My Appointed Rounds

Neil Pearce on the political economy of incarceration:

[B]ecause the Census historically counts inmates where they’re imprisoned, their numbers actually swell population counts — and legislative representation — for rural areas. The losers in political clout are then the very urban areas most of the prisoners come from.

The Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy group that documents the impacts of mass incarceration, found 21 counties across the nation where at least 20 percent of the population were prisoners from another county. The reformers’ “case celebre” is Jones County in eastern Iowa, where a backhoe operator was elected to the Anamosa City Council with just two write-in votes, one his wife’s. Why? Because 95 percent of his ward’s population consists of 1,300 inmates in Iowa’s largest penitentiary– and none of them can vote.

Seven state senate districts in upstate New York, the Policy Initiative has calculated, would not have met minimum population requirements in the last decade if they’d not had significant prison populations. California, Texas, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Maryland are among other states in which the census count of inmates held in lightly populated small town areas can impact the political balance.

Tim Stevens on cyberwarfare:

The facts of cyberterrorism, or state-sponsored cyberattacks, are heavily-guarded by national security protocols, but the case has yet to be made that these are really significant risks, despite what you hear senior officials say. And this is the point: you cannot use the darkest imaginings of those with high-level security clearances to promote ends with little consideration of the ethical and practical implications of the means of achieving them. Crime and espionage are not necessarily acts of war, and the fact that they are being subsumed under the rubric of "war" should worry those who care about international relations, diplomacy, the role of security agencies, the relationship between state and industry, and about the constitutional contracts between the individual and the state.

Cervantes on the comfort of having powerful enemies:

We want to have powerful enemies. They comfort us. "It is less scary to place all our fears on a single, strong enemy than to accept the fact our well-being is largely based on factors beyond our control. An enemy, after all, can be defined, analyzed and perhaps even defeated. . . A research team led by social psychologist Daniel Sullivan of the University of Kansas reports on four studies that suggest people are 'motivated to create and/or perpetually maintain clear enemies to avoid psychological confrontations with an even more threatening chaotic environment.'"

Indeed. But, the fact is, our real enemies can be defined, analyzed and perhaps even defeated; it's just that they are more complex and less palpable than al Qaeda or the communofascist plots of the Obama administration. Structural unemployment, growing economic inequality and declining living standards of working people; multiple environmental crises; the threat of emerging infectious diseases; these and other pressing problems are understandable and they are not insoluble. But they require us to give up some cherished illusions and confronting them requires accepting the likelihood of troubled times and struggle ahead. For many people, it's just easier to worry about the bearded guy holing up in the mountains halfway around the earth.

William R. Freudenburg on the American media's bottomless appetite for climate denialism:

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases a major report, its main conclusions get a few stories, while most of the attention goes to small errors that don’t affect its substance – and that show up about once every 1000 pages. On the other hand, when the American Enterprise Institute publicly offered $10,000 to any "scientist" willing to attack the climate science for money, that was somehow not treated as a scandal. There was barely a mention of it in the American press, and even after that information trickled out, the AEI and similar think tanks continued to be treated as perfectly credible sources for juicy quotes – without even a disclaimer to note that the quotes came from AEI, "which was revealed last year to be offering pay for reports that repeated its party line."

Obscene Desserts on Fremdscham:

The phenomenon of 'fremdschämen' refers to an empathic process in which person A feels ashamed in place of person B. Person B is not aware that they are in a situation about which they need to feel shame; person A, however, absolutely is. From this embarrassing feeling of being touched by the situation in which person B finds himself unknowingly, person A feels vicariously ashamed for him....

[I]t occurs to me that the noun form, Fremdscham (so, something like 'vicarious shame'), seems ready for export.

(Photo at top: "Tornado in the mid-west 1936" by Michael Paul Smith.)

