Obsidian Wings

April What? An Open Thread

by Gary Farber

It's still April 1st on the Left Coast for another two hours and five minutes (when I started this post; an hour and ten minutes when I finished), no matter what date you read above this post. 

Some foolish links are in order!

So, out of order!

Japan is on everyone's mind, but we need to remember than it's not all doom and gloom, and yet in the spirit of helping:

The Tactical Philanthropy Haiku Contest:

Donors want data
Nonprofits measure impact
Experts watch and smile

Hai, ku!  Can you write techie Haiku?  Win $50!

Some past winners I like include:

Chekov in the bay
searching hard for some space fuel
Nuclear wessels
-- Jay in Murfreesboro, Tennessee

I bit a zombie.
it was ironic but the
taste was terrible.
-- Blake in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Learn from the Jedi.
Discipline, control, respect.
Dangerous muppet.
-- Patrick in Anaheim, California

Packets of photons
Streaming by our planet's sky
their address divine
-- Michaline in Chicago Illinois

Eat Theobromine.
Drink methyltheobromine.
Heliophobe, I.
--Zach in Tyler, Texas

Why kill Wash and Book?
Are they thinking what I am?
Firefly Zombies!
--Barak from East Brunswick, New Jersey

Advice for commenters arguing with bloggers:  

Don't argue with a
Mobius strip because it
Will be one-sided
--Jimmy from Poughquag, New York

Let there be peace:

Take me to the black
I am a leaf on the wind
My Serenity
--Jennifer in Dallas, Texas

And this speaks to, for, and sometimes it seems to be me:

I am all around,
Yet some can't seem to find me.
I am Internet.
--Terry in San Francisco, California

Read the rest!  Funny!

Did I say "geeks"?  Not yet! Let's read Henry Jenkins talk about gender and game design with James Paul Gee!

There's nothing bloggers like better than catching out the New York Times in embarrassing goofs! 

till the landslide brings it down

by fiddler

Following up on previous posts (here, here, here, here, and here):

HBGary Federal, Team Themis, Hunton & Williams and the US Chamber of Commerce:

• Aaron Barr, HBGary Federal CEO, who spearheaded the company's attempts to discover the identity of members of Anonymous and whose emails were exposed by Anonymous in return, resigned on Feb. 28. Barr said he wanted to spend more time with his family and recover his reputation. The article linked also points out poor security practices within the company, including a general disregard of the importance of using distinct and complex passwords -- perhaps something else Barr could work on in his spare time, now.

Self-Evident

Guest post by Amezuki, not by Gary Farber

You all know me by a different pseudonym, and I'll reintroduce myself properly later.

But in the meantime, a word from our Founders:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence stands, in my mind, as one of the greatest political documents in history.

Like our Constitution, it stands on the shoulders of many other exalted works, and my opinion is not in any way intended to denigrate those works--but what makes it stand out in my mind is not just the role it had in the birth of our nation, but in the simple, unequivocal and straightforward statements of first principles it contains.

Foremost among these is the well-known passage I quoted above. Its evocative power was such that Martin Luther King, one of the most eloquent speakers and users of language our nation has known, had no need to embellish it further when quoting it, save to correctly note that it was a promise our country had yet to fully honor. "All men are created equal."

Think about that for a moment. All men. You will notice a distinct lack of footnotes, equivocation, qualifications or exceptions to the word "all".

Your zeitgeist post

by liberal japonicus

I was one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement - the original Port Huron Statement, not the compromised second draft. And then I, uh - ever hear of the Seattle Seven? That was me... and there were six other guys.

 The Dude, Big Lebowski

In January of 1968, the reform movement known as Prague Spring began, which was initially/fundamentally President Alexander Dubček's program of economic decentralization and relief from censorship. The movement led to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the USSR and Warsaw Pact allies 8 months later.

