No, Plamegate, the Michael Jackson trial, and other domestic fun and games were not being given so much attention because things in Darfur got better. Instead, it was just too depressing to keep going on about it, so the MSM wanted something else to talk about. Here is a piece encapsulating the situation in Darfur and its antecedents. Catch up and become alarmed. Something needed to be done a while ago. What is happening now?
Tag Archives: news
academia, israel, boycotts (again)
In an earlier post I talked about my discomfort with the idea that a boycott of Israeli academic institutions is an appropriate or effective means of applying political pressure. These recent posts at Left2Right and Crooked Timber discuss a thoroughly backwards way of approaching the issue that may be adopted by a university professor’s union in the UK. According to the NY Times:
The boycott, which has prompted outrage in Israel, the United States and Britain, would bar Israeli faculty members at Haifa University and Bar-Ilan University from taking part in academic conferences or joint research with their British colleagues.
The resolution on the boycott, passed by the Association of University Teachers in late April, would allow an exception only for those academics at the two schools who declare opposition to Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
This wrongheaded in so many ways that it makes me wonder how these people made it through grad school in the first place. Setting aside the issue of whether or not a boycott is appropriate in the first place, what could this possibly seek to accomplish? As a symbolic gesture it fails miserably because it’s trying to “call out” academics by threatening to make them academic pariahs. It is definitely not an effective way to apply pressure to the Israeli academy because it applies to only two universities. Finally, it’s an attempt to bind union members to a clearly controversial stance and represents an abuse (in my mind) of union power.
The whole thing is like one high school clique ignoring another or some kids giving one person the silent treatment. These guys wish it was like some sort of gang war or Noble Struggle, but it’s just childish and ignorant.
happy groundhog day
And the stupid beast saw his shadow. Take that, East coast! I live in Sunny California ™, where we don’t have seasons!
And actually, it is a beautifully warm and sunny day.
especially a tragedy
While watching the carnage wrought by the tsunamis around the Indian Ocean today on CNN, I was struck by a journalist’s remark that because it was high tourist season for Europeans, the tidal waves were “especially a tragedy.” Now I know that tragedy hits closest to home, but the implication I got was that it would be less of a tragedy if there were no European tourists there.
I suppose close-text reading of newscasts can reveal quite a bit…
Emperor Norton I Bridge
Some in the Bay Area wish to rename the Bay Bridge the Emperor Norton I bridge. Norton, a 19th century eccentric, lead a full and exciting life as the only Emperor of the United States. His many decrees and letters can be found online, and are good for a mid-day chuckle. I was first introduced to him in the Sandman comic, collected in Fables and Reflections. I suppose if I had been here before reading it I would have known all about him, but I figured Neil Gaiman was making it up. Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.
charming
Doesn’t the government in Orissa have something better to do with its time than institute a crackdown on snake charmers? It’s one of the poorest states in India, with a ridiculously high illiteracy rate. Its 40% Dalits and Adivasis, who are already plenty oppressed by the government and society in general. Perhaps there are bigger fish to fry…
more discussion on the marine
Is going on at Obsidian Wings, and it’s worth a read.
more atrocity
This can’t be good (link via Atrios):
FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) — The U.S. military is investigating whether a Marine shot dead an unarmed, wounded insurgent during the battle for Falluja in an incident captured on videotape by a pool reporter.
The man was shot in the head at close range Saturday by a Marine who found him among a group of wounded men. The wounded men were found in a mosque that Marines said had been the source of small-arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire the previous day.
…
Four of the men appeared to have been shot again in Saturday’s fighting, and one of them appeared to be dead, according to the pool report. In the video, a Marine was seen noticing that one of the men appeared to be breathing.
A Marine approached one of the men in the mosque saying, “He’s [expletive] faking he’s dead. He’s faking he’s [expletive] dead.”
The Marine raised his rifle and fired into the apparently wounded man’s head, at which point a companion said, “Well, he’s dead now.”
I’m sure the videogame industry will be blamed for this one any minute now. Shift the blame, shift the blame, until it spreads into a thin enough patina so that we don’t notice those bright lines between right and wrong go all fuzzy and out of focus.
Naturally, this is not a statistical sample. This is not a poll. And because of that, the spin will be, as it was for Abu Ghraib, that this data point has no statistical value. But a single point changes your posterior distribution a lot if your prior gave probability one to the event “no torture, no atrocities.”
This news has put me off my homework for the night.
reforesting
reporter suspended
Earlier I linked to a letter from Farnaz Fassihi, a WSJ reporter in Iraq, which documented the near-impossible conditions for journalists there. This was a private letter which was the posted on the Internet, and now the WSJ has decided to put Fassihi on forced vacation until after the election.
Paul Steiger, the Journal’s managing editor, was unavailable by phone Thursday, but his spokesman, Robert Christie, accepted a question on his behalf and agreed to put it to the editor: Had Fassihi’s e-mail been the subject of discussion among her editors and had they decided that its dissemination should prevent her from writing about Iraq until after Nov. 2?
Christie forwarded Steiger’s response by e-mail: “Ms. Fassihi is coming out of Iraq shortly on a long planned vacation. That vacation was planned to, and will, extend past the election.”
Is this much different from the employer who discovers his employee’s blog and then fires them? Or an employer who fires their employee for having the wrong bumper sticker? Or blacklisting communists?
I went to a panel sponsored by the journalism school here on whether or not the media got it right in the lead-up to the war. It was kind of sad watching 6 journalists from different organizations beat themselves up over how they were duped. But if you look at the actual news that has been coming out of those sources, it’s still the same old he-said she-said crap with very little analysis. On the one hand, you have the hyper-sensitive WSJ, which seems to enforce an objectivity gag rule, and on the other you have Bill O’Reilly, whose notion of no-spin is laughable.
An Ergodic Walk 