My Appointed Rounds

Smokewriting on risk:

It’s important to understand that risks are not free-floating objects with which we simply collide. They are created through social relationships, and are impossible to understand outside these relationships, which are themselves inflected by inequalities of power. For example, I am a “financial innovator”, and so get to run a risk, if I choose to; whereas, you, as a homeowner, get to have one imposed on you when my flush is busted. Risks which are imposed are typically viewed as less acceptable than ones which are chosen – and the consequences of imposing risks can be individually and socially serious harms: creating social conflicts further down the line (splitting communities, breaking implicit links of trust and so on), and entrenching exploitative and oppressive relationships (testified to by the history of environmental racism and environmental justice more widely, and nicely summed up by William Freudenberg’s remark regarding how often technical planning criteria tend to be satisfied "on the poor side of town").

Brian Holmes on global finance:

Writing in 1986, Susan Strange described the extreme volatility of the financial sphere as “casino capitalism.” While investment bankers made fortunes, risk and instability arose to dominate everyday experience: “The great difference,” Strange writes, “between an ordinary casino which you can go into or stay away from, and the global casino of high finance, is that in the latter we are all involuntarily engaged in the day’s play.” By the mid-1980s, the continually rolling dice had disrupted the entire international system for the production and exchange of goods and services. The United States retained the central role in economic governance that it had won with WWII, but its hegemony was now founded on the management of chaos.

Acephalous on the hacked CRU e-mails:

The problem with nonspecialists reading the private correspondence of experts is that their ignorance transforms all the technical points into nefarious inkblots....

They are convincing themselves that those black blobs represent what they insist they represent, and when experts inform them that those are not Rorschach blots to be subjectively interpreted — that they are, in fact, statements written in a language that skeptics simply do not understand — the nonspecialists look over them again and declare that it could be a butterfly, or maybe a bat.

See also Newtongate.

RMJ on Psalm 109:

While some passages in Scripture may be "difficult" (Psalm 109 is hardly the only one), that difficulty is changed by a confessional approach to those same passages. It's an approach only available to, and only understood by, the members of a community, and meant to be communicated only to those members by other members, be they ordained or lay. Even then, it is usually poorly understood, or even misunderstood. As time goes by, however, I become more and more convinced that, especially if the scriptures are "holy," heilige, set apart to remain pure, they must be handled as such, and not bandied about in secular discussions or political arguments as if they had only one meaning, one interpretation, one understanding, and we all, believer and non-believer alike, agreed on it.

Southern Beale on Psalm 109:

We live in a secular culture, and in the internet age, free and easy access to Scripture is coupled with Biblical illiteracy to create a whole mess of problems. The result is everything from a botched bumper sticker slogan to people claiming there’s a Biblical justification for bigotry, war, oppression, and even “free market ideas.”

Thers on everything else.

I don't believe in American democracy. I don't think our system works. I think we've achieved a point of perfectly pointless hubristic stasis, and we're all going to die.

(Photo by Lori Nix.)

Friday Kitten Blogging

By popular demand.

A Serpent's Nest

I was initially posting links here to my weekend blitherings chez Echidne, but I was interrupted by a long hiatus, and then forgot about it entirely.

For whatever it's worth, here are a bunch of recent posts. Be patient — or not — as Echidne's pages always seem to take a long time to load.

Math Class is Tough! discusses exciting new research that explains how women "choose" to fail at life.

Cell Groups prepares us for the looming radical-right revolution (i.e., an uptick in mass shootings), and compares "liberals," gays, and women to the regulations that impede the spontaneous order of the Free Market.

School's Out Forever takes a dim view of a plan to expel teens from school as a punishment for pregnancy, in a country with one of the lowest rates of contraceptive use on earth.

Dogma and Zealotry is a standard-issue rant against the false principles of climate denial, based on a column by Jeff Jacoby. The main focus is the weird assumption that a lack of knowledge allows you to assume the best possible outcome. Freeman Dyson is mocked too, which never hurts.

Why kNOw? presents such axioms of modern sex education as "if a woman is wet, a baby she may get!"

