2013 archive
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Spread random acts of politeness.
Kissimmee police are trying to find out who shot bullets into eight homes in two city neighborhoods.
The Deen of Southern Culture 0
The Rude One shares his take on the Paula Deen situation.
It’s not what you’d expect (warning: rudeness).
Like Chauncey Devega, he is able to look beyond an instance of a specific racist slur and see larger issues.
Electronic Scrubbing 0
In New York Magazine, Graeme Wood tells a fascinating tale of digital dishwashing. A nugget:
That work is not really any slimier than the work of PR firms offline—relentlessly accentuating the positive and hoping no one asks about the negative. But in the digital world, with anonymously registered websites, it’s easier to create natural-seeming whisper campaigns, positive or negative, and disavow any role in them. Michael Zammuto, president of Reputation Changer, founded in 2010, says he has seen numerous clients try to beat Google by flooding the web with junky self-glorifying sites. “These strategies never work over the long term,” he says. “There are no shortcuts.”
Gut Out the Vote 3
Plus ca change.
Gospel, Decoded 0
Connie Schultz:
“Being a Christian means fixing yourself and helping others,” she used to say, “not the other way around.” That’s a lifetime of work summed up right there.
Facebook Frolics 0
No place to hide.
Garbage In, Garbage Out 0
It would appear that using computers gives people who can’t spell, think, or proofread diploma-tic immunity (emphasis added).
Radford said the problem was caused when a commercial software system used to produce the diplomas within the university’s registrar’s office was upgraded last fall.
The software upgrade required the diploma wording to be re-keyed into the program and during that process the typographical errors were introduced into the template.
But the error in Wildberger’s diploma occurred before that change.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Chastise the children, politely.
Two mothers of boys at the sleepover contacted the James City County Child Protective Services after learning of the incident and filed a complaint.
Break Time 0
Off to drink liberally.
A Modest Proposal 0
Delaware Dem looks at Republican rebranding efforts and suggests a new strategy:
Coloring in the Color Lines 0
Rachel predicts the effects of gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Via Raw Story.
Feelings of Dred 4
I predict that the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision will eventually be judged as infamous a sell-out to bigotry and oppression as was the Dred Scott decision.
The Deen of Southern Culture 0
No longer in the chips:
Too much of a gamble for them, I guess.
(Later: Also, no longer in Walmart.)
In other news, Chauncey Devega continues to explore the confluence of casual racism, Paula Deen, and nostalgia for the Lost Cause (that the Supreme Court seems determined to revive, but that’s another story).
His post recalled for me the time I sat in the barbershop with my father while a local farmer renowned for his public profanity* spewed out stories about “his n*****s” and how he took such good care of them, so long as they did a good day’s work.
Paula Deen’s nostalgia for Jim and Jane Crow is a yearning for a world that was based upon legal violence and casual cruelty towards black Americans.
(snip)
“Our” is a description of a set of historical material circumstances wherein whites quite literally owned black people as human property. “Our” also sketches out the boundaries of controlling one’s own personhood and liberty–black Americans were denied this right from slavery through to the end of Jim and Jane Crow in the South and elsewhere.
Deen’s “our local African-Americans” can be abused and violated in an arrangement more akin to a White racial fiefdom than a proper democratic polity. If white folks felt benevolent they could also offer protection and defense to “their negroes” from those other white people who would do them even greater harm. Both arrangements robbed Black Americans of their agency and freedom.
Read the rest. As with all of Devega’s work, you will learn something.
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*Remember that, in that time and place, “locker room talk” tended to stay in the locker room.
This gentleman took a perverse pride in his ability to “talk sh*t” with anyone, everyone, everywhere, all the time. I heard stuff from him that I had never heard before, not even in the high school locker room.