September, 2014 archive
“No Labels” Means “No There, There” 0
Hendrik Gideons, writing at the Bangor Daily News, exposes the emptiness of “centrism.” A nugget:
“Centrist” denotes equidistance from whatever is on either side. The term pays no attention whatsoever to 1) how far apart the two sides are from one another, 2) which among them might have moved recently and why, and 3) how much. “Independent” draws its indeterminate meaning only from whatever it is — again unspecified — with which the speaker chooses not to be identified. And when such “independents” refer to political parties as “special interests,” they misuse a term employed for decades by political scientists to denote a person, group or organization attempting to influence legislators in favor of one particular interest or issue.
Do read the rest.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Pre-school politeness:
A 3-year-old girl accidentally shot herself at a home on East Lake Trail Saturday, police said.
Jennifer Timmons with the Columbia Police Department said the child found a gun and was shot in the leg.
Love that passive voice: “was shot.” By whom, one wonders.
The Write Stuff 0
Chuck Hawkins explains how Florida’s standardized testing is causing students to hate writing. A nugget (FCAT is the acronym for “Florida’s Comprehensive Assessment Test”):
Fifty of the 109 students wrote with some emotion about nine years of being drilled to write the “FCAT way”: a formulaic, bloodless exercise that drained the fun out of putting pen to paper.
Follow the link to see three of the students’ essays.
The “Privatization” Scam 0
Really, folks, it is a scan. Public responsibilities are public responsibilities that should not be farmed out to folks who don’t care about the public good.
When public responsibilities are turned over to private corporations which care only about how many CEO country club memberships they can afford, the corporations get their country club memberships and the public gets the shaft.
“To the Moon, Alice, to the Moon!” 0
The Seattle Times’s Danny Westneat remembers his time as a beat reported doing a weekly “police blotter” column. Despite the publicity, he suspects that, aside from the cover-up, pearl-clutching over the NFL’s abusive husbands and boyfriends may be obscuring a larger problem. A nugget:
. . . I came to call this my weekly domestic-violence tour.
Family fights, usually with a man attacking a woman, are the top reason people call police. They make up anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of what police do. Sifting through the weekly reports of South King County was a bruising tour of family dysfunction: shouting matches in the streets to fist fights to battering of children with canes to assaults with knives to, every so often, homicide.
Family violence was so routine it became background noise. I rarely put it in the crime blotter. Maybe this was a mistake, but there was too much. I could have filled the entire blotter every week solely with horrific accounts of men abusing women. I didn’t. I looked away.
(snip)
But the obsession with the NFL scandal is obscuring the real story: We are the ones who really have an epidemic of domestic-violence problems.
Scare Tactics 0
Rachel analyzes ISIS’s propaganda strategy.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Politeness after school:
According to the story, police are still trying to determine whether the politeness was purposeful.
Illegal Coverage 0
Bob Molinaro isn’t buying the NFL’s dance on condoning violence off, as well as on, the field.
The fuss about Roger Goodell–what did he know and when did he know it?–is a red herring. The problen isn’t Goodell; it’s not even the NFL. Covering up the misdeeds of star players reaches as far down as high school.
Big-time football is hopelessly corrupt.
Trolling Along 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Jennifer Golbeck discusses a study of internet trolls. A snippet:
- I have sent people to shock websites for the lulz.
- I like to troll people in forums or the comments section of websites.
- I enjoy griefing other players in multiplayer games.
- The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt.
If you are interested in a theory of why trolls troll. follow the link.
Twits on Twitter 0
Playing the trump card.
Light Bloggery 0
Things to do.