Thoughtful Discourse dissects WaPo ombudsman Andrew Alexander's careful response to George Will's latest fusillade of denialist lies. If that sounds as boring to read as it was to write, you can proceed directly to the money quote: "When people get angry because you've allowed a smirking ideological hack with a history of lying about this very issue to turn your op-ed page into his personal sandbox, and you respond to the idea of issuing retractions as though you'd been asked to harness a goose and fly it to the moon, what else can this signify but that both sides have failed equally to be Reasonable?"

Mother Pelosi and Father Frank is a horripilating vision of the End Times.

OctoMom Nation is another horripilating vision of the End Times.

A Muslim Tradition points out for the millionth time that Georgie Ann Geyer is a racist dingbat.

The Biggest Crutch bewails the pussification of American culture, as exemplified by anti-discrimination laws and medical care for the destitute.

There you have it! If you're looking for wisdom instead of cheap outrage and laborious gags, you can head over there and read everyone's posts but mine.

My Appointed Rounds

Jesse Taylor on the stimulus bill:

If you wonder why the voting public distrusts Republicans on the stimulus, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that they wrecked our national car and are now holding a bandage to their head, demanding to drive the ambulance that they didn’t want to call to the hospital they insist is full of filth and decay.

Echidne on healthcare:

Most of the currently uninsured do not offer great money-making opportunities for the private markets, however much competition we might wish to inject there (ironically enough, usually through regulation), but must be covered and treated through government programs, charity or not at all. And when the utterly uninsured finally seek help for a medical problem, it is often late in the disease process and at a hospital emergency room, one of the most expensive patches in our quilt and an inappropriate one as a setting for primary care.

BLDGBLOG on the ceaseless knocking of opportunity:

One man in Burbank, unable to sell his house for its asking price and having to compensate for a loss of rental income, "posted an Internet notice that the property, which has an eight-person hot tub, was available to the adult-film industry, which he had heard pays as much as $5,000 a day....

Apparently, "Income from residential filming for fewer than 15 days a year isn’t subject to federal taxes," so there might yet be something of a boom in short-term film sites around the city, a distributed micro-Hollywood of economically depressed domestic space.

Ann Friedman on the point at which people becoming the "deserving" poor:

[W]hat happens when the people who need welfare are not characterized in the media as solely urban women of color? When the aid recipients include well-educated, former white-collar workers affected by the economic crisis, the vocabulary changes. Now it's suddenly a "safety net" -- a more positive, temporary-sounding term that does not have the same connotations as the much-maligned "W" word.

The archfiend NTodd on the monstrous Nadya Suleman:

[W]e as liberals, progressives, pro-choicers, whateverers, allegedly believe in a woman's fundamental reproductive freedom. To castigate Suleman for CHOOSING to exercise her prerogative seems not only uncompassionate but illiberal.

The dehumanizing of Suleman by calling her "octomom" and "nuts" and reducing her to a "breeding vat" is part and parcel of this. It makes it easy to feel good about and/or ignore our own moral choices, and while we might cover our disgust with clever arguments about bioethics and whatnot, really it's just cognitive dissonance and a bit of correspondent inference theory as we decide what her real intentions are.

Bruce Schneier on the new and improved No-Fly List:

The House approved a bill creating a whitelist of people who are on the blacklist, but shouldn't be. No word yet about what they're going to do about people who are on the whitelist, but shouldn't be. Perhaps they'll create a second blacklist for them. Then we'll all be safe from terrorists, for sure.

And Saudi Arabian oil minister Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi on the dealy perils of investing in alternative energy:

While the push for alternatives is important, we must also be mindful that efforts to rapidly promote alternatives could have a chilling effect on investment in the oil sector.

Waxed Paper Negatives

More here.

My Appointed Rounds

Arms Control Wonk on government secrecy about the US-India Nuclear Deal:

Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Union of Concerned Scientists organized a panel for the 27 EU Political Counselors at the Embassy of Slovenia tomorrow....

The State Department has now uninvited PSR and UCS to their own meeting — or at least the portion about India — because they will be sharing “sensitive” information.

I’d really like to know what sort of “sensitive” information can be shared with 27 foreign nationals, but not US citizens.

