I'm reading about bell hooks.#

From the above mini-bio:

Although hooks is mainly known as a feminist thinker, her writings cover a broad range of topics on gender, race, teaching and the significance of media for contemporary culture. She strongly believes that these topics cannot be dealt with as separately, but must be understood as being interconnectedness. As an example, she refers to the idea of a "White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy" and its interconnectedness, rather than to its more traditionally separated and component parts.

The above links to an article by bell entitled, Postmodern Blackness. Oh my.

[13] Music is the cultural product created by African- Americans that has most attracted postmodern theorists. It is rarely acknowledged that there is far greater censorship and restriction of other forms of cultural production by black folks--beginning with literary and critical writing. Attempts on the part of editors and publishing houses to control and manipulate the representation of black culture, as well as their desire to promote the creation of products which will attract the widest audience, limit in a crippling and stifling way the kind of work many black folks feel we can do and still receive recognition. Using myself as an example, that creative writing I do which I consider to be most reflective of a postmodern oppositional sensibility--work that is abstract, fragmented, non-linear narrative--is constantly rejected by editors and publishers who tell me it does not conform to the type of writing they think black women should be doing or the type of writing they believe will sell. Certainly I do not think I am the only black person engaged in forms of cultural production, especially experimental ones, who is constrained by the lack of an audience for certain kinds of work. It is important for postmodern thinkers and theorists to constitute themselves as an audience for such work. To do this they must assert power and privilege within the space of critical writing to open up the field so that it will be more inclusive. To change the exclusionary practice of postmodern critical discourse is to enact a postmodernism of resistance. Part of this intervention entails black intellectual participation in the discourse.

Remember kids, if you try to make money with intelligent business decisions based on the ability for a given product to sell, you are being a racist bigot. This is because no one has the right to set up their own publishing house to test their theories about what will and will not sell, it is your responsibility to let these people force you to do what you would not otherwise do help these people out.

Sut Jhally wrote an article about Columbine High School about a week after it happened. He focuses on that the shooters were male children, not children.#

Such a discussion must examine the mass media in which boys (and girls) are immersed, including violent, interactive video games, but also mass media as part of a larger cultural environment that helps to shape the masculine identities of young boys in ways that equate strength in males with power and the ability to instill fear - fear in other males as well as in females.

But the way in which we neuter these discussions makes it hard to frame such questions, for there is a wrong way and a right way of asking them. The wrong way: "Did the media (video games, Marilyn Manson, 'The Basketball Diaries') make them do it?" One of the few things that we know for certain after 50 years of sustained research on these issues is that behavior is too complex a phenomenon to pin down to exposure to individual and isolated media messages. The evidence strongly supports that behavior is linked to attitudes and attitudes are formed in a much more complex cultural environment.

Sut Jhally also writes about the dangers of professional wrestling.#

This criticism (much of it egged on by master promoters like McMahon) fuels the erroneous belief of some youngsters that somehow the WWF and WCW are alternative and rebellious. However, one of the great insights of cultural studies is that adherence to a conservative and repressive gender order can appear powerful and liberating - or rebellious - even as it assigns greater suffering to those deemed less powerful in the social order.

Some people will argue that analyzing the social impact of wrestling is a useless exercise because, after all, it's only play acting, right? But to those who still believe that there is no connection between popular culture and broader social and political issues, that an analysis of wrestling has nothing to teach us about where our culture is heading, we have two words of caution: Jesse Ventura.

Although I cannot say for sure that Sut Jhally would agree with some of the politics around Howard Dean, I think that it is reasonable to presume that they share some of the same values. With this in mind, I find the insult of Jesse Ventura interesting seeing as he set many of the standards for internet politics and is currently a fellow at Harvard University. (Well, that probably isn't a plus because Harvard is part of the white male supremacist patriarchy.)

This article by Sut Jhally about why men are the most important cause of violence against women is interesting.#

The outrage in Central Park on Puerto Rican Day shocked and horrified not just New Yorkers but people everywhere. In its wake, the media have rushed to find an explanation, focusing on the "crowd" or "mob" psychology and the lack of a timely police response. These are important, but there is a far more central aspect that has remained largely unexamined: that men attacked and abused women. Seemingly "normal" men, perhaps fueled by alcohol, acted out publicly against women in an incredibly hostile and aggressive fashion.

