I am proud to be Brother Shuriken of Reasoned Discussion.
Might we appeal to the naming committee to have "chakrum" and "trident" added to the possible names for future siblings?
In Faith (unless others find this objectionable)
Brother Shuriken of Reasoned Discussion
I think it depends on the area. I walked to school as a kid, and the same suburban streets are equally convenient for getting to the library. Admittedly, bicycling to my high school required going for two block the wrong way down the bicycle lane to get to a crosswalk with a light, but the intersection I was avoiding was dangerous because of morning commuters, not mallgoers.
In the nice small town where my sister's kids go to school, the elementary school isn't walking distance from their house, even if there were sidewalks, which there aren't, because it's a mountain town with huge amounts of snow through the winter.
Though again we're doing the "about the children" business, instead of the "about the everybody" which is what society is supposed to be about.
On that end, speeding to the mall is less of a problem, since folk go to malls all hours of the day, than making the mistake of being near a school when it lets out and crazed moms are driving minivans with no regard for traffic laws so as to get the kids to soccer practice on time. I once had the front end of my car totaled because one such decided to to an illegal U-turn across three lanes of traffic and there was nowhere to avoid her.
The other half of "It takes a village" is folk bleating "We should raise our children as a community!" which I've always taken as code for "I want free babysitting!"
Um, no. Beyond what Madeleine's talking about, and basic good-neighbor reciprocity--which folk arrange or not on their own--you really shouldn't have to worry about it.
As for Tipper Gore, hers was a crusade of lazy parenting. If you want to know if you approve a certain album for your child, check the reviews or simply ask the clerk in the store for their opinion or ask to see the lyrics sheet. Expecting someone else to make these decisions for you? And worse, her proposed labeling categories for (songs glorifying) SEX, VIOLENCE and the OCCULT (booga-booga).
I remember writing in an opinion piece at the time that we'd have to slap "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" with the second two, since it certainly glorifies violence, plus positively reeks of Christian mysticism (and you don't get a free pass for your ecstatic trance visions of God's feet squishing your enemies like grapes as being non-occult just because they use Christian symbology and couple hallelujahs).
About the only good thing I can say about Tipper is that it appears the Dems wrapped her in duct tape from the moment Clinton stepped into office, because I didn't hear any more about her idiotic censorship campaign. Apart from Al's V-chip idiocy, which dropped the "Occult" setting, which is in some ways too bad, since I understand there are ways to hack the V-chip to show only Violent shows, and I'd like to hack it to show only Occult shows.
Tonight I'd get to choose between Smallville, Lost and Revelations.
Spotting the anti-smoking ads made by the tobacco companies is just a matter of looking at what the anti-smoking kids are wearing. If they're hopelessly geeky clothes that no halfway fashion-conscious teen would have been caught dead wearing even three years ago when the were marginally in style (meaning, being sold at OSH Kosh and Mervyns), then they're from the tobacco companies. The one with the black kid who couldn't dance (or, who more likely could, because no one dances that geekily without formal training in what not to do) was a calculated touch to show the utter-lameness of the non-smoking teens.
Of course, when I was in high school, not only did we have the "Just Say No" campaign (thank you, Nancy Reagan {not}), but we had some ill conceived business where kids were give ribbons printed with "Drug Free Celebration," not realizing that with scissors and a bit of tape, this became "Free Drug Celebration." What was even better were the pencils printed with "DARE TO NOT DO DRUGS" which, when used, ground down to the ever-popular "DO DRUGS" pencils.
Jax,
Well, Adolph's personal stylist and image consultant was Leni Reifenstahl. She did a lot to make him look good.
And while she wasn't killed, it's fairly accurate to say that she was blacklisted for the rest of her life, which was fairly considerable, since she lived to a hundred and one.
But, until tomorrow.
Kevin
Jax,
Read the third, relatively neutral reference link. The parallels between Ford in Nazi Germany, and Haliburton in Iraq, are, well, similar.
The trouble with corporations, governments and wars is that when there's a war, the governments are going to strong-arm every corporation into making things for that war, and the fact that Germany did this before the US isn't that remarkable since Germany started the war and was involved in it before the US. And to read the article, it shows that Ford plants in Germany built the trucks used to invade Poland while Ford plants in the US built, under licence with Roll-Royce, the engines for the planes which were likely the ones used to firebomb Dresden.
No one's talking about Dresden asking for reparations from Ford and Rolls-Royce, mostly because atrocities from the Allied side don't count, not even Hiroshima, but the plain fact is that if Henry Ford had told both Hitler and FDR to go take a flying leap, none of his assembly lines were going to be used to produce widgets for any war, ha ha, the company would have swiftly gone bankrupt, due to the wartime propaganda machine of both countries, not to mention the governments simply seizing whatever they damn pleased in the interest of national security and the war effort.
