Posts Tagged ‘outrages’
Obscenity of the Week
I can’t believe paying your employees in debit cards was ever legal, much less that it’s currently legal.
A Few More Friday Links
* We shouldn’t be assessing the health of the humanities by market-share metrics that are far more about demographics and the changing face of higher ed than they are about the intellectual shifts at the heart of actual humanities practice. Besides, the actual numbers show long-term stability post 1980:
The interpretation: The chart never quite reinforces the point that something terrible is going on in the humanities right now. Anyone looking at it closely will notice, as Michael Bérubé has, that the real collapse of humanities enrollments happened in the 1970s. The Great Recession has been less ruinous to enrollments than were the mid-1990s. Sure, a few Harvard majors have switched from history to government in the last decade: is that really a story?
But it does succeed in making the humanities appear massively out of date. And that’s a compelling story for all sorts of people. It makes humanists feel as though they deserve a larger share of the university, and that their sense of being under seige is due to the some pathology in the culture at large; it makes traditionalist critics of the humanities feel secure in pointing out that something has gone very wrong in the field.
* Malcolm Harris has a followup on his previous excellent student loan piece from Boston Review.
* Obama: PRISM Doesn’t Apply To U.S. Citizens. I don’t see how this could mean why Obama seems to be implying. Surely he’s saying that they’re collecting all data but only using data from noncitizens? How could they discriminate between citizen bandwidth and noncitizen bandwidth at the point of recording?
* But the real question: is Glenn Greenwald working for the ChiComs?
* Obama says go ahead kill all the wolves.
* And still another outrage of the day, as if your docket weren’t full: Hacker Who Exposed Steubenville Rape Case Could Spend More Time Behind Bars Than The Rapists.
Another One
WNYC and The Record asked, separately, for documentation of NJ Transit’s hurricane preparedness plans. Both news organizations received the same reply: a three-and-a-half page document with the words “New Jersey Rail Operations Hurricane Plan” atop the first page.
Thursday Night Links
* Predictably outrageous: University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.
* David Golumbia writes up UWM’s The Dark Side of the Digital conference.
* Pakistan Court Decision Finds US Drone Strikes Are ‘War Crimes,’ Which Are ‘Absolutely Illegal.’
* 19 Emotions For Which English Has No Words.
* Issue 4.1 of Excursions is devoted to “Science/Fiction” (including a much-needed denunciation of the Jedi).
* Millennials aren’t lazy; they’re f*cked.
* The Ghetto Is Public Policy.
* Surprising literally dozens, Snapchat photos can be retried after all.
* ABC has apparently picked up Agent of SHIELD.
* And just when you thought the culture had scraped the bottom of the barrel: 24 is coming back.
A Few Links for a Travelin’ Sunday
* After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered. A teacher resigns.
* Academics have finally “started” to talk about capitalism? Inconceivable!
* Take the example of online education, for which excitement is rapidly building in California. Morozov notes in the book that it might very well produce more graduates per dollar spent, but it also might miss the very point of education.
* An outrage of the week right in my own backyard: Botched ATF sting in Milwaukee ensnares brain-damaged man.
“I have never heard of anything so ludicrous in my life,” said Greg Thiele, who spent 30 years working for the Milwaukee Police Department including on undercover stings with federal agents, including those with the ATF. “Something is very wrong here.”
* The latest from the law school scam.
* How people die in Shakespearean tragedy.
* And when continuity collides: The new Doctor Who companion’s ten-second appearance in Captain America.
Sow Wells Fargo with Salt So That Nothing May Ever Grow There Again
Bailey added: “In September, 2010 Wells Fargo acknowledged its error in paying the taxes on Plaintiff’s neighbor’s property and corrected it.” By then, however, Delassus was so far behind on his mortgage payments wrongly doubled by Wells Fargo that the bank refused to let him resume his $1,237.69 installments, Trujillo says. He faced a sizable “reinstatement” cost — which is often the past due amount plus fees.
In an unsettling new twist, Delassus couldn’t get Wells Fargo to tell him how much his reinstatement cost was. Later, in a videotaped deposition, Trujillo asks Michael Dolan, a litigation-support manager for Wells Fargo: “So Plaintiff was never provided with the reinstatement amount after the bank discovered its error, correct?”
Irony: It’s a Good Thing
From the comments:
Disagree with you on the New Yorker cover.
I’m even not sure who these mythical people are supposed to be who are with it enough to have heard of the New Yorker in the first place yet still clueless enough to take the cover at face value.
People who walk by magazine stands? People who have it emailed to them? People who see it posted on a bulletin board or as the new desktop background of someone who just had it emailed to them?
We have a politics of image and symbolism. You can’t throw this kind of stuff out there into the public sphere and not expect it to be misused and abused.
I think the “oh, everyone gets the joke” thing comes from a fairly parochial point of view.
