waaaaa

In an Evolving Harlem, Newcomers Try to Fit In

The voices of the [gentrifiers] have often gone unheard

Cry me a river; their voice is their wallet.

hatin on pinker

found on wikipedia:

Linguist Steven Pinker[4] writes that "some categories really are social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist. Examples include money, tenure, citizenship, decorations for bravery, and the presidency of the United States."

Someone can't distinguish the particulars of citizenship, which any nation arbitrarily chooses, and the nearly analytic (okay, just analytic) fact that you can't have a political body without excluding certain sets of people. So any political body demands a conception of citizenship, whatever those particular requirements might be.

Now, one might ask, can you have a political body that includes all members? It seems unlikely. But if you could, then citizenship would not follow analytically from a political body.

Yet who get's to ask this question; and if we get to ask political questions at all - politics being almost the furthest from pure philosophy - why not then also add the assumption of an non-universal state? Without such an assumption, politics becomes domesticated, and we might ask whether there is just one universal household. And even if you go so far as to deny assumptions here, and grant all families in common, we hit next our basic element. We can no longer inquire, since there must be a distinction between parent and child.

And if there is no child without a parent, then why a household without a neighbor, and then a state without a foreign body?

kill the awesomebar

although now it's just bloat.

about:config
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults 0

The sickness of the South

With Resources Scarce, Homelessness Persists in New Orleans

Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else.

And don't just be thinking it's Ray-Ray. From bloggers to journalists, liberal to conservative, being an outsider is worse than being a racist.

Calm the fuck down Keith

Nope, not inappropriate. Nope, not offensive.
Get the fuck over it. Stop being so obviously partisan in this nomination process. It's fucking annoying when the only liberal voice on television is so obviously unable to maintain any objectivity. It makes it hard to take your voice seriously when you're attacking the Right.

I mean, the logic is simple, even if ineffective.
MSNBC

Responding to a question from the Sioux Falls Argus Leader editorial board about calls for her to drop out of the race, she said: "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know I just, I don't understand it," she said, dismissing the idea of abandoning the race.

Hillary wants to show examples of primaries that run into June. So she obviously sights wants to site important examples that everyone will remember. Hence, her husband's nomination and the Kennedy nomination. The argument had nothing to do with the possibility of some tragedy occurring. It's goal was obviously, when one doesn't cherry pick the soundbite, just to illustrate that primary races often go into late June. The last sentence was clearly an afterthought over the tragedy of that race.

How the fuck can anyone construe that as some kind of veiled threat???

I fucking hate, HATE, the media and the retards in it.

Thank God for Bill Moyers.

digby on the mark

It's the media, stupid.

And this is exactly the sentiment that I've been hearing from my Western NY, Western PA family and friends. It's not that they dislike Obama, it's that they dislike how the media is so unfair to Hillary. But the media is also passing the buck to Obama, making it seem that Obama is on the attack when he isn't.

The important question, now that Obama seems to be the frontrunner, is whether we can pull these central USers over to Obama. Heaven forbid I use the word bitter, but how could you not be? It's one thing for your favorite to lose, it's another for them to be dragged through the mud. Shouldn't that resentment linger? It's not like anyone in the media is ever held responsible.

What will be interesting, I think, is just how skeptical former Clinton supports will become. They have really lost their faith in the media (and I'm including a lot of the internet here) - so what other sources of information will they find? Or will they just give up on the political process? Let me foreshadow what I see.

It's a given that the media won't change. The opening of the internet has helped, but it has also proven to be its own echo chamber. (My blog roll has signifcantly shrunk since the start of the primaries.)

And chances are, Obama will not be able to fix the damage that Bush caused in his 8 years.

Just given those two premises, the conclusion is obvious. The media will blame Obama for the coming crisis, and paint his as inept. His fanclub has unrealistic expectation, and once their idealism is squashed, they'll be back on the right, "older and wiser". Just look at the years following Carter. Fanclubs are fickle. I can't count the number of Paultards that are now Obamaniacs. I look at them: huh? How the fuck do you make that leap? Do you even know their platforms?

science and skepticism

Tragedy is often born of oedipal acts. Is the philosophic father of modern empiricism and scientific methodology in an Oedipal position? Will the scientific sons have to turn the sword on their skeptical fathers? I doubt it. Few scientists are really interested in disbanding skepticism, even if it often leads to extremes. Hume foresaw the Pyrrohnian skeptic as a future opponent. He didn't provide much of a solution, except cloisters and starvation. Though a philosophic worry, the Pyrrohnian skeptic was never strong enough to stop scientific inquiry. And it seems to be a nearly necessary mental mechanism for the scientific pursuit. Why else would we seek the intellectual rigor, which finds itself up against the hedonistic cause? Why not just eat cake?

But now, coupled with religious fervor - skepticism's former enemy - practical consequences are appearing. Global warming skeptics, AIDS skeptics (I've only heard about this one recently), Flouride fears, obesity? Jesus. On the other hand, skepticism showed us that AIDS was not a gay disease. Skepticism compelled us to inspect the consequences of our industry. Worries are not just annoyances, they are requirements. They guard against arrogance, mistakes, and avoidance.

What's missing, importantly, is an intention to do something deceitful. (Of course, what is also missing is any form of responsibility - we can and ought, under empiricism, hold people responsible, at least to some extent, for their mistakes, regardless of intention.) This is where conspiracy theorists buckle. They normally require massive cooperation surrounding intentionally problematic decisions. Maybe a few will agree in dishonest usurpings, but most will feel enough moral pressure to prevent the wide spread cooperation required for broad conspiracy.

Deceit is the important point, I think. Because most people seem to agree that there are often people who know better than us. And we're okay with this. We listen to and take their advice. We give up some of our discretion in order to be guided by someone who can specialize and know more about a give field. But what we ask in return, is that, when we ask, they can provide reasoning for their decisions. In particular, that they give honest reasoning which can be held up to the standards of, if not the population at large, the large population of their peers. After all, if they claim to be knowers, then they claim to have justification for their beliefs. And if they have good justification, why would they worry that someone might question their belief?

Obviously, there is always a bit of wiggle room for the Straussian to step in with the city's need for a noble lie. But they tend to work under the assumption that the statesman's art is not an art that can be taught. And if this is the case, it seems to undercut any credence we would like to give to science. Science doesn't have to worry about this concern because science is precisely an transferable methodology. Otherwise it would lose repeatability and falsifiability.

Definitional distinctions are not going to solve all of the problems and worries that one might have about the scientific community. Nothing prevents there from actually being a a broad conspiracy. But we have to, again, resort to semi-scientific methods of making such determinations, otherwise we are left with conspiracy theories that do not have any standards of falsifiability and we fall into a vicious circle.

fuck NPR

That's it. I'm done. I will never listen to NPR again. I can't stand the fucking retards to whom they give a voice. If you changed your fucking politics because a hippy pissed you off then YOU'RE A FUCKING RETARD. Politics is not about about your goddamn motherfuckingbitchcunt experiences. And George Lakoff can suck my cock. He's a retard and needs to be bludgeoned with spoon. "O HI U R (STRICT FATHER) || (NURTURANT MOTHER) BCUS (TYPE A) || (TYPE B) WONT SELL MY BOOOOK ON AMAZON"