Besides which, after a while you're just going after Marie Antoinette's hairdresser. Yes, if she'd had bad hair maybe she wouldn't have oppressed the peasants as well or as effectively, but the fact is, Marie would have found another hairdresser, the same as Hitler would have found another automotive plant, and when the all powerful leader of a country comes to you and tells you to give them a hairdo or build them a car, you generally do.
Saying that Nazis wouldn't have been able to invade Poland without Ford trucks rather avoids the option of getting some other sort of truck, or just simply invading with wagons and horsedrawn carts, as people did in previous centures, assuming we're postulating a 20th century where there aren't any automobiles, which is still more plausible than a world where the Polish flee in trucks while the Nazis invade on bicycles.
My other thought is that war reparations with companies should have a date closer to the war, since a lot of this lawsuit smells of extortion with moldy old skeletons from the closet and threats to scream "Holocaust!" and thereby depress sales and stock prices unless someone gives them fat sacks of cash to shut up, go away, and try the same trick with someone else, despite the fact that Henry Ford's writings on why anti-Semitism was cool really have little bearing on the current board of the Ford motor company.
When I was driving down to World Fantasy a couple weeks ago, I drove by the cotton fields on I-5 and saw huge freight car-sized bales of cotton covered with tarps stamped with M.H. WHITNEY, obviously the corporate heir of old Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin and thereby caused the huge boom in slavery (despite thinking it might do the opposite).
There's a corporation which profited massively from slavery, and is still in business today. How much should they pay?
We could also go back to carding cotton and removing the seeds by hand, not to mention assembling each car individually, but that really isn't practical.
Besides which, you have to look at all the economic twists. Do you fine the Whitney company for making the cotton gins and selling them to the slave owners, thereby increasing their productivity and allowing them to buy more slaves to pick more cotton? Do you fine the northern mills which buy the cheap slave-picked cotton and turn it into cloth? Do you fine Levi Strauss for buying the cheap cotton cloth and turning it into jeans, the sales of which are causing the demand?
Or do you just say, "Eh, screw it" and put on your blue jeans, and only worry about Third World sweat shop workers being exploited today rather than reparations for people exploited in previous centuries.
Jax,
There's a discrepancy in your arguments with the stock investments between *if it was knowable* and *if it was known.*
From practical purposes, it's impossible for an investor to look into every possible aspect of a company they're thinking to buy stock in, especially in the case of an investment tip which needs to be acted on immediately. Whereas if a crime is known, the company is generally being prosecuted in court for it.
With Ford Motors and Cisco, both of those things were happening legally with the US government's blessing, so I'd park the blame there instead if I have to park it anywhere, since it's not likely either the Nazis or the Chinese government said to the respective companies "Thank you, these should work splendidly to help us hunt and kill our own citizens!"
It's best as I see it to let the war crimes trials start and end with the war criminals and go no further. If you don't, you start looking like the French revolutionaries going after Marie Antoinette's hairdresser.
Jax wrote:
And, after all, *you* personally didn't take part in displacing these children (as far as I know), so you might be wondering why you should pay for it (as I wonder why I should pay for slave reparations or my father, who is German and was 10 years old when WWII ended should pay for the holocaust). That's where things get fuzzy for me. I'm in favor of finding all the people (including corporations who ever supported such crimes) actually responsible and taking *their* money.
The trouble with corporations is a bit more complex, especially in that corporations are held by stockholders, and stockholders change.
For example, my grandfather invested heavily in German railway stock, being an economist and knowing this would likely survive the war. It didn't save his life, but it did end up providing for a lot, including college funds for myself and all my cousins.
Everyone knows the part trains played in the holocaust, but I think there's a difference between "supported" and "pressed into service." Yet even if you find direct culpability, at this date do you fine current stockholders for the involvement of past war profiteers whose heirs have long since cashed out and spent the money?
I think the only clear case is the one with the banks. If you die, your heirs are supposed to get the money. If heirs can't be found, the bank doesn't just get to pocket it.
Things like this happen fairly commonly.
I remember at my high school, which was hardly all white, but you could count the black students if you sat down and throught hard about it. (Not the case with the Asian and Indian students, who were about a third of the class, and there were a fair number of hispanics as well.) Anyway, our fairly elected student body president was black, and on graduation, I heard he'd won the "Young Black Leader" scholarship, despite the fact that his parents were fairly well to do and would have been able to send him to college regardless.
My general thought at the time, and still, is that there were definitely some poorer students who could have used the scholarship more, but I couldn't blame him for reaching out for free money, and in his place, I would have done the same thing.
The trouble is, the United States is not homogenous. The inequities that exist in one corner are not in the same proportion in another corner, and certainly have varied over the course of generations.
