Month: December 2010

by Chris Bodenner

Gabe delivers the glorious goods, mashup style.

by Zoë Pollock

Ann Althouse points to this list of the 100 top choices, but she prefers short and sweet:

Hey, for me, click is one of the most beautiful words. But the words on this list tend to be multisyllabic with aesthetically pleasing sounds: evanescent, efflorescence, effervescent, emollient.

I like the idea that a simple word that we often run across could win, as opposed to liking the fancy ones that seem to show off and we'd feel silly saying out loud. I've just returned from a 10-day birthright trip to Israel, open to anyone of Jewish origins under 27.  I hope to share some more thoughts with you all once the cloud of jetlag has cleared, but on a language note I was surprised by how much of the slang that the Israelis used and taught us was actually Arabic: sababa, yalla, wala. (Very rough translations respectively: "awesome", "let's go", and an affirmative or ironic response, often played for humor.)

It's not a perfect parallel by any means, but I don't know many Americans who use South American slang in the same way, despite how many of us live in close proximity to Latino communities. As always I stand to be corrected by the collective consciousness of the Dish. Are there words I'm obviously missing and that you all love to use?

by Conor Friedersdorf

TNC offers up a history lesson:

In much of the antebellum South, the enslaved knew these last weeks of December as Holiday. Holiday was generally a good time, you could secure passes to see relatives on far-off plantations, get plenty of time off, and the master would often come down the hovels and hand out new clothes, cider and whiskey.

But for many slaves Holiday was also a season foreboding, for the start of the New Year often brought the selling and trading of slaves, and thus the destruction of families. I mean not to ruin your own personal Holiday, and all that it means to you. But I find that this is the time when my thoughts turn to length and breadth of my family, and the great sacrifices that were made so that my Holiday would be different.

by Chris Bodenner

Pete Guither sees the bigger picture in Pat Robertson's on-air musings:

This is actually true conservative thinking. I thought that was dead. Related: Radley Balko has a column at Reason discussing a new public policy website called Right on Crime, a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation aimed at changing the way conservatives think about criminal justice.

“While the growth of incarceration took many dangerous offenders off the streets,” says an introduction to the website, “research suggested that it reached a point of diminishing returns, as recidivism rates increased and more than one million nonviolent offenders filled the nation’s prisons. In most states, prisons came to absorb more than 85 percent of the corrections budget, leaving limited resources for community supervision alternatives such as probation and parole, which cost less and could have better reduced recidivism among non-violent offenders.”

I’d really like to see this take hold. With Democratic politicians, for the most part, too afraid (and too beholden to special interests) to actually follow the wishes of their voters, it would be fantastic to have a strong conservative faction looking for policy that is fiscally responsible, results accountable, liberty based, and limits big government waste.

Ilya Somin is also bouyed by the conservative cred Robertson's words lend to legalization.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Over at Ricochet, Adam Freedman expresses alarm at a news story from Europe:

A high school geography teacher in Spain recklessly told his class that the region of Tevelez in Granada Province has a cold climate that favors curing ham. A Muslim student complained on the grounds that the mere mention of “ham” is offensive to Muslims.  Okay, high school students often say intemperate things.  But here the student talked it over with his parents – and the parents filed a complaint with the National Police and the Court. 

According to sources, the complaint isn’t likely to go very far.  But the high school and the teacher will nonetheless have to spend time and effort in getting it dismissed.  The very fact that adults seriously think that the word “ham” should be banned in Spain – in Spain! – gives us a glimpse of the tyranny of “cultural sensitivity.” (h/t Volokh Conspiracy).  Calling Mark Steyn – help!

Obviously I share the opinion that this sort of complaint is absurd. (Full disclosure: jamon serrano is one of my favorite things on earth.) But as I've watched this story bounce around the Internet, I can't help but feel like it's much ado about nothing. Find a teacher, buy him a cup of coffee, and ask about absurd complaints filed by parents. They're legion. There's no sense in scaring ourselves everytime an absurdity that occurs all the time originates from someone who happens to be Muslim, particularly when the matter is promptly dismissed by authorities.

Among my fondest memories of living in Spain: the fact that practically every restaurant and grocery store in the country has legs of cured ham dangling from the ceiling. They're as ubiquitous as hamburgers in the United States. I don't at all want to pick on Adam, who is one of dozens who wrote posts on this topic. In another mood, I might've written a similarly eye-rolling post myself. But let's not cry for help, even as a cute rhetorical device, as if our freedom to persist in core cultural practices is so fragile that unsuccessful complaints filed by a single family threatens them. If nothing else, that attitude hands too much power to anyone inclined to file a frivolous complaint. When Mark Steyn engages in that sort of alarmism – as distinguished from his good work on speech codes and other matters – he isn't helping to bolster our freedom. He's just needlessly frightening  credulous people in a way that doesn't at all increase our vigilance or ability to combat the actual threats we face.

by Chris Bodenner

"We should not bring Guantanamo terrorists to the heartland. It would make us a new mecca for terrorists, for Al Jazeera and other network attention and I think would lower the security of the entire United States," – Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), asked about the possibility of a detainee transfer to a prison in Illinois. Al Jazeera mentioned in the same breath as terrorists? 