The time is long overdue for us to have a national conversation about the way our culture teaches boys and men--across class, race and ethnic distinctions--to think about and act toward women. While this incident rightly shocked and angered a lot of people, and has caused women in New York and elsewhere to be even more vigilant about their personal safety, the most shocking aspect is how long this kind of thing has been going on with so little public response.

I find this interesting primarily for two reasons. The first I will explain and the second will be explained by my favourite partner in crime, Chip Gibbons.

The first thing that is interesting is the insinuation that the only proper and good response to an event is a "public response," rather than individual responses with ones own values in mind.

For the second, here is Chip Gibbons:

When are women going to stop expecting men to protect them from violence? It is so typical of our culture that we expect others to do the dirty work for us. If women (and men) want to defend themselves against rape and other violence, they should buy guns and learn how to use them.

What kind of woman or man demands that men risk their lives to defend her/him? A person who has no respect for the freedom or the lives of men, a person who wants a white knight, a person who has fantasies of men fighting other men, the good triumphing over evil and blah, blah, blah.

Rape is a disgusting crime but as I've grown older, I've grown as disgusted with those who whine that nobody else wants to do their self-defense work for them.

Yet another article by Sut Jhally is about why many more blacks than whites thought O.J. Simpson to be innocent.#

In 1992 I co-authored a book (with Justin Lewis) on audience perceptions of The Cosby Show, the most popular prime-time show of the 80's that was just drawing to a close. Our research was based on interviewing a range of American audiences (both black and white) about their reaction to the show and the broader understanding of the state of race relations in the United States. The most striking aspect of the interviews with black Americans was that when we asked them about Cosby, they responded with comments about the role that media images play in how white America looks at them -- of how stereotypical images of blacks as criminals impacted upon their own everyday interaction with white society and institutions. As one person put it "Nobody can believe that you can actually have the intelligence, the fortitude, the dedication and determination to go out and earn a decent living to afford you some nice things. The mentality today is that if you're black and you get something, you either got it through drugs or through prostitution". The role that the media played in the cultivation of this perception was clearly understood. Another of our respondents stated, "We seem to be the only people in the world that TV tries to pick out the negative to portray as characteristic of us. What television is doing to us, I think, is working a hell of a job on us."

I was reminded off the post I linked to today on the Marginal Revolution where a theory like this was put to the test. I wish that more of these "cultural/media critics" would put their money where their mouth is and actually test their hypotheses, rather than just complaining and calling for another "discussion."

In order for some balance, I will point out that I am a fan of many of the videos by Sut Jhally's organization, The Media Education Foundation, including Slim Hopes and Killing Us Softly, and I am a fan of some of the foundation's advisors, notably Susan Faludi and Cornel West.#

Christen Nelson hangs out with Quentin Tarantino in the mall.#

When we returned an hour later the table was waiting for us and a few of the employees were gathered around sheepishly checking him out. They offered to help get it to his car, but he said I was "super strong" and that we could manage. We took the elevator up to the fourth level and I immediately recognized his car.

About 60 feet away was the bright yellow "Pussy Wagon" from Kill Bill. He said that he was driving it around to promotional events and loved the fact that it freaked people out. It looked like a very comfortable ride. I looked into the back seat that Uma had dragged herself into in the movie and got goose bumps.

David Henderson writes about how to defend yourself in an argument and reforming health care.#

"So what would you do to make sure low-income people can get health care?" he asked.

I answered, "I would have massive deregulation, so that it would be easier for people to be doctors. The increased supply of doctors would bring the price down. I would have massive deregulation of health insurance, getting rid of mandated benefits so that low-income people would be able to buy catastrophic health insurance at a fairly low price. I would deregulate drug development and sales and the result would be drugs on the market much more quickly than now." I had given him the very brief version of the reforms I lay out in the health care chapter of my book, The Joy of Freedom: An Economist's Odyssey.

"I think we have a responsibility to help poorer people get health care," he said.

"I can see that," I said, "but no one has the right to force someone to provide health care for poor people and that's what taxes do."

Dan on his compiler article and putting Parrot in production.#

The initial compiler was written in perl because, well, it's a nice language for text processing if you like it, and it's got a lot of powerful tools (in the form of CPAN) handy. Yeah, I could've done it all in C with a yacc grammar, but it's a lot less effort to get that level of pain just smacking myself with a hammer. The first cut of the compiler didn't take too long, as these things go. A few months and I had something serviceable that would run against the whole source repository and work. There were still some issues with the generated code, but nothing bad.