CKR on polling:

[B]ecause the polls drive the campaigns, and because the polls divide the electorate in particular ways, the campaigns move toward “demographic”-driven strategies (we need a few more working-class white men, and maybe some urban Latina women). If you aim your message at working-class white men and urban Latina women, you probably will get more of those groups to vote for your candidate. But does this say more about those groups or about the campaign tactics? Further, the “demographics” are not fully separable from racism, as we are now seeing.

Sir Oolius on ecoterrorism and the housing market meltdown:

As usual, high-end real estate burns and right-wingers shout "eco-terrorism!" But they have been wrong before. What's certain is anyone could spray-paint the letters ELF on a sheet.

RMJ on war and hate:

The question of why "they" hate us, can be postponed for yet another day. I understand, too: politicians stand on the shoulders of prophets like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but they only do it a generation or so later, when the prophet is safely dead. Thus does this "more perfect union" get "perfected," in Mr. Obama's words.

Athenae on the government's bailout of Bear Stearns:

Let me ask how on earth we can take all the time it takes to think up all the ways we think up to sit in judgement on every individual case we hear about, about how that person just didn't work harder, didn't suffer enough, didn't earn "our" money, didn't deserve "our" charity, didn't bleed in front of us enough, and all the while, all the fucking while, we give it away by the millions and never ask where it goes. All the while.

Let me just ask. I'm sure somebody out there has the answer. After all, they had reasons why Katrina victims deserved to drown and die, be forced from their homes and screwed by their insurance companies and disregarded by their country. They had reasons why uninsured children didn't deserve health care, why those who died from a lack of medical attention only got what they had coming. They had reasons why the people who came to emergency rooms were just looking for drugs, they had reasons why thieves got rich and saints got shot, they had all kinds of explanations for everything that looked to everybody else like a fucking problem we needed somebody to solve. I'm sure the answers here are just as simple, just as easy.

(Illustration: "Snail tongue microphotograph by Carl Strüwe, 1929.)

Today's Products Yesterday

More here.

UPDATE: You'd better have a look at this, too: Japanese microbes of the 16th Century.

(Via Dark Roasted Blend.)

My Appointed Rounds

Photos from The Claude C. Matlack Collection.

Snapshots by Jean Thomas, The Traipsin' Woman.

Photos of Africville by Bob Brooks.

Near the Cross: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta.


Botanical and cartographical drawings by Alida Withoos.

A "social history of collecting," entitled Collect: Obsessive, Passionate, Visionary.

Ice, Fire, and Northern Myths.


An exhibition of works by Salvatore C. DiMarco and Gilbert J. Tucker of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.

Nova Scotia Bird Watercolors by S. Edgar Marsh.

(The illustration at top is from The Panorama Effect.)

Saturday Dancing Pig Blogging

My Appointed Rounds

CKR has posted the first installments of her inter-blog debate on nuclear strategy. Here's part one, and here's part two (and here's my contribution in full).

There's broad agreement on the main points; the specific details are a bit more knotty (don't you hate it when that happens?). For me, much of this debate hinges on national sovereignty's likely fate under what Zygmunt Bauman has called "the divorce of power and politics." Most participants agree that the Cold War model is outdated; I'd argue that the elements that make this model outdated are the very ones that people tend to hold onto: its statism, and its rather essentialist view of America's role in the world.

Apropos of which, Bryan Finoki, in a post on floating prisons, quotes Keller Easterling to good effect:

Worlds and empires shelter and fatten offshore, dropping into protected enclaves, free economic zones, and paper sovereignties long enough to avoid taxes, engage inexpensive labor, or launder an identity. Streamlined logistics and loosened legalities are among the bullet-pointed features of every logistics park and free economic zone in the world. Their segregation from other worlds and other nations helps them to garner power, and shapes them into distended and dominating territories that are constantly expanding and excluding. They are the world with their own seas.

Meanwhile, Smokewriting discusses nuclear power and intergenerational equity:

It gives a good example of how the principle of consent can lead to massive injustice, given that the consent sought is that of a small subset of the present generation to collude with the Government in imposing unasked-for and unfair burdens on future generations. The risks of long term disposal, unquantifiable as they are, are inevitably inequitably shunted into the future.