In March of 1968, Edson Luís de Lima Souto was killed by Brazilian Military Police during a student protest about the high price of meals at a student restaurant. This incident led to a number of protests in Rio de Janeiro and resulted in the enactment of Ato Institucional Número Cinco (Institutional Order 5), which closed the National Congress for a year, made political gatherings illegal and suspended habeus corpus for crimes that were politically motivated

In March of 1968, students occupied the administration building at the University of Paris in Nanterre. In the previous decade, the student population of the university had tripled, with little extra funding to support the university. The students occupying the admin building, issued a manifesto that called for "Outright rejection of the Capitalist Technocratic University". After the manifesto was distributed, the students left. 2 months later, on May 2nd, the French government closed down the university. Students at the Sorbonne organized a protest the following day and police entered the university. Protesting that hitherto unprecedented police invasion of a French university, the UNÉF (Union Nationale des Étudiants de France) and the union of university teachers marched thru Paris on May 6th. 20,000 protesters were sealed off by police, barricades were erected, and hundreds of students were arrested, with a confrontation between police and students in the Latin Quarter yielding many of the iconic images of that event. High school student unions also organized protests, and on May 7th, a large demonstration took place at the Arc de Triomphe focused on three demands: That all charges against the students be dropped, that police leave Nanterre and the Sorbonne and that both those universities, which had been closed, be reopened. The French government was not too concerned with these protests, there were industrial labor actions the previous year and continuing industrial action at Renault. On May 13th, the participating unions issue a call for a general strike. This is picked up in the press, and the call was published on the front page of L'Humanité. The action was held on May 15th. link and link  

In June of 1968, students at Tokyo University boycotted all classes. This action was led by medical students whose initial grievance was the service they were required to do upon completing their degrees. The boycott led to other actions at university across Japan. While a huge range of sweeping changes were enacted, a sit in at Yasuda Hall, continued until January 1969, when 8,000 riot police evicted the protesters. Protests occurred at approximately one-third of all the universities in Japan, all with various local origins pdf link

In October 1968, a large riot over the banning of a university lecturer active in the Black Power movement, Walter Rodney, occurred in Kingston, Jamaica. link

On Oct 2nd, 1968, October 2, a student demonstration in Mexico City resulted in the police and paramilitary forces killing over 100 people, in what is now known as Tlatelolco massacre link

In October, 1969, the party of Korean president Park Chung-hee forced through a constitutional amendment that permitted him to seek a 3rd term over the objections of the minority party. Park declared a state of national emergency in 1971, martial law in 1972 and Korea was riven by protests and riots for the next 10 years until the assassination of Park by the head of the director of the Korean CIA. 

In addition, there are a number of other incidents and historical points that I think are related, but may occur outside this 1968-69 period. The Cultural Revolution began in China in 1966, and by 1968, the Red Guards were virtually in charge of the country.

In Thailand in October 1973, 400,000 students and residents of Bangkok protested and were suppressed by the military. The student organization that was one of the main organizers, the NSC of Thailand, was formed after a bus fare hike in 1969 led to a protest. (link)

In the Phillipines, January 1970 marked the event known as the First Quarter Storm, where 50,000 demonstrators stormed the Presidential Palace.

I've purposely left out the 1968 events in the US (MLK assassination, Chicago, etc) and in some places in Europe because there is a tendency for USAians to view those events thru the lens of civil rights and Vietnam (I dare say we have a number of people who were at those protests here, and I'm not trying to denigrate or minimize what was done). I don't think that is wrong so much as I think looking at the period of time as a worldwide phenomenon, you get a different picture. More about that picture is below the fold. (if I did the extended entry code correctly.)

Related (if only in my mind)

by liberal japonicus

John Emerson's guest post raised a number of issues, but as it was talking about media and the left's relation to it, what it highlighted for me was the tendency of the Left (for certain values of Left) to always have to find a balancing point between the calling out different aspects, even if they are your allies, or waving the banner of solidarity. More sarcastically, one could say that I was wondering why the standard formation for a firing squad on the Left is a circle.

