In which the idea of who is a superhero is challenged.

zenlari at deadbrowalking pointed these out.


The photographer, one Dulce Pinzon, takes square aim at the traditional definition of a superhero:

After September 11, the notion of the “hero” began to rear its head in the public consciousness more and more frequently. The notion served a necessity in a time of national and global crisis to acknowledge those who showed extraordinary courage or determination in the face of danger, sometimes even sacrificing their lives in an attempt to save others. However, in the whirlwind of journalism surrounding these deservedly front-page disasters and emergencies, it is easy to take for granted the heroes who sacrifice immeasurable life and labor in their day to day lives for the good of others, but do so in a somewhat less spectacular setting.

The Mexican immigrant worker in New York is a perfect example of the hero who has gone unnoticed. It is common for a Mexican worker in New York to work extraordinary hours in extreme conditions for very low wages which are saved at great cost and sacrifice and sent to families and communities in Mexico who rely on them to survive.

The Mexican economy has quietly become dependent on the money sent from workers in the US. Conversely, the US economy has quietly become dependent on the labor of Mexican immigrants. Along with the depth of their sacrifice, it is the quietness of this dependence which makes Mexican immigrant workers a subject of interest.

BERNABE MENDEZ from the State of Guerrero works as a professional window cleaner in New York. He sends 500 dollars a month.

ERNESTO MENDEZ from Mexico City works as a gigolo in Times Square New York.
He Sends 200 dollars a week.

One might also point out that their heroism does not leave a devastated city that has to be rebuilt by tax-dollars behind them...


Go see the rest here

In which my brain breaks and I learn more than I ever did in a college classroom so far

Culture Clash Series on Open Left


The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem by Paul Rosenberg

There's a rather far-flung concept in mathematics known as "duality." A few days ago it struck me how this concept can illuminate something very fundamental about the current state of American politics. It's a powerful, and far-reaching concept, but fortunately you don't have to grasp a great deal about it in order to get my point.

...

The Basic Duality

(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

Actually, that's just a first approximation. It's actually more rigorous than that, which is what makes it interesting. But that's enough to let you know the ballpark we'll be playing in, if you care to continue this exploration.

...

One such example is Shawn Rosenberg (no relation), who emphasizes a greater role for the social environment, as opposed to seeing development as purely an internally-driven process. In his 1988 book, Reason, Ideology and Politics he lays out a three-fold typology of adult reasoning,
which is discussed along with other developmental approaches in an online papepr, "Structures of Geopolitical Reasoning":

* Sequential thinkers reason "by tracking the world," recognize regularities in sequences of events, but have no abstract understanding of cause and effect. The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences.

* Linear thinkers understand cause and effect, limited to a one-direction, one-cause/one-effect model. The world they perceive has logical order and structure, but the structure is invariably hierarchical, causality flows top-down, and the world is divided neatly into cause and effect.

* Systematic thinkers understand multi-faceted, multi-linear cause and effect, with mutual cause-and-effect relationships between different elements. The world they perceive is primarily a world of systems and relationships, rather than objects.

Because sequential thinking plays such an important role in movement conservatism, I want to elaborate it more fully. The first two points come from the paper linked to above, the last two from Rosenberg's book:

* The notion of causality, e.g. that events are caused by necessary and sufficient preconditions, does not play a salient role in the sequential mind. Events transpire, without much interpretation of how they come about. The attention is occupied by one item at a time, and there is little spontaneous effort to relate them to other items or to a general context.

* The sequential thinker is not really aware that the world may appear differently to other people, and he or she has therefore a limited ability to take the perspective of others.

* Sequential thinking involves conceptual relations that "are synthetic without being analytic. They join events together but the union forged is not subject to any conceptual dissection." [Direct quote from Rosenberg's book.] Because such relations are non-rational, there is nothing rational one can say or do to change them. (Sound familiar?)

* But they can change, Rosenberg explains, based on changing appearances. These relationships "are mutable," they can either be extended, based on "share[d] recognized overlapping events" (connections provided by Limbaugh, O'Lielly, etc.) or changed, when the sequence does not play out as expected. Because it is a pre-logical mode of thought, "the relations of sequential thought engender expectations, but do not create subjective standards of normal or necessary relations between events."