And Echidne dissects an article on the "market for sex" among monkeys:

How do we know that what Gumert describes is a market with a currency? If we were to force monkey behavior into the human construct of a marketplace, then the one he describes sounds a lot more like one of barter: a situation where two monkeys trade services. Why can't we view the market as one for grooming, where the female monkeys are buying grooming services and paying for it with sex? That would make the male monkeys into the sellers and the female monkeys into the buyers. See how deciding that this is a market for sex and not for grooming warps our views and prepares us to superimpose all the human values and all the human biases on what is happening?

Last, Eli is impressed with the new and improved Taser:

Just think of the compliments and admiring looks your sexy new leopard print taser will garner in between agonized screams! And if you get tired of the screams, well you can just tune them right out with that nifty MP3-playing holster! Awesome!

I predict that next year they will partner up with a cellphone company to develop the Motorola TAZR - zap ‘em and then call the cops with the same convenient device!

(Illustration: With Us or Against Us by Francesca Berrini.)

The Essence of Vileness

(Via Coudal.)

My Appointed Rounds

CKR on the “ticking time-bomb" scenario that supposedly justifies legalizing torture:

The simple and justifiable response to the extreme scenario, whatever its details, is that the person deciding to use torture assumes responsibility for his actions. Later examination of the scenario determines whether or what punishment is suitable. Making law to suit the most extreme situations is always a bad idea.

Bryan Finoki on Camp Justice:

‘Camp Justice’ is – to its credit – just what it says it is: justice in the form of a camp. There is absolutely no pretense here whatsoever, nor can it be mistaken for anything else either, really, which is partially what makes it so disturbing. Not to mention how obnoxious and arrogant it is in its crude declaration of itself.

Question Technology on "techno-globalization hype" circa 1920, which includes this timely quote from George Orwell:

Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic 'progressive' books, I was struck by the automatic way people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are the 'abolition of distance' and the 'disappearance of frontiers'. I do not know how often I have met with statements that 'the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance' and 'all parts of the world are now interdependent'.

Smokewriting on Richard Dawkins and the Sokal Hoax:

The strategy Sokal and Bricmont employed in carrying out this assault, and which Dawkins (whose entire review amounts to little more than fawning submission to the argument from authority) takes as some sort of model of academic practice, basically runs as follows.

1. Take a short extract from a text, chosen more or less at random. I have selected Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.

The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.

2. Say ‘what the fuck was that about?’


3. Wait to be accepted as a new intellectual authority, whose name defenders of the Enlightenment everywhere can invoke in order to shut people up.

Roy Edroso on the poverty of conservatarian conspiracy theory:

Ad agencies don't get their strategies from Satan or the Democratic Party -- they get them from market data, laboriously collected and analyzed. And they employ them because they bring in money.

Conservatives often seem to miss, when raging about the stuff on their teevees, that it's really their beloved Invisible Hand that's slapping them in the face.

Last, but assuredly not least, The Disposal of Surplus Sodium, 1947. (Via Danger Room.

(Photo at top by Amy Stein, via Coudal.)

My Appointed Rounds

Danger Room on Blackwater's purchase of attack aircraft:

On one hand, it's not a surprise that Blackwater is getting into this game, given that counter-insurgency aircraft are making a big comeback. But it's still a rather significant precedent (and that perhaps is an understatement) to have a private company in the U.S....offer training services on an attack aircraft.

PHK on the domino theory:

When I worked at the US Embassy in Bangkok from 1973-5 and observed the evacuations of our missions from Vietnam and Phnom Penh that final spring, conservative domino theory fingers wagged virulently threatening the imminent onslaught of the future Communist apocalypse.

