Month: January 2011

Emily Anthes reports on the bizarre history of using real "practice" babies, borrowed from orphanages, in home economics classes:

Cornell’s program ran from 1919 to 1969 (which strikes me as incomprehensibly recent). At Cornell, eight female students at a time spent a full semester living in a fully-kitted out practice apartment. The women were there to learn the entire spectrum of homemaking skills, and, the exhibit says, “an early proponent of the program, believed that babies were essential to replicate the full domestic experience. Albert Mann, Dean of the College of Agriculture, called the apartments ‘essential laboratory practice for women students.’”

Stephen Budiansky expands on his earlier post:

For as long as I can remember, I have heard conservatives blaming everything that is wrong in the universe, from violent crime to declining test scores to teen pregnancy to rude children to declining patriotism to probably athlete's foot  . . . upon Dr. Spock, Hollywood liberals, the abolition of prayer in school, Bill Clinton, the "liberal 1960s," the teaching of evolution — in other words, upon symbols, rhetoric, cultural norms, and the values expressed by political and media leaders. Yet from the moment when someone gets a gun in their hands, apparently, society ceases to have any influence whatsoever on the outcome and individual responsibility takes hold 100%. Something is driving the tripling of death threats against congressmen (and the concomitant rise in threats against Federal judges and other villains of the right, from Forest Service rangers to climate scientists) and it isn't the sunspot cycle.

Choire Sicha reacts to California's new law in which "it's now illegal to impersonate people online for nefarious purposes":

I mean the good news is that bad things will have a legal foothold: most online impersonation and harassment seems to be part of larger campaign of harassing and/or attacking women. So for purposes of like, harm as in stalking? Good! But harm as in "brand dilution"—that is what will be prosecuted. Of course there is no carve-out for playful, political or non-murderous uses of online impersonation, and so, before this winds up in courts for refinement, it certainly seems like a stepping stone to our future regulated online identities. Just go ahead and trademark yourself now and get it over with—that way you don't have to wait for the law to catch up to your personal brand online.

What's true for scare-tactic HIV PSAs also holds for climate change commercials:

Matthew Feinberg at the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether presenting children as the main victims of climate change, a common feature of warning messages, might be viewed as unfair because children have not caused global warming. He speculated that this, along with the apocalyptic descriptions of global warming's possible consequences, might threaten people's natural tendency to believe that the world is a fundamentally fair and stable place. Undermining that belief has been shown to increase the likelihood that people will ignore reality and allow events to unfold around them without intervening.

Cord Jefferson rounded up some of the more depressing ads.

A reader writes:

I was deeply moved by the video of the Vanuatu chief.  You mused:

Or maybe grief at this kind of human loss is Luddite or reactionary. But I don't think so. It's, in a word, wise.

I couldn’t agree more. The story reminded me of another recent one about the sole survivor of an un-contacted tribe in Brazil (“The Most Isolated Man on the Planet”, Monte Reel, Slate, August 20, 2010). The Brazilian government decided to carve out protected space around the man, intermittently monitor his movements, but otherwise to leave him alone and protect his isolation. A generation ago, this man would have probably been dragged into Western life whether he wanted to or not. But for many like him, that trip doesn’t end well.

We’ve all watched in horror as indigenous groups all over the planet struggle to find their place in the modern world. For many, the promise of jobs, medical care, and technological wizardry either does not manifest or is outweighed by the concomitant loss of identity, the reality of poverty, and frequent struggles with crime and/or alcohol and drugs.

Modern Western societies have yet to figure out how to incorporate traditional ones without major disturbances. And for all that I, modern and Western to the core, could not give up my modern life with all of its amenities, I also recognize that many traditional societies offer extraordinary benefits to their members: certain identity, constant fellowship, and presumably lower day-to-day stress.

There aren’t easy answers to questions like this. The lure and proximity of the West makes the unchanged continuance of the Vanuatu tribe unlikely. But those who think grieving its loss is Luddite or reactionary are poor students of history and arrogant to their core.

Thank you again for posting such a moving and beautiful video.

Over the weekend there was a plane crash in Iran – killing at least 77 people. FP summarizes:

Early reports show the Boeing was delivered to IranAir in 1974 and was the oldest passenger aircraft still operating in Iran; A U.S.-made aircraft, it has been out of production since 1984. "This plane has been one of these very old kind of aircraft that are still serving in Iran's airlines — a Boeing 727, which is more than 40 years old," said Al Jazeera's Alireza Ronaghi. Aircraft accidents are not uncommon in Iran, where international sanctions have prevented the country from buying new aircraft parts from the West.

Adam Serwer looks at what Gates is actually doing to the military budget:

[D]efense spending is actually rising, and not just to keep place with inflation, just not as much as it would. Calling this a "defense cut" is a bit bizarre. Think about it this way: If you were 300 pounds, and in the next year your doctor told you that you were on the road to gaining another hundred, but you instead only went up to 350 pounds, you wouldn't be walking around telling everyone about how you "lost weight."

