Can you detect the normativity in this BBC article?
14 March 2008
13 March 2008
11 March 2008
Geraldine Ferraro: Crazy Old Bigot or Straight Shooter?
First, it was:
If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.Now, it's:
Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up... Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?On a completely unrelated note, I'm quite distressed to find out that the F-117s are going to purgatory.
P.S. Geraldine Ferraro, if you're out there, you came this close - || - to making it onto the list of people who need to read Aquinas.
P.P.S. Please note that in the title of this post, I make my first in what is likely to be a long series of ageist remarks of the 2008 campaign.
The Moral of the Story
If you're a politician, screw around with interns. Not pages, interns.
If you're a politician's spouse, keep your maiden name. And don't quit your day job.
08 March 2008
Sweet Land of Bigotry...
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa 5th) indulges in a great American pasttime:
Transcript (hat tip - Crooks and Liars): I don’t want to disparage anyone because of their, their race, their ethnicity, their name - whatever their religion their father, father might have been.
I’ll just say this that when you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States — and I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam?
And I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the, the radical Islamists, the, the al-Qaida, and the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11...
It does matter, his middle name does matter. It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world, it has a special meaning to them. They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name. They will be dancing in the streets because of who his father was and because of his posture that says: Pull out of the Middle East and pull out of this conflict.
So there are implications that have to do with who he is and the position that he’s taken. If he were strong on national defense and said ‘I’m going to go over there and we’re going to fight and we’re going to win, we’ll come home with a victory,’ that’s different. But that’s not what he said. They will be dancing in the streets if he’s elected president. That has a chilling aspect on how difficult it will be to ever win this Global War on Terror.
Happy International Women's Day!
Celebrate with milestones in women's history, as recounted by porn stars.
07 March 2008
It's about time...
...to throw a shoutout to Stuff White People Like, an irreverent and over-the-top blog about--well, the rest of this sentence was going to be redundant. A recent entry: white people like Graduate School. As Jacob Levy points out (hat tip to him for this link) one is led to react with a healthy ambivalence towards the kind of "self-conscious, self-congratulatory way that members of a privileged group can enjoy humor at their own expense."
On a personal level, it's both revealing to note (given my ethnic background) the proportion of the 84 items (at the time of writing) which apply to me (I'd say 80-90%); moreover, I'd venture that the blog refers less to "white people" (or even white Americans) in general than a certain cross-section of the liberal-yuppie-indie nexus. And finally, while the insights are often devilishly funny, the writing style leaves much to be desired. All these things considered, it's still worth a quick glance-through.
06 March 2008
Sign of Weakness
Yes, this is silly, and Paul Wells is right to point it out. Parliamentary navel-gazing is never attractive when examined outside the hothouse atmosphere of the House of Commons.
However, Wells (and the vast majority of press coverage of Stephane Dion and the Liberal Party) glosses over one simple and irreducible fact: the Libs are broke. Jean Chretien's campaign finance reform effectively crippled the Liberal mode of fundraising. It's an open question whether one leadership candidate or another would have been quicker to organize fundraising efforts, but the fact remains, the Liberals have been hamstrung by their own history.
If the Liberals were rolling in cash, I suspect we would have had an election six months ago. But then, we also would have had television ads to counter the Harper smear campaign of January 2007 (which wins an award for Best Character Assassination Attempt of the Century) that was, and continues to be, so determinative of Dion's standing with the national press, and so detrimental to his public image.
And in case I be accused of failing to put my money where my mouth is, I donated $50 bucks to the Liberals last week. I can't quite believe I did it - but these are strange days indeed....
03 March 2008
NAFTA springs a leak
This story, which has been percolating in the Canadian media for a couple of days, is likely a tempest in a teapot... but I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at the Canadian embassy when it (whatever it was) went down. Next time I see Michael Wilson, I'll quiz him maybe.
LOOSE-LIPS-SINK-SHIPS UPDATE: So it wasn't the embassy in Washington after all - but it was the PMO that decided to alert the news media to Austin Goolsbee's informal remarks. I suggest giving the Newsday piece a full read - the most interesting stuff is buried at the end.
