December, 2016 archive
How Stuff Works, White Supremacy Dept. 0
Solomon Jones lays it out. A snippet:
Then, after doing so, the rich have routinely stood by as America’s working poor fought to protect their place in the pecking order.
That’s where hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan come from: The false belief that whiteness cancels out the reality of poverty. That whiteness makes one superior to a black person who is better educated and economically thriving. That embracing the notion of whiteness can turn back the clock to a time when one’s advancement was based on the color of one’s skin.
Do read the rest. He lays out the con quite nicely.
In a tangent thereunto, this morning before I got up, I was thinking about the long game: what happens if the United States chooses to violate its oft-stated, nay, ballyhooed position as a refuge for the poor, the tired, and you know the rest, its commitment to the rights of others and to expel immigrants and anyone else with brown skins?
“Why!” I realized, “they have to leave lots of stuff behind.” Whatever else the anti-immigrant movement is, it is most certainly a con so that haters can steal stuff.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
You heard of ice-fishing? Now there’s ice-hunting.
Massachusetts Environmental Police said the hunter hit the butt of his muzzleloader rifle to check the ice.
The gun discharged, hitting him in the chest.
According to the story, bystanders competently administered first aid. The hunter and his quarry are both singly in treatment together.
The Art of the Con 0
Farron thinks that the Nativists are restless.
Afterthought:
One you open Pandora’s box, it does not close easily.
No Place To Hide 0
Click to see the image at its original location.
Aside:
I am cautious about who wants to collect all my data on the inner webs, but I realize I must deal with them in today’s world. The alternative is to cut your shoes off, learn to play the flute, and live in a tree.
Google is more trustworthy than many of its counterparts. One indication of this is that their TOS are in (at least relatively) plain language and short enough to display on one webpage.
(Open tag fixed.)
Looking Beyond the Surface 0
Microsoft Surface ad during Monday Night Football goes horribly wrong.
Microsoft has some experience with horribly wrong.
What’s in a Name? 0
Well, if the name is “Samsung Galaxy Note 7, quite a bit, it would appear.
White Christmas 1
In a typically long and densely reasoned post, Chauncey Devega explores the Christmas imagery of the movie, A Christmas Story. That’s the story woven from several of Jean Shepherd‘s stories, which opened to disappointing reviews and receipts, but which has since become a Christmas staple of television.
Some of the lessons he draws might surprise you. Here’s a bit.
(snip)
Black people are present in “A Christmas Story.” There are several black children in Ralphie’s elementary school classroom and, like their white peers, they participate in pulling a prank on their teacher. There are also some black folks watching the Christmas parade. There is a black man in Black Bart’s gang, which attacks Ralphie’s home in a fantasy sequence and are beaten back by his deft use of that Red Ryder BB gun.
The black characters in “A Christmas Story” are present but remain peripheral. They have no real voice or agency. They are shown in an perfectly inoffensive and neutral fashion. They are “present” in much the same way as the minor white characters who are not members of Ralphie’s family or his circle of friends.
Follow the link for the rest.
Full Disclosure:
I am a big fan of Jean Shepherd’s writing. When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, I’d catch his radio show on the skip from WOR-AM in New York City whenever the atmospheric conditions were favorable. In his own way, he captured the essence of growing up as boy (and, as Devega points out, quite specifically a white boy) in America in the late 1940s and 1950s. As a white boy who grew up in America in the 1950s, I realized that when I discovered his stories (I was maybe twice Raphie’s age when I did) and can attest to it today.
Jean Shepherd did not pretend to write profound fiction or social realism; he was a humorist. Nevertheless, that does not in any way impeach attempts to draw social lessons from his work. Heck, popular culture often tells more about day-to-day social reality than the ponderous works of self-proclaimed serious artistes.
I don’t remember there being any persons of color in any of his short stories–and I read almost all of them–and I do not think that reflects on Shepherd in any way other than that he was a product of his times. Because of segregation de facto and de jure, employment and housing discrimination (repeat after me: “Redlining“), when Shepherd was growing up in America, a white person outside the South could be born and grow to maturity without ever seeing, not to mention interacting with, a black person or a brown person or an Asian person, except for possibly seeing one of them on the Ed Sullivan Show.*
To the extent minorities were present in the movie, they were a creation of times of the movie, as Devega points out, not of the times of the stories, and I commend Devega’s analysis of the phenomena to your attention.
________________
*This sentence was slightly edited for clarity at 11:20 a. m. EST.
All That Was Old Is New Again 0
At The Seattle Times, a holocaust survivor sees parallels between Germany then and the Unites States now. Here’s a bit of the letter he sent to his Senators and shared with columnist Jerry Large:
Wassermann wrote that the entire Nazi ideology is in place and wonders how far it will go here. “We can hope that our government of checks and balances will be more resistant than the Weimar Republic was. Don’t count on it.”
Follow the link to learn more.
Do not follow the link if you wish to pretend to yourself that today’s events are politics as usual.
The “Still Face” of Society Is Still There 0
Back in the olden days, when I was young ‘un studying history and sociology at my alma mater, the condition described in this article would have been called anomie.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Give your children the opportunity to be polite.
(snip)
Investigators said a loaded handgun had been left on a nightstand in a bedroom the girl shared with her parents. Several other guns were also found in the house.
In an relatively unusual circumstance, this has not been ruled a “tragic accident.” The father has been charged with several crimes related to unsafe handling of lethal weapons.
The Art of the Con 0
Paul Krugman comments on the “populism” that isn’t. A snippet:
Follow the link to see why he said that.
