Posts Tagged ‘Gabrielle Giffords’
Wednesday Deux
* CFP: Queerness and Games at UC Berkeley.
* AMC passed on Red Mars, but then greenlights this? Those idiots.
* Minimum Wage Machine (Work in Progress).
The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 4.97 seconds, for $7.25 an hour (NY state minimum wage). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money.
* Gabrielle Giffords op-ed on the Senate’s minority-rules rejection of gun control.
* What started out as a case about whether corporations could be held accountable in U.S. courts for human rights violations abroad now turned into a case about whether anyone can be held accountable. And on Wednesday, a five-justice majority of the U.S. Supreme Court held that the answer is, mostly, no.
* Mellon Foundation awards grant to develop new careers for humanities Ph.D.s. At the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
* Disney Says New ‘Star Wars’ Films Will Open Every Summer Starting in 2015. The internet has spoken: put Patton Oswalt in charge.
Happy MLK Day Links
* American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white. Via MeFi.
* Tim Wise on the disappearance of the real MLK.
So we compartmentalize the non-violence message, much as we compartmentalize books about Dr. King and the movement in that section of the bookstore established for African American History; much as we have compartmentalized those streets named for the man: locating them only in the blackest and often poorest parts of town.
Were this tendency to render King divisible on multiple levels — abstracting non-violence from justice, colorblindness from racial equity, and public service from radical social transformation — merely an academic matter, it would hardly merit our concern. But its impact is greater than that. Our only hope as a society is to see the connections between the issues King was addressing and our current predicament, to see that what affects part of the whole affects the greater body, to understand that racism and racial inequity must be of concern to us all, because they pose risks to us all.
* But let us never forget that the civil rights movement was completely unnecessary in the first place; a “truly free market” would have ended segregation on its own.
* Martin Luther King in science fiction.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Jon Hamm is just too damn old to play Superman.
* Schwarzenegger says being governor cost him 200 million dollars. You’re welcome, California.
* When assassins get results: Arizona law could force Gabrielle Giffords out of her seat within months.
* The Edge Question 2011: What scientific concept would improve everyone’s toolkit? There are some good nominations, but for a twenty-first century civilization teetering on the brink of ecological suicide there’s only one right answer: TANSTAAFL.
* Towns for losers: the highway’s jammed with broken heroes fleeing the ruins of New Jersey. Let’s hope Chris Christie isn’t next to make the big move to D.C.
* And naturally you had me at Soviet workplace safety posters. Via MeFi.
This Was Monday
* All these worlds are yours, except Kepler 10-b. Attempt no landings there.
* Autonomous organization: In urban N.J. areas, few residents disrespect unwritten rule of reserving snow-cleared parking spots.
* Matt Taibbi gets introspective.
For my part, as a member of the political media, and a vitriol-spewing one at that, the Tucson shooting immediately made me ask myself the question: do I personally do anything to add to this obvious problem of a hypercharged, rhetorically overheated political atmosphere? And the unfortunate answer I came up with was, maybe. I’ve always told myself that what I do is different from what someone like Rush does, because I don’t target classes of people and try not to exempt anyone (even myself) from criticism, or favor either party.
I’ve also counted on the belief that anyone who’s willing to devote the mental energy to even follow whatever wild rhetoric I’m using is probably also smart enough to tell the difference between reality and hyperbole. I also hope that anyone reading my articles will get the underlying message that I’m pretty sure — I hope I’m sure, anyway — I’m conveying at all times, i.e. that violence is irresponsible, that we should use our brains instead of baseball bats to solve problems, etc.
But while I tell myself all these things, I also know that I would never talk to my wife or my mother the way I talk to Lloyd Blankfein. Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you’ve got? That’s a question that I think has to be asked. It’s certainly possible that we’ve all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I’m not just talking about Jared Loughner.
To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people.
* The University of California Student Association responds to news of an additional half-billion dollars in cuts to education in California.
* Short film of the night: “Three Minutes.”
* Infographic of the night: Dexter’s victims.
‘Climate of Hate’
Echoing commentary from across the blogosphere, Krugman and The New York Times Editorial Board consider the larger social implications of Saturday’s attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and call for an end to extremist and eliminationist rhetoric of the sort extensively catalogued here.
Assassination in Arizona?
An Arizona congresswoman has been shot and possibly killed at a scheduled “Congress in your Corner” event in Arizona. The shooter is in custody. It’s obviously too early to speculate on his motives, and somehow feels wrong to mention at all when the news is still so fresh, but my Twitter feed is exploding with recent instances in which Rep. Giffords has been a target of eliminationist rhetoric and imagery in the past.
Sad news for her family and for the nation.
UPDATE: Just to clarify, the initial reports were that Giffords had been killed; the new reports are saying she’s still alive and in surgery.
UPDATE 2: The story from the New York Times includes this detail:
She has held several events since first taking office in January 2007. At one such event in 2009, a protester was removed by police when his pistol fell on the supermarket floor.
A federal judge was apparently also killed or injured at the scene, who could have been the target as well if this was indeed a motivated assassination (as opposed to a random act of violence).
UPDATE 3: Members of Giffords’s staff and a child have apparently also been killed. So sad.
UPDATE 4: RT @TheFix MSNBC reports that deputy city manager tells them that doctors expect Giffords to “pull through”. #giffords