This little fracas is really quite fascinating, if only for the fact that it teaches our American cousins what we poor Canadians have learned (or are learning) through bitter experience: Stephen Harper has a reputation for giving no quarter, letting no nuance go unpunished, and taking any and every opportunity to screw with you if he doesn't like your politics.
DENIAL-AIN'T-JUST-A-RIVER UPDATE: And the story continues to swell to distinctly unteapot-like proportions. Leaks? What leaks?
I'M-SHOCKED, SHOCKED-THAT-LEAKS-ARE-TAKING-PLACE-IN-THIS-ESTABLISHMENT UPDATE: Now that Barack Obama's lost in Ohio and seems weakened in the long term, our enlightened government is going to investigate just who leaked that darn NAFTA memo. But not by using the RCMP. And not taking into account the original causal leak. Jeffrey Monaghan must be shaking his head in disbelief.
OMG-BROKEN-TELEPHONE-DECIDES-THE-FATE-OF-NATIONS UPDATE: So it was Ian Brodie who made an offhand remark about an offhand remark he hadn't even heard, about a different candidate than the one the press reported the remark as being about, which then revealed another offhand remark that had been miscommunicated to somebody else. No wonder Barack Obama had no idea what was going on. Nothing was going on, except that someone turned the echo chamber up to 11.
This incident and its many reverberations could well be the basis for a PhD thesis. Maybe my PhD thesis...no wait, scratch that. Anyway, much to my chagrin given earlier posts, this fracas may be a good example of one of my favorite maxims. I hope Stephen Harper doesn't sue me.
THE-OTHER-SHOE-DROPS UPDATE: My mea culpa above notwistanding, I do have one question: how did CTV News, which originally reported that both the Clinton and Obama campaigns had contact the government (when, at least according to the initial leak, it was only the Clinton campaign that the government knew about, and in fact, now denies Brodie mentioned at all) get its information about the Obama campaign? Did they have the Goolsbee memo before they ran the original story? What, in short, was CTV's role in all this? Incompetence? Or something else?
HITTING-CLOSE-TO-HOME UPDATE: So maybe I won't be talking to Michael Wilson about this after all. I doubt it's high on his cocktail chatter list.
02 March 2008
War Threats Not Headline News?
When a head of state orders the deployment of troops through a public television and radio address, threatening the possibility of "the start of a war in South America," I wonder why this appears lower on the Globe's homepage than items on the latest death of a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan, the sham Russian election, a tiff between the Canadian finance minister and the premier of Ontario, and the situation in Gaza. I mean, I suppose we're used to this kind of banter from Hugo Chavez, but... well read it yourselves and see if it doesn't makes you slightly anxious, if it might not deserve a slightly higher billing.
Let me demonstrate this visually:
01 March 2008
Poetry v. Prose
Via the Times:
To deal with the geographic demands of two diverse states, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama were relying on surrogates to carry their message. For Mrs. Clinton, it was Richard A. Gephardt, the former House Democratic leader from Missouri, who was a longtime opponent of trade deals like Nafta and was campaigning in the blue-collar Mahoning Valley.Metaphor for a nomination campaign? Stacking up the Dick Gephardt of the infamous Rose Garden moment against L'Arcade Fire, I know who I'd vote for.
For Mr. Obama, it was Arcade Fire, the popular indie-rock group who announced they would perform for Mr. Obama at Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville on Sunday. Nelsonville is not far from Ohio University and many of the younger voters that Mr. Obama seeks.
29 February 2008
Harper Family Values
Evangelist takes credit for film crackdown
Christian crusader says he pressured cabinet ministers and PMO officials to deny tax credits to productions deemed too offensive
- from the Globe & Mail, February 29, 2008
Headline says it all really. Welcome to Canuckistan - yes, we have no bananas!
28 February 2008
proper protocol
Like many online forms, the registration for Amtrak's Guest Rewards program, which gets you points for free travel, has a drop-down menu for "title" along with name, address, etc. One is then presented with the following options:
Admiral
Airman
Brother
Captain, USA
Captain, USN
Chief Master Sgt.