Like Lexington, Adam Serwer puts the shooting in context: 

As with any other act of political violence, we have to be mindful of our own reactions. Political violence in the United States has never been more illegitimate. There was a time when a member of Congress could walk into the Senate and beat a political rival senseless and walk away unmolested. The South was once a place of unrestrained terrorist violence conducted with the tacit approval of local authorities. Even when those authorities were brave or responsible enough to press charges, securing guilty verdicts would be difficult because of a local culture willing to accept crimes committed in service to white supremacy. We live in a time where no major political movement would be willing to openly justify such behavior. 

A reader writes:

In Phillip S. Smith's

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Americans aren't willing to stick their neck out to work against marijuana prohibition, since the consequences for making that preference public are disproportionately harsh. I assume I am not alone in the fear that speaking up about marijuana would mean a risk of losing my job, and of hurting my chances at another job in the future.

Just recently, a Redditor who used to fight for marijuana legalization found that his "past life" of activism was preventing him from getting a job; he had to ask for help scrubbing his name's Google Search results. Certainly, there are ways to remain anonymous, or to advocate quietly enough to avoid notice, but with the traditional avenues of political speech denied to us by threats of financial ruin, it's hard to feel positive about marijuana activism.

Another is a bit harsh on Smith:

Mr. Smith makes two facts overwhelmingly clear.  One is that he did not read your foreword to the book, and two is that he does not adequately comprehend the position of the common stoner.  You see, when your occupation is a “drug reform activist”, you really don’t have to worry about losing your job by coming out of the cannabis closet.  For those of us who have “real jobs” (i.e. doctors, lawyers, truck drivers), we are faced everyday with the very real choice between either providing for our families or cutting off our noses to spite our faces.

Had Mr. Smith taken the time to read the foreword, he would have realized the purpose for which this book was offered: as a starting point.  Mr. Smith has put the cart before the horse.  He wants every reader and contributer of the book to become a full-blown activist, not understanding where this fight actually lies.  You wrote at length about the prevalence of marijuana in our culture, almost a “tongue in cheek” rite of passage for the youth, where everyone understands or accepts its harmlessness and yet we still silently suffer with our low self-efficacy.  This book was meant to galvanize.  To make others aware of our existence.  To act as catharsis.  The idea of revolution must be gently kindled before it becomes a roaring fire.  Mr. Smith, as a self-declared “drug reform activist”, has taken up the snotty air of superiority shared by most activists: lambasting those who agree with him because they’re not as hardcore as him.

All we want is to be left alone.  And coming out of the closet will have the complete opposite effect.  When marijuana is already so prevalent in American society, the return is not worth the risk.  And the main difference between the stoner closet and the gay closet (without sounding trite or indifferent to the unfairness of comparing the two) is that the US government has not declared a multibillion dollar war on gays.

Another:

Just for the record, at least one contributor to The Cannabis Closet regularly makes donations to reform groups and contacts his representatives. I'm sure the number is much higher than that. I realize that Smith wasn't being particularly scathing and is probably right about the percentages involved, but he verges on invoking the lazy/selfish/clueless stoner stereotype that the book does its best to combat.

More reader reviews here. You can still buy the book at Blurb.com for only $5.95 (and be sure to use the promo-code DISH for $3 off shipping).

A reader writes:

I just listened to the Bruce-Mansour interview in its entirety, and it strikes me that the pathology on display here runs deeper even than the "surveyor's symbol" excuse. Rebecca Mansour (who, as you know, is one of Palin's closest advisers) insists that it wasn't the idea of Palin and her advisers to take down the target graphic – instead it was Palin's web host that broached the idea. But otherwise Palin NEVER would have made any connection between that map and a target, it just never would have occurred to her! And besides, Team Palin thought the graphic had already been taken down, because the election was over. So by all means, yes, take it down, they told the web company – but not because there's anything tasteless about it. Just because it's outdated anyway and they didn't want to "pay" any longer to have it up. And besides all that, Mansour goes on, the graphic wasn't even designed in-house. It came from out outside firm. So, there you have it.

Really, the stream of credulity-straining excuses is like listening to a teenager try to explain why his homework assignment isn't done.

This is not the way mature, rational adults behave. It's also majorly bizarre that Tammy Bruce insists multiple times at the beginning of the interview that Mansour isn't appearing as a representative of Palin or SarahPAC ("she joins me personally and not on behalf of the PAC" says the lead-in text on the website). She's just on, apparently, as a private citizen shootin' the shit. I can only assume that this disclaimer is offered up preemptively to give Palin breathing room to deny anything controversial Mansour might have let slip during the segment.

Is there any length to which Palin will not go to evade responsibility for any action? She could have come out and made some statement to the effect that the target graphic was in retrospect a poor choice, but that "targeting" is a common political metaphor and no harm was intended, etc. Instead she lies, evades, and misrepresents.