20150818
Real House Trans White Wives
It appears Real Housewives of Atlanta and the White House are running neck and neck.
20150817
Yes. Yes it do. As Nick Walker Hirsch fumes,
This article treats [Hillary] Clinton as the protagonist in some kind of political drama in which progressive (white) liberal supporters of [Bernie] Sanders are framed as either an obstacle, a nuisance, or a fifth column within the rank and file, while Clinton is lauded for having tied up the money before the race even began...
"She has won the so-called invisible primary, the behind-the-scenes competition for elite support that helps decide the nomination. She has more endorsements and cash than just about any candidate in American history."
...If Clinton and Jeb! Bush are really so powerfully entrenched with the moneyed elites in this country that we can just treat their candidacies as inevitable, why do we bother having elections? We could all save ourselves a lot of time, money and pretense and just let the rich people sort it out without all of those bothersome plebs mucking up the works.Just so. The question is whether the data or the conclusion came first. Nate Cohn is NYT's knockoff Nate Silver, whom they lost to data journalism stardom, whatever the fuck that is. (It's clear and worth chuckling over that NYT was hoping people wouldn't notice the Nate2Nate swap—like turning on Bewitched in 1969 without being bothered or bewildered by the new Dick on the block.)
It's entirely likely, in my view, that NYT editorial owns this brand up to and including dictating the outcome which Mr. Cohn's analysis must prop up. As Nick points out, the whole piece comes from a Clinton-as-a-historical-inevitability POV. Mr. Cohn's tenor—frequent recourse to "Democratic elites", greater discussion of party than of voters—suggests that NYT has already accepted, and expects its readership to accept, that the Age of the Electorate is over. The American people don't elect their officials: they rehearse some tepid cheers over the Candidates (2) that Capital Built, while the media, like Briar Rose's godmethren, amusingly bicker over the color of their outfits.
Oh, sure, throw in lots of drama in the public square for window dressing. The "issues", those enterprises of great pitch and meme-ment don't worry The Money one bit. They serve only as a welcome distraction for the ideological. Besides, more often than not, they aren't even issues to begin with; they're gossip. My FB page has decayed into 10 percent issues and 90 policing of how people react to and discuss the issues. Which fuck that methodically to fine powder.
Of course, Mr. Silcohn and NYT are not wrong. We folks who espouse Sanders are the crazy people. We are "the overwhelmingly white, progressive left"—and in a refreshingly novel turn of events, that image sells like Wal*Mart China-made clothing to downtrodden Black America as well as it sells to white centrists and conservatives. That is what happens, I warrant, when you devote three decades to sabotaging public education, criminalizing communities of color, traducing science, and stigmatizing intelligence. The vast horde of under-educated, shit-fed hinterland masses already accept the new federal figurehead selection model. That is why they have thrown their support behind a professional wrestling superstar called Donald Trump.
20150816
Let's disagree to agree.
This is an admirable sentiment propped up with artifice. Everything from "We are one species" forward is, in my view, inarguable. But "there really is no such thing, scientifically, as race" is fundamentally disingenuous: it's like saying there's no such thing as "generosity" or "jealousy" because capital-S-science doesn't have formal definitions or standards for these qualities. Even worse, it actually obfuscates a basic principle of life science: that evolution is fluid; speciation is nothing but sufficiently distant cousinage. Except with a monoculture (like the Cavendish banana) defining a clade doesn't prohibit or discourage subclades. And denying subdivision of species is not merely idle sophistry: race-blindness would catastrophically diminish the efficacy of screening and managing sickle cell disease, Tay-Sachs disease, and similar genetic disorders.
Not surprisingly, the pugilistic Bill Nye above is quoted too restrictively: Mr. Nye supports his message re human unity with a more nuanced (and more entertaining) discussion of the science behind it.
We obsess about whether our dog is a pug-Jack Russell terrier mix with corgi overtones and an oaky finish. 'An approachable little dog.' Whatever. They’re all dogs, okay? And so the idea of a purebred is just a human construct.Er... ok. Again, I take the point, but I think there's a difference between "a human construct" (i.e., a mental schema humans make up to explain something) and an actual thing humans actually constructed (i.e., Scooby Doo and Gidget*, via selective breeding). The problem comes when you start speaking as if "science" and human communication were the same thing:
If a [Papuan] hooks up with a Swedish person all you get is a human. There’s no new thing you’re going to get. You just get a human ... there’s really no such thing as race. There’s different tribes but not different races. We’re all one species.Granted! But who said the word "race" meant "species"? I think the general public—insofar as they consider it at all and without resort to scientific terminology—understand "species" primarily as "members of a clade genetically similar enough to successfully reproduce." There is no way any common use of the word "race" today means the same thing. It is nonsense to proceed from the proposition that recognizing race denies the unity of the species. Bill Nye can draw a Venn diagram of this as easily as the next scientist. But he is a science populist/popularizer, a humanist, and (absent a skosh of evidence to the contrary) a Good Person, and he thus considers the ultimate message so important as to trump (not Trump—for there we are talking speciation) the finer points of science. I respectfully dissent.
Of course we must emphasize the universality not just of our species but of our entire biosphere. That we are all "in this together"—that the survival of life on earth depends on our species behaving intelligently in the broadest possible societal context—is the most important truth we have before us. To present bad science and popular myth, even in ultimate support of this overarching goal, is to act in bad faith—to betray the goal itself.
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* BTW, that dog is dead now.
20150807
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