Molly Ivors on Iraq:

As it happens, I do believe that a political rather than a military solution is the sole hope for some sort of balanced peace, and obviously the political structure is not in place to achieve that. But whose fault is that? The purple-finger people? The people who voted in what they thought were their best interests? Or the crowds of twelve-year-old bureaucrats who treated Iraq as their own personal sampo, determined to remake it as some freakish cross between Gilead, Colorado Springs, and the Marianas Islands?

Auguste on tolerance:

[T]he current jingoism is a whole new kind of wrong. It’s morally wrong, it’s strategically wrong, it’s wrong about human nature, it’s wrong about Democracy, it’s simply utterly wrong, and it’s the kind of wrong that gets people killed. Lots and lots of people killed. That’s the kind of wrong you don’t “agree to disagree on” and you don’t “respect the opinion.”

Anyone has the right to express any opinion they want. They don’t have the right to expect that borderline-genocidal opinions will be met with anything other than people calling them [pace Atrios] “pretty hideous human being[s], one[s] which all good people should shun.” Nowhere in the Constitution is it written that we ought to be polite to defenders of empire.

David Roberts on fear:

Fear causes fairly predictable reactions, which do not include international cooperation, equitable distribution of resources, cost-benefit analysis on a multidecadal scale, and short-term sacrifice in the service of long-term problem-solving. They do include increased xenophobia, reactionary moralism, and susceptibility to demagogues.

That is to say, the language of fear intrinsically serves the needs of authoritarian-leaning politics, regardless of the fear's particular object.

(Photo from BLDGBLOG's amazing feature on the Drains of Canada.)

Sunday Cat Blogging

Now that we've put straw in our garden, the neighbor's cat spends most of her days lolling around in it.

Heated Interstellar Dust

"This image shows the entire sky in infrared light at nine micrometres. The bright stripe extending from left to right is the disc of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Several bright regions corresponding to strong infrared radiation appear along or next to the Galactic Plane. These regions are sites of newly born stars. At the brightest region in the very centre of the image, towards the centre of our Galaxy, old stars crowd together. AKARI observed the infrared radiation emitted from the heated interstellar dust."

Image via European Space Agency. Click to enlarge.

Happy Fourth!

Emma Goldman, "What is Patriotism?" (1908):

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that she will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.

Such is the logic of patriotism.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Wakefield" (1837):

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.

Marilynne Robinson, "Psalm Eight" (1996):

So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us.

This, That, and the Other

A few random links, just so I can put off writing anything for a little while longer:

Congo Journey is a collection of "Photographs and Documents from Robert Hottot's Expedition to Central Africa, 1908-9."

Art That Heals: The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia is a fascinating site that discusses the role of medico-religious identities, secret names, and talismans in traditional medicine.

The Dawn of Colour commemorates the centennial of the autochrome. Here's one taken in 1913 by Mervyn Joseph Pius O'Gorman:


Tyren, Jomfruen og alle de andre comprises a collection of old star atlases (in Danish).

Teh Booxxor of Joob preachez teh LOLcat g05p3l 2 u nooblarz (via Pandagon).

Not Pop-Ups: The Other Illustrated Books, Ephemera, and Graphic Designs of Vojtech Kubašta was the source for the illustration at the top of this post.

Things About Stuff

CKR has an interesting post on climate science:

One of the objections to climate science and the IPCC process is that science is about facts, not consensus.

It’s about both, actually. Scientists are a lot less deterministic lot than is popularly supposed. Some do indeed measure particular properties or effects down to the fourth or ninth or whatever place after the decimal point, but for the most part, the world is slipperier than that. Or it would be nice to believe that scientists pin down causes and effects in an unambiguous way: smoke cigarettes, and you’ll get lung cancer.

That example shows that it’s not so simple. We all know someone who smokes and has lived a long and healthy life. But it still makes sense to discourage smoking, because many people who smoke do get lung cancer, and the cigarettes are the cause of that lung cancer. Probability there, not determinism.

Subtopia discusses an article on "the urbanization of panic":

Berardi describes the state of urban territory as striated by new dimensions of panic where the mental and physical environment of the city overlap in an over-saturation of signs “that create a sort of continuous excitation," he writes, "a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual mind as well as the collective mind to a state of collapse.”

