Month: April 2012

Karen Grigsby Bates spotlights a new documentary by Bill Duke:

Hue-based hierarchy, of course, is ancient — and also very modern. The difference is many non-American societies are matter-of-fact about the preference for lighter skin. Prospects on the Indian online dating and marriage website Shaadi, for instance, often list themselves as "fair" or "wheat-colored" without embarrassment. Women touted as beautiful throughout Latin America and the Caribbean often range from very fair to cafe au lait. Black Americans are no exception — but they're also less forthright about the color prejudice that exists within the black community.

Previous coverage of Dark Girls and colorism here.

From – who else? – Emily Dickinson:

To know just how he suffered would be dear;
To know if any human eyes were near

To whom he could intrust his wavering gaze,

Until it settled firm on Paradise.
To know if he was patient, part content,


Was dying as he thought, or different;


Was it a pleasant day to die,


And did the sunshine face his way?
What was his furthest mind, of home, or God,

Or what the distant say
 

At news that he ceased human nature


On such a day?
And wishes, had he any?

Just his sigh, accented,


Had been legible to me.

And was he confident until

Ill fluttered out in everlasting well?
And if he spoke, what name was best,


What first,

What one broke off with

At the drowsiest?
Was he afraid, or tranquil?

Might he know


How conscious consciousness could grow,


Till love that was, and love too blest to be,

Meet — and the junction be Eternity?

Julian Sanchez pinpoints what's so creepy about "Girls Around Me," a (now banned) app that used Foursquare and Facebook data to tell users about women near them:

[T]he reaction to the app is substantially  a result of, as Hill puts it,  the “design of ‘Girls Around Me,’ consisting of Bond-style silhouettes of naked ladies dancing and posing provocatively.” Suppose Foursquare were rebranded as “Hookupsquare” (or “Stalkersquare”), or Facebook absorbed by AdultFriendFinder, but everything else about the software remained the same. One assumes they would be a good deal less popular, despite being identical in terms of the information flows they enabled. 

Charlie Stross extrapolates on the fundamental problem with this sort of app:

It's easy to imagine how we could make something worse than "Girls Around Me"—something much worse. Facebook encourages us to disclose a wide range of information about ourselves, including our religion and a photograph. Religion is obvious: "Yids Among Us" would obviously be one of the go-to tools of choice for Neo-Nazis. As for skin colour, ethnicity identification from face images is out there already. Want to go queer bashing? There's an algorithm out there for guessing sexual orientation based on the network graph of the target's facebook friends.

Edmund Zagorin imagines the future:

Of course, a lot of people want their friends to know where they are and what they’re doing at all times; they post it, tweet it, and check-in through FourSquare. But it may not be long before where we live in a world where our smartphone’s will give us the digital equivalent of Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map, where we can examine our environs at any geographical scale to see the exact real-time GPS locations of our friends and family. To be sure, used wisely this technology has the potential to do a lot of good, probably even to save lives. But if information is power, then access to it is only as good as the intentions of the user. Which raises the question; who don’t you want knowing where you are at all times?

(Screenshot from Drum.)

Larison pinpoints a basic problem with the Romney foreign policy vision – an obsession with friend/enemy binaries:

Romney’s criticisms suggest that he thinks one of Obama’s greatest mistakes is pursuing cooperation with states that don’t fall simply into categories of friend or foe. It’s as if he thinks it is wrong to try to advance U.S. interests through cooperation with another state unless the other state is entirely and always on "our" side. That doesn’t leave many states with which to cooperate.

It actually leaned heavily on the public sector: 

Which president’s economic recovery benefited most from an increasing number of government jobs? Oddly enough, it was President Ronald Reagan, who successfully ran for re-election in 1984 by proclaiming it was “morning in America.” Reagan, running in a year when unemployment fell over a percentage point to 7.5 percent, is generally (and incorrectly) remembered as the first conservative president to dramatically shrink the size and role of government.

Ah, yes, Reagan the big insolvent government conservative. That part of his legacy, rejected by the first Bush, was never more fulfilled than under the second.

Heidelberg, Germany, 12 pm

A reader writes:

As a fundamentalist pastor I never really bought into the notion of an angry God, and as I progressed in my studies from lay minister, to seminarian, to pastor, to doctoral candidate, I concluded that Yeshua was not and could not have been the Messiah, which rendered my faith's claims to objective truth, divinely revealed, moot.

I eventually concluded that all claims of divine knowledge were specious, but I did discover that once you set aside the mythology and redaction that went into remaking Yeshua as a Greco-Roman demi-god, and just dealt with his teachings about life and interpersonal conduct, you find a man today's right wing religious nutters would nail to a post only after much water-boarding and worse.

I think your approach to the man (whose real aims and philosophy were buried, forgotten and replaced in a generation) is spot on. But I've always found that even those who collapse and twitch on the floor in ecstasy at the name of Jesus could not quote three things he taught.

Nicole Cliffe recently became a mother:

Going in, I was expecting that having a baby would be extremely emotionally transformative, but very little fun, at least for a long time. Because of the exhaustion and the sniping-with-co-parent and the paranoia and the vagina-stitches and the breastfeeding and the crushing existential weight of what you've gone and done. But, again, emotionally transformative, so that you push through the no-fun because you have never experienced such crazy, overwhelming love and devotion and awe.

And it's been … exactly the converse, for me.

She's LOTS of fun, but I … have not really been emotionally transformed? God, this sounds bad. I love her so much, but I love her like I love my parents, and my husband, and my best friends, and my 15-year-old mixed breed dog. Incredibly! Delightfully! Fiercely! But it's not a whole new feeling. She's like having a really high-needs roommate that you just couldn't picture living without. You know, the kind that would have a chore wheel.

(Photo via Shit My Kids Ruined)

A snapshot from a state with only four electoral votes: 

The Obama team already has more than 30 paid staffers on the ground in New Hampshire and is expanding rapidly across the state. Its headquarters in Manchester is one of seven Obama field offices here, and the president’s campaign has already held several events in each of the state’s 10 counties. By contrast, Romney does not have any paid staffers on the ground, and his campaign has barely maintained a footprint in the state.