Seth Finkelstein continues on A-Listers.#

What I am saying is that bloggerdom is as gatekeeper-constricted as other Big Media. It's a gatekeeper of audience, not a gatekeeper of production, but this makes no different in the final result. To be charitable, people keep responding to that observation by saying anyone can pitch a story to the editors, I mean the gatekeepers, and that they are unmoved by insularity and clubbiness. Which, by the way, is exactly what Big Media claims too, and I think is about as true (note the implication there - people can think conections count for more than they in truth do, but denying they mean anything at all seems over-idealistic)

Tyler Cowen explains an experiment about caste and performance.#

What are they really saying? When the Experiment-Meister knows who belongs to which caste, and this is common knowledge, the low caste players don't try very hard. It seems the low caste players don't expect to keep anything they might win.

Use the same players, but "caste blind," and the low caste players put in a good showing. Their supposed "self-confidence" problems disappear. In fact the high caste players try harder too.

"Mistrust undermines motivation", write the authors. How is that for a nice three word sentence?

Matt May explains why only Massachusetts and Maine celebrate Patriots' Day.#

April 19 is the day in 1775 when Paul Revere rode at midnight to warn the townspeople of Boston that the British were attacking. This day was the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

The question comes: Why Massachusetts and Maine, but nobody else? And there's a very good answer: Maine was once part of Massachusetts. In fact, until 1820, Maine was a part of Massachusetts (and before that, a part of Massachusetts Bay Colony). They became a state unto themselves in a deal related to Missouri and maintaining equilibrium between slave-owners and abolitionists. And now you know everything I know about the history of New England and the revolution.

Chai Tea Latte: "Got up in the middle of the night. Groggy. Dark room. Door to bedroom not shut completely. Walked right into it, forehead first. Stunned, I slapped my hand up to my forehead while squealing 'ouch'. Hand slapping forehead only exacerbated the situation. Note to self: in future, do not compound injury with second injury." Poor thing!#

Micha Ghertner on opportunity costs and private law enforcement.#

To make the analogy a bit more cogent, consider the fact that those who want to purchase private law enforcement under the current regime must take into account the opportunity cost of "free" public law enforcement, even if they don't want it. Of course, this is not such a big problem for drug dealers operating in a black market, as public law enforcement isn't a very useful tool for resolving their disputes. However, taxes imposed upon those who would prefer private law enforcement is a cost, just as paying for public school is a cost to parents who prefer to send their children to private school. Further, private law enforcement is currently illegal—the very definition of a state is an organization that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence (i.e. enforcement of law) within its territory. This state prohibition serves as a costly barrier-to-entry for any potential law enforcement competitors. This is the primary reason why few if any private law enforcement agencies currently exist.

Imagine how much more expensive and difficult sending your children to private school would be if the government claimed a complete legal monopoly on education—a monopoly even more monopolistic than it is now were the state to prohibit the very existence of private schools instead of just tolerating them with not-so-thinly-veiled contempt. Who among us—other than Vito Corleone and Washington politicians [Is there a difference?-ed. Does the Pope shit in the woods? Do rhetorical questions always need smartass answers?-ed. Yes.]—would still be able to send their children to a school of their own choosing? Few, I gather. The opportunity costs associated with private law enforcement agencies are just too great in the present time. The opportunity costs associated with private school are too great for those parents who would eagerly remove their children from public schools if given the means to do so.

Jeff Sharlet writes about pictures coming out of Iraq.#

None of this is true, of course. We look at the pictures and we see facts. Soldiers. Guns. Dust. Women in hijabs. We try not to think of where we've seen this picture before. We can't--it makes no sense. It's like the splatters of black paint with which the resistance fighters, or the terrorists, or the muhajadeen, or whatever they are, splatter the signs of the American occupation. That is, when they're not shooting them. Bullet holes or black paint, either way they're making rorschachs, asking us to look at them and say what we see.

I love Moxie's new style of posts.#

Whenever my Saudi sweetheart is in town he fills up my Porsche's gas tank on the house.

He flew into Los Angeles courtesy of President Bush to discuss important matters regarding the control of November's election.

[...]

Later, when I returned from church there was a swinging foam party, Jell-O wrestling and one of the potential November terrorists was licking whipped cream off Dick Cheney's cheeks. Butt cheeks.

Consuela was thougtful enough to serve our Saudi friends their cocktails in oil cans as they played truth or dare with the strippers. Needless to say, no one present was capable of telling the truth, so it was a night full of dares.