Tag Archives: politics

Racist “Wild West Tribute” at Ocean Beach

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American “artist” Thom Ross has recreated a tableaux of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. This show was the equivalent of blackface minstrel shows of the 19th century but for Native Americans, yet is lauded in the press as a “tribute.” He himself is quoted as calling it a “Valentine to my hometown.” Of course, since Native Americans are such a marginalized population in the US, he can get away with it — life-size plywood figures of Sambo eating his watermelon with the head cut out so you can take a photo would never have made it off the drawing board. So much for cultural sensitivity, San Francisco.

It boggles the mind that such an astoundingly uncritical recreation is put up as a public art project in an ostensibly progressive major city. I’m used to dull things like giant arrows coming out of the ground. But is this art? Does it invite us to think about the image and it context? Does it intend to implicate us by inviting us to take the cutout photo-op because it should leave a dirty taste in our mouths? No. It’s simply a paean to a degrading, exploitative, and racist past. Valentine, indeed.

Here is some more information (pdf), courtesy of mark27. Hat tip to Jen for pointing out the article and the link to the flyer.

p.s. The comments on the Chronicle’s website are equally horrific.

p.p.s. There is some reaction from a show on KPFA.

links on academic freedom

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Over at Crooked Timber, guest blogger Eric Rauchway has a set of links about academic freedom. Over here at Berkeley there’s a bit of a push to get the law school to fire John Yoo, author of the infamous “torture memos,” which provided the (il)legal justification for contravening the Geneva Convention. Yoo has tenure, so firing him is quite an extreme move. The argument for firing him is that he engaged in gross professional misconduct and is a war criminal and letting him teach constitutional law is questionable given his willingness to toss out the Constitution. The other side says that as a matter of academic freedom, he should be allowed to engage in whatever political activities he likes outside the academy and that he has already been judged an excellent scholar by the standards of his discipline. Firing him would set a dangerous McCarthy-esque precedent and we should err on the side of caution.

In my view, unless Yoo is formally censured by his own peers, public pressure to fire him is just that — public pressure. Jane Kramer wrote a fascinating piece in The New Yorker about the tenure battle of Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist at Barnard who drew the ire of some fringe pro-Israel because her book, Facts on the Ground tries to eludicate the discourse (in a Foucauldian sense) of archaeology in Israel and its relationship to Zionism and the concept of the Israeli state. These groups organized a petition threatening Barnard and Columbia in order to get them to deny her tenure. There too we saw a public outcry over perceived harmful actions of an academic. In Abu El-Haj’s case, her detractors basically made up things about her, selectively and misleadingly quoted from her book, and pretty much didn’t have a leg to stand on. Yoo’s case is different — he clearly wrote some odious memos that have had horrible consequences. However, unless he is disbarred (which is possible), I tend to side with those who say finding a loophole to fire him would do more harm than good.

Somewhere, languishing on my shelf is the book Academic Freedom after September 11. I read half of it and then switched to something less dry, but maybe I should go back to it now that my interest has been re-whetted.

Battlestar Galactica and the law

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Via Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy, here is a link to a legal blog’s interview and discussion of some of the legal aspects of the show.

For the record, I was dubious at first, but Bobak’s evangelizing convinced me to start watching. BSG is one of those few shows that opens some good hard questions in a way that doesn’t grate horribly on my aesthetic nerves (c.f. Joss Whedon, for me). I don’t agree with the politics or aesthetics always, but there is good fodder for debate, to my mind.

Jonah Golberg is pantsed by Jon Stewart

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been reading Sadly, No! document the atrocities of Jonah Goldberg’s new book Liberal Fascism : The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. The book can be summarized by the following argument : Nazis liked organic food. Modern liberals like organic food. Therefore modern liberalism is rooted in fascism. Clever, eh?

Then I found out about this interview of Goldberg on the Daily Show. Wow.

See also this insightful contribution from Michael Bérubé on the line from Dinesh D’Souza (also one of my least favorite “commentators”) to Goldberg.

George and the NIE : the argument from information theory

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George makes the following argument: let X be a binary random variable that equals 1 if Iran has an active nuclear weapons program and 0 if not. Suppose that last month we knew that P(X = 1) = p > 1/2. Then we can measure our uncertainty about X via its entropy:

H(X) = hb(p) = – p log p – (1-p) log (1-p)

Here hb(p) is the binary entropy function. Now let Y be a random variable representing the NIE. We know that conditioning reduces entropy:

H(X | Y) ≤ H(X)

Let p’ be our new probability that X = 1 conditioned on the evidence Y. We cannot have p’ < p, because then hb(p’) > hb(p), which is a contradiction. Therefore p’ ≥ p and therefore the NIE shows that the chance Iran has an active nuclear program is even higher than before.

Exercise: Explain the error(s) in George’s argument.

Extra Credit: Write a short essay explaining why one should not abuse information theory for political ends.

free speech and America-centrism

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Chris Bertram over at has a post on speech regulation with which I’m not sure I agree, but I do wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment:

The Americans have a long tradition of trying to discuss these things using the language of an 18th-century document. Given the difficulties of shoehorning a lot of real-world problems into that frame, that gives them a long history of acrobatic hermeneutics somewhere in the vague area of free speech. Some of it is even relevant. The trouble is that many Americans (at least the ones who comment on blogs!) can’t tell the difference between discussing the free speech and discussing the application of their constitution.

Not only true on blogs, but in person as well.

being literal

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A: Last night, B said that our candidate has been “seduced by the Calypso of the insurance industry.” We think that B should apologize for this ridiculous and unsubstantiated attack on our candidate.
B: What are you talking about?
A: We have never liked Calypso.
B: It’s a metaphor!
A: Sure doesn’t sound like plain English to me.
B: You’re kidding me. Didn’t you read The Odyssey? Calypso keeps Odysseus prisoner…
A: Are you saying we have imprisoned the insurance industry?
B: What? No! I mean, it’s a literary allusion.
A: My fellow Americans, it is clear that B’s “literary aspirations” are growing out of control and that he is out of touch with real Americans. We want straight talk, and that is what our candidate will bring to you.

The mendacity of politicians who willfully misconstrue and misquote others must appeal to some people. It kind of reminds me of those who walk around talking about how the Bible is the literal word of God. They think words should mean what they say, and there shouldn’t be any “interpreting” going on. Perhaps that’s why you get a lot of “person on the street” interviews in which someone says “I like candidate A, since they seem so straightforward.” Perhaps that’s why we have possibly the dumbest President in the history of the country. “Straight talk” can come from all sorts, but the smart ones still use subtext.