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Why Conservatives Can't Govern

In The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, I made the claim that Republicans and Democrats are inverted mirror reflections of one another:

(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

And I argued that there is a deeper, more specific explanation for why this is so. To lay the groundwork for that argument, I spent most of the diary laying out two related schemas for understanding human cognition in a stage-like developmental framework, and I presented an initial argument that liberalism represented a generally more advanced way of thinking about the world. In this diary, I want to take one main example-the defining example of the "war on terror"-to flesh out that argument some more by showing how the "war on terror" is heavily dependent on a low level of cognitive development. I will add some comments at the end about several other issues as well, to give the flavor of how such an analyisis can be generalzied into other areas as well. Then, in the next diary, I will look at how liberals and Democrats tend to be as clueless about politics as conservatives are about governance.

...

Two Other Brief Examples: The "War on Drugs" and Abortion

I'd like to supplement the above exhaustive look at a single example with a few other observations about other examples, which I would like to deal with thematically, using a single example in each case to stand in for a number of other different examples.

First of all, a common movement conservative practice is to divide the world up into good and evil, and declare war on evil in a fashion that has no clear foundation in even a single simple causal explanation that one would find in linear thinking. The foundation of such an approach in Lakoff's Strict Father morality is fairly straightforward, but Lakoff's argument is largely separable from the argument here. (Lakoff does argue that there is a set of logical entailments involved, and I don't dispute this. But these entailments act primarily to structure the issue landscape, which is a different subject entirely from what I am discussing here, which is how arguments are presented within that landscape. )

Here my focus is simply on the fact that a good-vs-evil framework drives the argumentative assumptions, so that logic can be dispensed with almost entirely. A "war on drugs" means that we need not ask about why people might want to take drugs in the first place. Nor do we need to ask if the war on drugs might cause more problems than it solves. Nor do we need to ask if there might be other high-priority problems we ought to pay more attention to. These are all examples of systematic thinking that might lead us to question the "war on drugs" project-much less, of course, the obvious racism involved. But we don't even have to go there to see enormous problems with the "war on drugs" if we engage in systematic thinking as a matter of course.

When liberals-or even just reality-based professionals, such as criminologists, public health experts, etc.-try to raise such systematic concerns, they sequential response is simply to label them as "soft on crime," as "pro-drug," as lacking "family values," or something similar. It is simply inconceivable from within the sequential thinking framework that someone might agree with the assessment "drugs are destructive" and yet want to take a significantly different approach to dealing with them. It is even more inconceivable that someone might agree on the wisdom of reducing and controlling drug use without thinking that drugs are inherently evil, but only that they are inherently risky, and that the risk alone is reason enough to take prudential action.

Read the whole thing


Postively fascinating. And it backs up my thoughts that its not enough to stay in school. What we have to do is completely overhaul the curriculum, paying special attention to a proper accounting of history, as well as logic and critical thinking and statistical analysis as well, in order to properly raise the discourse of our current society, and thus its ability to see through political stage craft and bullshit and better direct its affairs. More tomorrow.

So you think you can dance: Bollywood.

Thank GOD , cause I was getting so tired of the waltz and salsa and stuff! ANd African Jazz? Set to Marilyn Manson music? WHUT? Only problem was that the judges didn't spend time getting up to speed with how to judge it on its technical merits, Nigel patted himself on the back for having thought of this at all, and he and the rest then commented on how similar to Western dances like hiphop and ballroom dancing it was! I was so annoyed!

In which my mouth drops open: Bush insults G8 leaders

Via: Daily Kos

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world's richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.

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I...have...no words.

From GritTV what the mainstream news ain't telling ya...