Chief Petty Officer
Chief Warrant Officer 4
Col.
Commander
Dr.
Father
Gen.
Hon.
Jurist Doctorate
Lady
Lieutenant Commander
Lt.
Lt. Col.
Lt. Gen.
Maj. Gen.
Major
Master Chief
Master Sgt.
Miss
Mother
Mr.
Mrs.
Ms.
Pastor
Prince
Princess
Prof.
Rabbi
Rev. Father
Reverend
SIR
Senator
Senior Chief
Sgt.
Sgt. Maj.
Sister
27 February 2008
Afghanada
No, not the plucky and hard-hitting CBC radio drama...
...but the news that CIDA is This little tidbit is coupled with Peter Mackay's musings that withdrawing from combat actually means withdrawing the government from any direct control over when or where combat occurs. You've got to give the government points for this piece of sophistry: the Liberal withdrawal of their own combat operations against the Conservatives over the past few months has emboldened CPC strategists to make do with the flimsiest-possible rhetorical fig leaves, barely cover enough for the government's immodest and increasingly indecent flouting of public opinion, historical necessity, and good sense.Taken together, I have the depressing impression that Canada is in the process of exporting two of our most dispiriting national faults to the poor unsuspecting Afghans: mistaking large, ugly buildings for social and cultural progress, and letting government organs off the hook to be both ineffective and invasive at the same time through a naive and unquestioning certainty that a Canadian would never call a spade anything other than a spade. These are perhaps reasons as good as any not to become involved in the foreign adventurism of our friends and neighbors. In any case, here is my (modest) eight-point plan for Canada and Afghanistan - because it can't be worse than Peter Mackay's: 1) immediately make it clear to the Canadian public that as long as Canadian personnel of any stripe remain in Afghanistan, they will be at some physical risk, and point out that the only honorable way to mitigate that risk is to improve conditions in Afghanistan proper; 2) stop whining about how the Europeans aren't pulling their weight, and let some of our astonishingly talented diplomats take the lead in aggressively courting allies, NATO and otherwise, in forging a common voice for intervenors in Afghanistan; 3) find a neutral country (Brazil, let's say) to act as a common mediator between the Afghan government, the northern warlords, and the Taliban to forge a stable political settlement -- point out to all parties that the only way NATO countries will have the stamina to continue operations is if all parties can overcome their differences in the name of their own self-interest (namely, a place in the future of running Afghanistan), and suggest that NATO's unhappy involvement in what everyone can see is an ill-conceived neocolonialist boondoggle would be brought to a much swifter conclusion if everyone played nice;4) agitate with vigor for a strong UN Special Representative and a centralized reconstruction plan to adequately and fairly disburse international money and resources across the country not merely to build things, but also fund the Afghan people and their work;5) insist on recruiting the myriad entrepreneurs, NGOs and small business owners who are doing their best to revive Afghan trade and civil society into the redevelopment process to achieve something from the ground up - and that includes poppy producers who could be convinced to sell their plants for morphine, not opium;6) host a regional conference on Afghanistan to enlist, cajole or impress regional states into participating, or at least tacitly endorsing, the plan; 7) insist that these various measures be tied to continued, and possibly expanded, Canadian troop, diplomatic and personnel deployment; and8) stop "selling" the mission domestically as though it's a used Honda Civic, and instead present Canadians with this broad international progress in Afghanistan with Canada at its head. This is the sort of thing that might lead people to believe Canada had an independent, muscular foreign policy, or, perish the thought, a global "leadership role." Of course, leadership is only accomplished through intelligence, courage, energy, compassion, and the willingness to take a risk or two, not qualities the Harper government likes its dependents to display. (Leadership, at least on the world stage, also requires foreign ministers who have a clue about their lack of credibility on foreign things, but we won't go there). Nor does the government like to really think to the long-term, at least not on constructive matters - and that's another thing holding Canada's Afghanistan policy back. If we as a country are unwilling to undertake the many kinds of work - financial, diplomatic, social, and military - that will help our fellows in other parts of the world, let's at least stop being hypocrites about our own parochial narrow-mindedness.
26 February 2008
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