Now, I agree with Shankar on a wide range of issues, but I still think this anxiety is simply overheated. First, the image’s meaning is unmistakable, because frankly it deconstructs itself; it’s impossible for anyone with either a modicum of political intelligence or cultural savvy to take this image at face value. Obama doesn’t dress like that; Michelle Obama doesn’t look like that; presidential candidates don’t burn flags or stand in front of pictures of Osama bin Laden. That’s not to say that there aren’t still people who won’t get the joke, despite all its obvious tells—sadly, there probably are—but I just don’t think there are especially large numbers of people in that category, nor to the extent that there are do I see much compelling reason to dumb down the culture in an effort to cater to them.
Art and literature are misunderstood all the time. That’s their nature. They’re nonetheless good things to have in the public sphere, even when they’re misused and abused at the margins.
I’m also not clear on what the actual objection to the cover is supposed to be. Most of the concern on the left seems to be that the cover isn’t “useful,” which may or may not be true, but it’s neither here nor there with regard to its cultural value. (And I’d add that for what it’s worth the image may actually prove itself pretty useful to Obama—the best response to this sort of under-the-radar bullshit is mockery and marginalization, which is what we all agree this is.)
Then there are the claims that the image is tasteless or offensive. Now, I write from a very privileged subject position, white heterosexual upper-middle-class American male, and it’s certainly possible that this cartoon trips sensitivities I just don’t have. I’m open to that. But I haven’t seen any compelling explanation of just what about this extremely pro-Obama cartoon is actually supposed to be offensive; instead, its offensiveness and tasteless are simply taken for granted, as if everyone in the world but me and Jon Stewart’s writers had forgotten what irony is.
Irony: it’s a good thing, and a powerful weapon. Didn’t we learn from Orwell that without irony language is just Newspeak?
‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said. ‘We’re getting the language into its final shape — the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.’
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or ” doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in The Times occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’
‘Except-‘ began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say ‘Except the proles,’ but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. ‘ By 2050 earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
What Satire Is, What Jokes Are
Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, “You know, we don’t get many kangaroos here.” Barack Obama replies, “At these prices, I’m not surprised. That’s why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”
Andy Borowitz has the list of official, campaign-approved Barack Obama jokes in the wake of the now-infamous New Yorker cover flap, undoubtedly the silliest Outrage! of the election yet. Reasonable people can disagree about the success of the cover as satire—personally I think it works, and I think the ensuing shitstorm is pretty strong evidence of that—but whether it’s a “good” satire or not the meaning is absolutely clear, inoffensive, and pro-Obama: it’s the morons who believe this crap and the media figures who cynically peddle it who are being mocked, not the Obamas.
I’m even not sure who these mythical people are supposed to be who are with it enough to have heard of the New Yorker in the first place yet still clueless enough to take the cover at face value.
However, it must be said that Jon Stewart gets this wrong:
When Mr. Stewart on “The Daily Show” recently tried to joke about Mr. Obama changing his position on campaign financing, for instance, he met with such obvious resistance from the audience, he said, “You know, you’re allowed to laugh at him.” Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview on Monday, “People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them.”
Comedy Rule #1: Don’t blame the audience when your jokes fall flat; get better jokes. His writers, much more than Colbert’s, have clearly been struggling when it comes to Obama; just about the only successful Obama joke they’ve run is this one: “I wonder when he’ll break our hearts.”
Let’s Get Outraged
Things to be outraged about this Thursday night:
* When people say the surge is working, they mean that fewer American troops are dying each month in Iraq. I’m certainly glad this is the case—but I do regret that the accompanying escalation in air strikes that has made this possible has gone so underreported.
The U.S.-led coalition dropped 1,447 bombs on Iraq last year, an average of nearly four a day, compared with 229 bombs, or about four each week, in 2006.
…
The greater reliance on air power has raised concerns from human rights groups, which say that 500-pound and 2,000-pound munitions threaten civilians, especially when dropped in residential neighborhoods where insurgents mix with the population. The military assures that the precision attacks are designed to minimize civilian casualties — particularly as Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy emphasizes moving more troops into local communities and winning over the Iraqi population — but rights groups say bombings carry an especially high risk.
Lenin’s Tomb and Matt Yglesias have more commentary, skepticism, sorrow, and distrust.
* Authorities are investigating the death of a 29-year-old Fridley man shot with a Taser by state troopers, who said he had become “uncooperative” after a rush-hour crash Tuesday evening.
* Almost 9% of money donated by Duke faculty to political campaigns went to Republicans. The rest went to Democrats, overwhelmingly Obama and Edwards. Was it really that much? Outrage!
* Bin Laden’s son wants to be a peace activist. I suppose this ought to warm my heart or something, but no, it didn’t work.
Gerry Canavan 