From GritTV with Laura Flanders

Food or fuel. Does there have to be a trade-off? Not long ago, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food called the conversion of food-grains to fuel a "crime against humanity," but GRITtv's panelists lay out a much more complicated picture.
It's not just the biofuels, it's agribusiness and trade policy, not to mention market speculations that are to blame. Besides, we must be very careful about our language, says Anna Lappe: "it's not a food crisis, it's a food price crisis." The planet grows plenty of food, it's the purchase price that's threatening three billion people -- three billion-- with malnutrition if current trends keep up.
Joel Berg, a former food security expert at the USDA, now heads up the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. Not long ago he lived for a week on food stamps and found just how far the check would take him. Not far. He could only buy the mealy apples (not the organics,) and only the cheapest eggs. This year, he tells GRITtv, he repriced the goods in the imaginary food stamp basket. He wouldn't be able to afford any eggs at all.
The discussion here is rich. It's amazing what can happen when the conversation's not underwritten by Archer Daniels Midland, the ubiquitous agri-business media sponsor. No one trigger that has caused the food crisis, but there are concrete steps governments could take to solve the problem, says Yifat Susskind of MADRE With several sister organizations, MADRE wrote a proposal to the leaders of the G8 countries, to support "real solutions" to the situation that threatens to destablize dozens of countries. But sustainable agriculture requires sustainable economic policies, said Susskind. For more on the MADRE plan go to MADRE.org.

(no subject)

Whats in a Name? A Hell of a lot.

The history of re-naming people who are different and especially POC is dark and ominous in America. We know what happened to all those Africans who lost their names, and fought to keep some of their culture alive. So why have been so ready to give up our names for something more “All-American”?

I’ve actually had folks say “I’m just gonna call you _____” which when I was younger I agreed to, this gave me a large smattering of nicknames in high school all connected to some mangling of my name but nowadays I simply say “Actually I would prefer to keep my birth name if it’s all the same to you.” If any one of us had trouble pronouncing David or Solomon, would there be the audacity to ask to call them something else? No. Because they’re names are normative and ours are “weird” or “foreign”. So we give up our identity or names to be more like everyone else. (I could get into the theft of “foreign” names for Fantasy novels and such and they way everything should be exotic and magical and the way that ties into this but that’s a separate post altogether)

One of the reasons we do this is because all too often Americans act like they can’t pronounce our names. Often it’s not a conscious act, they’ve been told that all those foreign names are incomprehensible so why even try, right? The saddest part of this act is that for most it’s unconscious and that those of us with names outside the norm buy into it too. And so when we tell them our names and they lean forward with that “huh?” and small smile inviting us to share in the joke of our own name, we smile back because we’ve been taught that yes our names are funny. We’re taught that our names are so different, so foreign with both of these being understood to mean “bad”, “strange”, “not one of us”.

We often don’t stop to think about if on a simple linguistic level our names really are that hard. Most often it’s not that they can’t pronounce two, three or four simple syllables. It’s that societally they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge our lives and choices. We are a conscious reminder of change, of immigration and “the others” who are becoming more and more populous. Renaming us is a way to makes us less threatening, to change our identity and rob us of some agency by naming us as if we were a pet.

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...

Mocking Black names in Covina: How Liberal are our youth?

There seems to be no end to mocking of the language and speech of people of color by whites. A Los Angeles Times article recounts some mocking of the names of black high school students, likely from a white high school student:

Administrators at Charter Oak High School in Covina are investigating how a student on the yearbook staff was able to get fake names for Black Student Union members, including “Tay Tay Shaniqua,” “Crisphy Nanos” and “Laquan White,” into the published yearbook.

Beyond this hateful racist mocking there are deeper issues. Whites and some others do not seem to understand that many working-class and middle-class black parents provide their children with nontraditional first names to provide them with something special and distinctive–and not with the “white” first names that are commonplace in society. (Adia has made this point to me in discussion.) Such naming is often a type of resistance to whiteness and white folkways. Historically, whites have done a lot of mocking of the language and speech of all Americans of color–African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and others—and name mocking in the Covina case seems in this tradition of negative racial framing of Americans of color. Mock Spanish and mock Black English seem to be esp. popular these days, including on the Internet. There are many websites mocking the speech of other Americans of color. Whites often say such mocking is “just joking,” but as we have known since Freud, racist joking is often far more than joking.

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John McCain's Top Economic Advisor, Phil Gramm Said:

Via: Daily Kos

"We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline," said the former Texas senator. "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession."

Gramm also said the media was responsible for fostering unnecessary anxiety over the state of the economy. "Misery sells newspapers," he said. "Thank God the economy is not as bad as you read in the newspaper every day."

And yet it is Obama who is elite and snobby because:
1. He can't bowl
2. He orders orange juice instead of coffee
3. He said that it made sense to learn two
languages because it would make people
more employable.