in same-sex marriages, domestic partnerships, or civil unions, Nancy and I are afforded the more than 1,100 federal rights of marriage. Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights. Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire.

Ten years ago, when Nancy and I became a couple, the idea of us having a child was more dream than plan. I always wanted to have children. However, due to severe endometriosis 20 years ago, Nancy had to undergo a hysterectomy and is unable to carry a child. But after the success of our custom screen-printing business and a move from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest two years ago, the timing finally seemed right. I stopped taking my bimonthly testosterone injections. It had been roughly eight years since I had my last menstrual cycle, so this wasn’t a decision that I took lightly. My body regulated itself after about four months, and I didn’t have to take any exogenous estrogen, progesterone, or fertility drugs to aid my pregnancy.

Knowing there are people in the world this courageous really restores my optimism. Yes, the next few decades are going to suck. But we might just be able to pull through.

Post!

Ezra has a very creepy discovery in buying his Wii. Link.

Life: The Musical

If only this happened more often. Actually, now that I think about it, there are some aspects of life which might be made slightly more awkward if set to music. Link.

Way To Go Huck!

I've long thought that Mike Huckabee would have been close to the worst, if not *the* worst, person to win the presidency out of the initial field, but was conversely among the most likable guys running. Even though he's out of the race now and every political instinct should probably be screaming to find some way to help McCain's chances (and his own political career), ol' Huck is still totally decent. Good show sir. Link.

It's not as simple as `let them fail'

I've seen some progressive and mainstream voices denouncing the `too big to fail' Fed bailout of Bear Stearns a week ago. I'm much more ambivalent about this sort of thing.

The financial sector of the American economy functions much like a private toll road system. Some roads -- like the one from your savings to your neighbor's new mortgage or small business loan -- are small, low-volume, and highly local. Others, like Bear Stearns, are superhighways, moving tens of billions of dollars back and forth all over the place in both financial and physical space. Bad loans, in this metaphor, are like cars with severe mechanical problems -- no breaks, bad transmissions, maybe a couple cylinders aren't firing. And when lots of them break down in the middle of the superhighway, it gets clogged and slows down. The dead cars have to be cleared out, which adds to the operating expenses of the superhighway.

Now, the superhighway can, as it were, only allow cars that pass mechanical checks to use it. This keeps everything moving along nicely, but it's sacrificing some profit. More risk-friendly superhighway operators aren't going to have such checks, betting that the additional costs from cleaning up after the failures of bad cars will be less than the additional profit from having a higher number of cars move through their system.

Bear Stearns failed, essentially, because it lost this bet. As traffic ground to a halt on the Bear Sterns superhighway due to all the broken cars littering the roadway, the other superhighways closed their connections to keep the backup from spreading to their systems. (Imagine you have an east-west superhighway passed underneath a north-south highway, with a complex series of ramps that allow you to move from one to the other. Now imagine there are barriers that can be lowered to prevent cars from using those ramps. That's essentially what the other giant securities banks did to Bear Stearns late last week.)

This is good, at least in the short term, for the other superhighways, because it keeps them from grounding to a halt along with Bear Stearns. But it's bad, in the medium term, for the economy as a whole, for exactly the same reason suddenly shutting down one of the major superhighways through the middle of a large city is bad. Money/cars still need to move around. Either traffic will be diverted onto other superhighways, which will likely push them beyond their efficient capacity and slow them, and hence the system as a whole, down. Or people will, as it were, just stay home, and not bother trying to fight the nightmare traffic. Money won't move from the people who have it to the people who want it to do things, so people do less things -- don't open new businesses, don't expand existing business, don't build new houses, etc. In either case, economic growth slows down, and there's a potential for recession.

At least, that's the `too big to fail' theory. Closing fifty feet of surface street in the middle of a residential neighbourhood probably isn't going to do much damage -- the failure of small economic players, at least individually, might be inconvenient, but the system will adapt pretty easily. Shutting down a massive superhighway that carries a significant percentage of all the city's traffic will have complex effects that will ripple through the traffic network as a whole, and possibly even damage it severely -- letting Bear Stearns fail could have made the recession even worse.

So, did the Fed do the right thing, in essentially paying another superhighway operator to clean up the mess Bear Stearns made of its system by letting on all the junk cars? Well, they acted to prevent a medium term disaster. The clogged superhighway will be cleaned up. But the incentive to create such clogs will not have been removed. If superhighway operators knew that they would be the primary losers when a massive traffic jam developed on their superhighway, they would be likely to sacrifice some profits and allow only cars that passed mechanical checks onto their part of the system. But they don't know this. They know the exact opposite: that they can create a huge mess, and the Federal government will buy them out. According to a purely self-interested conception of reason, they have no good reason not to just do the same thing again.

It's this last point that critics of `too big to fail' are trying to get at. Or, at least, I think it's the best related point. With a prevalent short term profits mentality, a pure free market system will cease to function efficiently as these sorts of disastrous decisions are made again and again. A more virtuous business culture will help, but the temptation to tempt fate might still be too large. (Remember, Bear Stearns was enormously successful until it finally imploded. Even without the bailout, the former CEO could have walked away from the mess he created a ridiculously wealthy man.) And stopgap, emergency intervention by the government is just that -- it might avert the most looming disasters, but it completely misses the underlying cause of the problem. What the system needs, I think, is vigorous regulation -- the kind that pretty much made these disasters impossible in the '50s, '60s, and '70s.