There was a time when signs said "Irish Need Not Apply." My grandfather told me about being called "a dirty Mick." My only possible complaint is that people who see my name sometimes assume I'm Catholic, or at least was raised as such. And while there are likely places where I'd suffer some form of discrimination because of my name, they're probably balanced out by the ones where I'd get some unwarranted advantage.
I'll admit I'm not fond of affirmative action, but compared to several other inequities, it's relatively slight, and serves to balance the scales, even if they swing wildly at times.
Dave,
Excellent. I'm really glad to read this letter, and am proud to have had some part in the thought process leading up to it.
Donald, Bellatrys,
Agreed. I hadn't heard of the Truth and Reconcilliation Commissions until they were mentioned, so apologies for the remark on that.
Stefanie,
Fair points, but I thought I made it fairly clear that I was all for government reparations, scholarships, assistance and whatnot, at least in the case of economic hardship.
As for Jim Crow in the 60s, it certainly had an effect, but that effect wasn't homogenous throughout the 50 states. If we're talking about reparations, does the money come from the federal government or from the states? I think it's fair to say that Alabama had a lot more Jim Crow going than Hawaii.
I suppose, following the "were all in this together" argument, we could take federal disaster relief as a model and use funds to clean up urban blights.
Bellatrys,
You never mentioned any commissions, just Truth and Reconciliation, capitalized in the same paragraph as Mom's homemade Apple Pie. Is there a commission for that too that I'm not aware of?
As for things like:
Is your rhetorical snideness due to the same insecurity that makes you set up straw men, or is this simply the only way you know how to debate? (If so, I will cut you some slack,
I do know enough about formal debating terms to know that that's an ad hominem attack. But I suppose if you can pardon my rhetorical snideness, I can pardon your incredible condescension, including incessant use of pejoratives, such as "smacks of the urgent bleating" which, to my mind at least, also should qualify as rhetorical snideness, not to mention hypocrisy. But I suppose in the same spirit as you pardoning me in my poor beknighted ignorance (suitable for a junior high school), I can pardon your rhetorical snideness as well.
However, to make this discussion a bit more useful, it seems from your mention of First Things--a magazine which I'm only familiar with because I know the poetry editor, not that I've ever even seen a copy--that you guessed I'm Irish Catholic, which I'm not, and also wasn't raised with it so hardly know the first thing about current conservative religious dialogue, and certainly not all the buzzwords. This debate is the first time I've seen Truth and Reconcilliation capitalized outside of 19th century poetry, but I'll be happy to do a websearch for it....
Alright, just did. Important thing for South Africa, but the only government website is one for Zaire, and it evidently wasn't important enough for them to maintain, since I can't pull the page up. Though there is the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission for Stonehenge. As neither of these is my neck of the woods, I'm not too alarmed about having been ignorant of them, and anyway, now I do know about them, so it's covered. On with the debate.
As for the false dichotomy business, I agree with your statement about what one is, but that wasn't my argument. My argument, which I suppose I didn't make succinctly enough, is that monetary reparations are irrelevant if an individual's personal wealth is enough that they are not suffering from any of the crimes inflicted on their ancestors. And if they are suffering, their suffering is not inherently more worthy than that of a person whose ancestors did not suffer crimes against humanity, but has nevertheless been born into an equally awful situation. What needs to be addressed is the poverty, not the cause.
Aside from that, yes, we should put up monuments that say "This was an awful thing that never should have happened, and we're sorry" but at a certain point, history has to become history as well.
It also smacks of wretched denial, to refuse to engage in Truth and Reconciliation - but that is typical of almost all Americans I have met in my lifetime.
Bellatrys,
Interesting how you capitalize Truth, as if you have a corner on it.
But the trouble with Reconciliation is that the people who want it run around with a one-size-fits-all guilt trip, oblivious to the fact that most Americans of European ancestry had those ancestors come here after the Civil War, and in many cases, after the Civil Rights movement. My mom moved here in the 60s. Is she supposed to apologize to people like Barrack Obama, the first-generation son of a Kenyan diplomat, when the only possible blood tie either of them have to the Civil War is maybe on Obama's mother's side?
What about the recent Russian and Ethiopian immigrants in my city? Reconciliation, and for what? Or do we wait a generation for when their kids are respectively European Americans and African Americans (and that generation is actually now, since they started moving here in the 80s) and what exactly are they supposed to say to each other? (Note: I'm in California, where few people give a damn about the Civil War.)
And bi-racial people? Is Halle Berry supposed to apologize to herself?
And what are poor white folk, who already have such lovely names applied to them as "white trash" and "trailer trash," supposed to say to someone like Oprah Winfrey, who grew up in poverty, but is now considerably richer than the Widow of Croesus, and she earned it herself too?
As I see it, address the poverty and you've addressed most of the problem. Once you've got a swimming pool, and a mai tai in your hand, the horrible injustices done to your ancestors are about as relevant as the Peloponesian War.