Two items came up that I think are related to it. The first is via LGM and it concerns the fact that the academic journal, Gender and Politics, refused to accept for peer review a paper about research related to questions of the LBGT community and said in the letter that it was not going to accept any research on those questions. An open letter written by an academic in the field is included.

I'll start off by saying that this is a pretty stupid thing, and I stand by that. However, in the LGM comments, one person notes that this is one aspect of a debate in a lot of areas and notes that, despite the stupidity of the above, the move from Women Studies to Gender Studies to Gender and Sexuality studies returns women to an invisible state. The commenter says "So I think there are legitimate political concerns at work here but they are going about addressing them completely incorrectly and in a way that is likely to do more long-term damage."

Another area where this manifests itself is in the question of how race is defined. The NYTimes had this Room for Debate section which discusses the question of the Education Department's new mixed race category. I don't care too much for the format, it is like a little sampler tray of opinions, but it is instructive to see who is talking about it and what they are saying. The participants are (in order they are listed, but the NY Times basically has the pieces linked in a circle, so you can start with any of them and move around) are

• Lani Guinier
• Eric Liu
• Shelby Steele
• Anthony Carnevale
• Susan Graham
• Gerald Torres
• Ranier Spencer

Of the contributors, Shelby Steele and Susan Graham (who I had never heard of) are the most enthusiastic advocates of the mixed race category. Other interesting points were raised but the simple fact of Shelby Steele advocating this deserves some attention.

Gayl Jones, an African American writer whose books I highly recommend (Corregidora and Mosquito are two must reads) once said something to the effect that diversity was simply whites way of trying to dilute blackness. It's not hard to see her point when you see Shelby Steele waving the flag of mixed race categories.

I think one reason that the Left always has these problems is that there is a constant tension between the question of having solidarity and demanding your own space. There is not a simple template to be placed on these questions to derive an answer. Each instance has to be examined for its own history and peculiarities.

Albert Camus wrote a short story entitled the Artist at Work, In the collection of Exile and the Kingdom. In it, an unknown painter finds success late in life and is unable to cope with it. He secludes himself from his family and friends and works, isolated, in his loft. He collapses, partially from exhaustion, but also because he hears the sounds of his family laughing, and life in the outside world. As he is being checked out by the doctor, Camus tells us that the painting he has locked himself away with is a canvas blank except for a small word in the center, too small to be read, except that it could either be solitaire or solidaire. So it remains.

A Kind Of Moderation

Guest post by Thomas Nephew, longtime blogger, posted by Gary Farber.

Gary has been kind enough to invite me to post here, and I'm overcoming some real jitters to give it a try.  

Obsidian Wings!  One of the top blog sites and one of the top online communities of the past decade, hence pretty much of all time.  Writing that could make you simultaneously rend your garments and thank the gods somebody, somewhere had the guts and the gift to say it - whether as writers like Katherine, Publius, Lindsay, Hilzoy, Eric, or G'Kar/Andrew, or commenters like Nell, KCinDC, or Gary.  (Just to name a few, and not to overlook the rest.)  Still not sure I'll belong.

Aside from jitters, though, I was also not sure how I'd fit with ObWi's recognizable "voice" -- probably basically hilzoy's, but somehow the whole site's as well. 

I have my own little blog, which I named "newsrack" once upon a time, and "newsrackblog.com" now.  I imagined I'd cover the ebb and flow of news from all over, but I couldn't do it: the Twitter-like pace of a Willis, a Reynolds, a Sullivan, a Marshall awes me and completely eludes me.  

I nevertheless think I've sometimes written some fairly good stuff there, usually when I stick to a topic for a while, learn more about it, research it, and finally start to get across to *myself* what the heck interests me about it.  