Also, for the record, hardly any of the detainees have been convicted of terrorist ties, let alone tried. But this sort of fear-mongering has already worked for prisons in Michigan and Kansas, so there's every reason to think it will continue working, particularly with Obama's dismal record on closing Gitmo.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

As an African-American, I understand the reluctance of rational, "judge by the content of their character" white people to challenge their racist relatives during the holidays, especially the ones that are bona-fide white supremacists (somebody has to be related to them).  It turns what should be a fun family gathering into a lecture, a fiery debate or worse – a really, really bad argument/fight.  But let's be honest, who really has a drama-free family holiday?  Therefore, I would encourage them to fight smart and strategically.

For racist generalizations, maybe you could:

email articles/videos of interviews by credible sources that disprove what they're saying (especially if they claim someone said something, and they actually didn't), then challenge any crazy racist emails that they send you in return; just for giggles email them articles that profile highly accomplished non-white men and women that relate to whatever crazy they were trying to sell as fact; just laugh at what they say (unless it's a racist joke); or ask them to prove what they're saying. 

If they're the racists that they claim to be, they won't know any non-white people personally, so how could they "know" what they're saying.  It's all observational or gleaned from TV/radio/websites, and you can just shut down the conversation by stating that until you are proven to your satisfaction that what they say is true (which as we know will never happen), you will not give any credence to what they're saying.  Or expose their hypocrisy, like they hate black people, but love black athletes, black entertainers, etc. – either they're committed to their racism, or they're just half-ass about it.  The same holds for non-white "friends" that they have; just ask them what would these non-white friends think if they heard them saying these racist things, etc.

Or to really have some fun do the old "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" move.  Depending on how racist your relatives are, ask if you can bring a guest, and bring one of your non-white friends.  Just make sure that you have warned that non-white friend ahead of time, and let them know what you're trying to do.  For most of us non-white people, we are used to dealing with people like your racist relatives and would have no problem going toe-to-toe.  Indeed that could actually turn some of the racist relatives around, because they would've met someone who contradicted their stereotype (though they love to say that peole like that are the exception, e.g. Condi Rice).

However, where you should draw the line is if they make pointed racist statements about people you know personally or that your own family/children know personally.  For that you should stand up, because as noted by another reader if not you, who?   You should also draw the line if you've decided to raise your children in a different way and may have to tell them to chill out.  If that doesn't work, you may have to just limit the time spent with your family at the holidays.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A post over at Power Line begins by alerting readers to a sad, terribly disturbing news story. It concerns a husband and wife whose son recently died of a heroine overdose:

The two struggled at the front door as Stuart Arkley attempted to flee and his wife, holding a steak knife, yelled, "I only want to kill myself." Rhonda Arkley then grabbed a 5-gallon can and spread gasoline around the house, saying, "I don't want anyone else to see this house." He tried to stop her, but she threw more gas on him and lit a piece of paper. He fled out a back window to a neighbor's home and called 911.

When police arrived, they found the home ablaze and Rhonda Arkley in a locked car in the driveway, stabbing her chest with a screwdriver. Arkley drove off. Eagan police put down stop spikes on Pilot Knob Road near Cliff Road, disabling her vehicle. Officers approached and saw her again stabbing herself in the chest with a screwdriver, using a hammer to drive it in.

It's the sort of story that doesn't have any easy explanation or takeaway… unless you're the sort of blogger who manages to twist even that into an occassion for ideological point-scoring:

One can only have sympathy for her and her family. It is noteworthy, however, that Mrs. Arkley is not a random Minnesotan–rather, she was the Democratic Party's candidate for the Minnesota Senate in 2002 in District 37, my district. In that race, she received an "A" rating from the National Organization of Women. She is a prominent member of Minnesota's atheist community. And she is on record as believing that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is "nutty."

That last, of course, is an article of faith among liberals. But the contrast is a striking one: Congresswoman Bachmann is, in fact, a woman of great serenity, substantial professional accomplishment, invariably sunny disposition, and almost unnatural energy; she is the mother of five and foster mother of 23 children. This sad anecdote from my neighborhood illustrates a commonplace of sociology: scratch a conservative and you will almost always find a happy person; scratch a liberal and you are likely to encounter a seething cauldron of disappointment and rage.

I find that so unseemly that I can't even manage to articulate exactly why, but I trust I'm not alone in reacting that way.