Well, since the rituals and pictures and assorted whatnot tend to center around a church service, it's not unreasonable for people to think of marriage in a religious context, even if they realize on an intellectual level that the thing that lets them file a joint tax return is the marriage license signed at the courthouse, not the cake and bridesmaids and ridiculously expensive dresses and so forth.
I personally think that terms like "domestic partnership" should be kept separate for other situations, such as two sisters cohabiting and sharing property but not sex. That would also free up the word "partner" again so you could use it in conversation to mean business or legal partner without everyone seeing it as yet another coy euphemism for something sexual.
If you're living together until death do you part, and having sex while you're doing it, you're a husband, wife or spouse. No need to make up new words to fandance around the fact that you're having sex.
Yes, but what they are is a class that was discriminated against for generations. It isn't about what they do, it is about what was done to them. We need to get better at fighting the argument that undoing discrimination is discrimination. Maybe we could try to connect affirmative action with victim's rights, since many of the people who are against the first seem to be for the second.
It's not so much about discrimination as it is about class, inheritance and history.
Let's say you've got some people: the first has money for college because his great-grandparents worked hard, invested wisely, and the intervening generations didn't piss the money away; the second guy's great-grandparents had all of their property taken by corrupt government officials and the family's been suing to get it back ever since; the third guys great-grandparents were the corrupt government officials and the intervening generations were insane drunkards and spendthrifts who spent all the ill gotten gains so there's no college fund for him either.
I haven't assigned any race to the hypothetical college students because I don't think it particularly matters. Everyone deserves an education, and the descendents of victims or criminals and spendthrifts are still of the same economic class, poor, and should get financial assistance however the government can wangle it.
Discrimination and race also aren't a cut and dried thing anyway. Speaking here as the descendant of Cherokees, Abolitionists, Nazis and a Prussian Countess, what am I supposed to bitch about? That one of my ancestors, when faced with the Trail of Tears, cleverly married a Dutch alcoholic instead? That another of my ancestors died of tuberculosis in Andersonville Prison for fighting to free the slaves? That my great-grandparent's lakefront property in Berlin was taken by the Communists after the war, never to be seen again (until German reunification, at which point my mother got a share as part of the settlement)? That the noble title which I may have claim to belongs to a country which no longer exists?
At some point, you have to stop bitching. I think living memory is a good earmark. I have a Palestinian friend whose family still has the deed and keys to a house in what is now Israel, and that, the same as the lakefront property in Berlin, is in living memory of folk in both our families, but I really can't get too concerned about the Civil War, the Trail of Tears, or the Fall of Prussia. I particularly can't get upset about the Potato Famine because the Irish part of my family, while they did come over during the 19th century, came over because of a job transfer.
Indiscriminate reparations for things before the start of the 20th century are a bit whacked as I see it, but any excuse you can find to give a poor kid money for college or find an excuse to lift a community out of poverty is a good thing.
California has been doing some entertaining things with licensing all of the indian reservations to have gambling, even to the point of finding lands for tribes who don't have any and letting them build casinos there.
There aren't perfect solutions, but some are better than others.
BSD,
Interesting case, and while I agree with the ruling, in practical terms we're talking very different things with a visitation of a few hours in a hospital versus long term housing at a university.
With the hospital, for example, there's a difference between what the rules say and what the rules are intended for, which with a hospital is keeping the number of visitors passing through down to a reasonable number while at the same time bringing in loved ones for moral support during the illness. Limiting certain wards to immediate family only is part of this, but doctors nod, wink, and relax restrictions all the time.
As for college housing, I remember one housing administrator who lied to a student assembly for her convenience, rigged the housing lottery, and generally displayed many of the less savory traits of an administrator in service of her goal of keeping the bitching to a minimum and thus keeping her job. At least with the ruling for the lesbian couple, that sort of administrator can just say "Sorry, rules are rules" and get people who complain about their new neighbors out of her office.
Further, one of the reasons to use the old term, as opposed to some new or recently excavated term, is that private institutions will also have their lists of rules and regulations, and if you use the old term that's already included in them, the gatekeeper doesn't have to make a judgement call as to whether something counts.
For example, while the Catholic faith may not recognize marriages conducted outside of the Church, I think you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a Catholic hospital that excluded spouses of patients married in civil ceremonies or other ceremonies of other faiths.
Well, the question of "living as a woman" becomes even odder in a culture where women are culturally allowed to wear the same clothes as men with no attached social stigma.
With according spiritual power, it's really hard to find anyone in western society who's accorded any spiritual power by general society, no matter how well they're costumed. But with the berdaches, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the rarity is what accords the special status, the same as the superstitions about redheads, or blue-eyed folk being thought to have the evil eye by a largely brown-eyed middle eastern population.
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