I call those "jags", and I've been on a few:   Iraq.  Iraq. (More on that in a moment.) Torture.  Bankruptcy bill.  Texasgate. Impeachment.  Executive power.  Civil War/Reconstruction.  Wal-Mart.  Fair Share Health Care.  Feingold 2010.  FISA Amendment Act.  License plate scanners.  A general sense of disgust with the media. Disappointed In Obama.  D'oh!

The Media in Sixteen Snappy Paragraphs

Guest Post by John Emerson, posted by Gary Farber, to cover Gary while traveling, but who was delayed by hotel internet service going out.

(Everything below is expressed in its maximal form, as per my normal modus operandi. Readers may want to trim certain passages in accordance with their own tastes.)

Everyone talks about the media, but no one has been able to do anything about it. I share the common opinion that the disaster of contemporary American politics is in large part the result of the corruption and dishonesty of the media, and I also believe that this corruption is deep-rooted and unlikely to change, and that as a result we are between a rock and a hard place somewhere up shit creek. Eight years ago I thought that the internet would change things, but that hasn’t seemed to have happened. A lot of us are now better-informed than the media want us to be. But there are not enough of us and we remain a powerless minority, even (it has turned out) within the Democratic Party.

I am not trying to replace the libraries of media criticism that already exist, but merely to sum up my understanding of the situation in a few snappy phrases.

AMBIENT OPINION

 

We Can Haz Kitty Open Thread With No Guns!

by Gary Farber

One Thousand and One Nights of no Open Threads it has not been, but let one begin! 

Tell your stories! 

One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة‎ Kitāb 'alf layla wa-layla; Persian: هزار و یک شب Hezār-o yek šab) is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English language edition (1706), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.^[1]

The work as we have it was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars across the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان, lit. A Thousand Tales) which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.^[2] Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the 14th century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to around the 9th century.

Let me frame that for you.  I foreshadow.  We are all unreliable narrators.

But some of us haz friends who are kitties.

 

Download We Can Haz Grooming Vid 2011-01-30 002

One Way To Connect

by Gary Farber

ONE WAY TO CONNECT can be this:

This is America:

This is something we can do:

To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor:

The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world

Everything connects:

Speak To The Kitty: NEW OBWI EMAIL ADDRESS And Open Thread

by Gary Farber

Longtime and valued commenter Uncle Kvetch asked an extremely important question here.

[...] While it was nice seeing a united front of commenters taking on avedis' all-too-familiar mix of dick-waving bravado and abject sexual terror, I do find myself wondering just what constitutes "beyond the pale" when it comes to homophobic remarks around here. I'm not referring to ban-worthy offenses, as the posting rules are clear enough. But I have to say that when the inevitable necrophilia/bestiality comparisons were dragged out and numerous commenters just kept on presuming good faith on avedis' part...well, it makes me wonder.

The answer is that the "New Banning Rules" were last updated, as you can see, by longtime front-pager Edward at 10:25 AM on January 26, 2005.

They include this:

One writer (but only one) from the other side of the fence must agree to the ban for it to move forward (Von can vote as either side of the fence as he wishes). For the record, currently Charles Bird, Andrew, and Sebastian Holsclaw are on the right; Von is in the center; and Hilzoy is on the left.;-) Yes, that's unbalanced...we're working on it.*

This has been discussed many many many times in comments since 2005, by various people.  Many emails to the kitty address have been sent since 2005.

The "New Banning Rules" remain as posted until someone with the ability and authority to post new rules does so.  Wording has been suggested. 

The Posting Rules were last updated 1/19/2007, with a further undated update by an unknown to me user of "SuperUser."  I can guess, but so can you.

Again, much email has been sent to the kitty address since then, and there have been various discussions in comments about this since that time.

The Posting Rules remain as posted until someone with the ability and authority to post new rules does so.

None of this will change until the co-bloggers communicate with each other about it, and appropriate action taken by the appropriate parties with the ability to do so.  As has always been the case. 

As of Wednesday, December 29th, the address to email the kitty has been: ObWings At gmail Dot com

Send Obsidian Wings related email there.