There's an awful lot of stuff I'd take issue with in the theory-laden source article. It's hard to say whether I'll ever get around to it, though. For now, the questions that occur to me are: 1) Is panic really "urban"?; and 2) Is "panic" really panic?

David Neiwart reports on a picnic in Rapid City, MI, at which a KKK flag was flown:

Probably the most noteworthy aspect of the story is the way everyone in the community scrambles to cover for the person who raised the flag. They're all equally quick to deny that the flag's appearance meant anything racial....

If white people sometimes wonder why minorities sometimes view their protestations off innocence on racial issues with deep suspicion, they need only look at incidents like these for a simple explanation.

Except that for many people, assigning ill will to the accuser rather than the accused provides the simplest possible explanation for racial incidents.

Stories like this one show how racism has essentially become inadmissible; it's as though it were so rare a phenomenon, and so inexplicable a form of mental or ethical perversion, that almost any other explanation is not only more plausible, but also more in keeping - perversely enough - with the "civilized" value of tolerance.

Speaking of tolerance, VastLeft extols the virtues of being reasonable:

Maybe it’s part of the plan, the rightwing going so far off-the-rails that the Democrats are stuck being the boring Mr.-and-Ms. Fixits, while the Repubs create all those mind-boggling new realities. But, maybe it’s time we remind people how boringly reasonable we are. It just may be that reasonable is the new reasonable.

Damn straight. Death to extremists!

Kidding aside, Amanda Marcotte would take issue - as would I - with the "Mr.-and-Ms." part of VL's equation:

If you pay very close attention to the way Democrats and liberals are dismissed by the right and in the mainstream, you’ll notice that it’s the same set of dismissals issued to silence and discredit women out of hand. Despite all indicators that we marched off to war because a bunch of neocon wingnuts watched way too many war movies in the 80s, the idea that liberals are ruled by emotions and conservatives are rational still has play (look at any Sensible Liberal® defending his support for the war, and you’ll see that myth played out)....

And it’s all because Republicans have been coded as masculine, and the Democrats as feminine, and thanks to sexism, we believe that masculine is more rational than feminine, regardless of piles of evidence to the contrary.

My thrusting, probing male intellect tells me that the young lady is on to something (I'd emphasize that the "rationality" in question is of the conservatarian variety, and therefore has more to do with kicking ass than, say, devising a sensible trade policy).

Which reminds me: Echidne has written an excellent piece on the media's portrayal of gender research.

(The photo at top is by David Levinthal, from his series "Hitler Moves East 1975-77." Via Coudal.)

Stuff About Things

Here are some links that didn't make it into last week's edition of Friday Hope Blogging.

Exquisite Surprise: The Papers of Joseph Cornell compiles Cornell's source material, notes, and other ephemera.

Historical Photography of the American West in 3D is a fascinating collection of stereo cards and anaglyphs.

Out of the Teeming Sea comprises 19th-century glass models of marine invertebrates by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.


The Illustrated Word at the Fin de Siècle details "the relationship between fin de siècle aesthetic and political theories, and between literary, artistic, and journalistic culture and paid particular attention to the role of the visual in the media of the period."


America and the Utopian Dream is notable less for its rudimentary survey of utopian and dystopian literature than for its collection of ephemera relating to American utopian communities like Kaweah.


Death of the Father: An Anthropology of Ends in Political Authority asks the immortal question: "Of what significance is the symbolization of the Father and his dead body for the form of national authority that follows the collapse of a regime?"

A Buzz About Bees presents historical material on bees and beekeeping.

New York Street Photography features photos taken in the 1960s and 1970s by Diane Arbus, Roy Colmer, Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, Thomas Struth, and William Gedney.


Also:

Time, Tide and Tonics: The Patent Medicine Almanac in America.

Vive la différence! The English and French stereotype in satirical prints, 1720-1815.

Under the North Pole: The Voyage of the Nautilus.

The Animal Kingdom: Six Centuries of Zoological Illustration. See also Animals Are Allowed in the Library.