The Warren Court?
Labels: Elizabeth Warren, Legal, Obama, SCOTUS
“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994).
Labels: Elizabeth Warren, Legal, Obama, SCOTUS
Labels: health care reform, Legal, SCOTUS
Labels: Best Shots
Labels: Photography
Labels: Obituaries, poetry
Labels: Music, Obituaries
Labels: politics, Symbolic Politics
Labels: Margaret Atwood, Unions, writers
Labels: FEMEN, portraits, protests, women's rights, World Press Photo
Labels: porn, pornography
Labels: crime, euphemism, JR, Mexico, Political Not Ethical, politics, portraits
Labels: Best Shots
- Jodi Dean and Jason Jones on "Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Representation" here at the Russian outlet Chto delat.
- Alex Keyssar on "The Strange History of Voter Suppression" here at The New York Times.
- And Hilary Wainright on Occupy too - 'An Excess of Democracy" here at openDemocracy.
- There is an interview with Amos Oz here at Ha'aretz.
- You can find an Op-ED - "Free Trade Blinders" - by Dani Rodrik here at Project Syndicate.
- Arundhati Roy offers "Capitalism: A Ghost Story" here at Outlook India.
Labels: recommended reading
"There’s always been some concern that adult subject matter should be quarantined from a page that attracts children. Unlike late at night, when South Park and Colbert are on, impressionable minds are wide awake when the newspaper arrives. But as editors well know, the vast majority of comics readers are adult. More to the point, children don’t read Doonesbury. They never have. They think it’s stupid and boring, a view shared by some of their parents. My older son ignored it his entire childhood, until one day when he was around 11, something clicked and he sat down and read 25 years of work in two weeks. I’m not sure he’s looked at it since."Read the rest too. While Trudeau won't call the editorial decisions to pull the strip censorship, I will. If, as he suggests, the editorial types know that there is no real danger of corrupting youth, they are simply pandering to right-wingers who will howl with outrage nonetheless. This is like saying that we need voter ID cards to prevent electoral fraud even though we can point to no instances of such fraud. The right wants to impose policies and take no flack. The editors are conniving in that agenda.
Labels: cartoons, Censorship, health, Legal, Media Politics, politics, sex, women's rights
To the Editor:And that is why the retraction the folks at "This American Life" have issued is important.
I was so pleased to see Jennifer B. McDonald take on and take a stand on one of the big issues in contemporary writing, the mixed-up, messed-up mash-up between truth and fiction. The potential for serious damage grows as this approach creeps out from memoir (where maybe you’re sort of entitled to lie about yourself, if not anyone else) and into works about strangers, including people who — as the stalwart fact-checker Jim Fingal points out — are not going to be publicly represented any other way, and about politically and culturally complex figures and events. When I teach, I tell my students that it’s a slippery slope from the nasty thing their stepfather never really did to the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq never really had.
A good artist is not hindered by her responsibility to both subject and readers, but stimulated to go deeper, look harder, write better. Maybe that’s because the stories don’t belong to you. You belong to them.
REBECCA SOLNIT
San Francisco
Labels: Apple, Bullshit, Journalists, npr, Political Not Ethical, Truth
Labels: Conventions, grief, photojournalism, Pietà, Samuel Aranda, World Press Photo
Labels: Best Shots
Labels: cartoons, Censorship, health, Legal, Media Politics, politics, sex, women's rights
I chose the topic of compulsory sonograms because it was in the news and because of its relevance to the broader battle over women’s health currently being waged in several states. For some reason, the GOP has chosen 2012 to re-litigate reproductive freedom, an issue that was resolved decades ago. Why [Rick] Santorum, [Rush] Limbaugh et al. thought this would be a good time to declare war on half the electorate, I cannot say. But to ignore it would have been comedy malpractice.
Labels: cartoons, Censorship, health, Legal, Media Politics, politics, sex, women's rights
Labels: food
Labels: cartoons, Censorship, Media Politics, politics, sex, women's rights
The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.”Of course, there are massive problems of coordination blocking the way. There are informational and power asymmetries galore. And there is no guarantee whatsoever that, if the many were to withhold their acquiescence, the powerful and well-off would not simply insist on implementing some sort of emergency powers to deal with the ensuing difficulties. Anyone want to give odds?
Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency” fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass protest would force a public conversation that, to date, we have been content to avoid.
Labels: democracy, José Saramago, justice, Legal, OWS, politics
Labels: economists, Inequality, political economy
Labels: capitalism, gender, Limbaugh, Markets, Media Politics, sex
"Isn’t there some sort of contract violation here? If the students in class are paying to learn economics, is there any recourse that they have? Is it any different than buying a movie ticket to see Rocky IV and ending up being shown Chariots of Fire?"That is the response of one of my colleagues, Michael Rizzo, to the fact that students showed up in the class of another colleague, Steve Landsburg, to protest the latter's idiotic attempt to channel Rush Limbaugh. First, let's be clear. Disrupting a class like this is inappropriate. Period. The students involved were wrong to do so. I will leave it to the Dean's to figure out how best to respond to the event.
Labels: Academic Follies, economists, Speech on Campus, Steve Landsburg, UofR
Labels: Obituaries
Fluke was not, as Limbaugh and Landsburg have suggested, "demanding" that taxpayers pay for her to have sex; her testimony was originally part of a debate about whether religious institutions should be required to provide access to contraception. Her argument focused primarily on the medical (and non-contraceptive) uses of birth control [source].Of course, it was the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee that prevented her from testifying in the first place. They preferred to elicit the insights of a bunch of old men, mostly clerics, on the matter. No matter.
Labels: economists, gender, Limbaugh, politics, Republicans, sex, Speech on Campus, Steve Landsburg, UofR
Labels: Best Shots
Two points are in order. Since extortion typically requires threats or intimidation, it is hard to see how Sandra Fluke is extorting anyone. (I return to this below.) So, we are back with Limbaugh's verbiage. Second, because slut and prostitute are nouns, they are statuses we attribute to other people. Hence Limbaugh called Fluke a slut and a prostitute. They are not words we attribute to a "position." That means that the fine distinction Landsburg seeks to draw - "While Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position - which is what’s at issue here - deserves none whatsoever. It deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered. To treat it with respect would be a travesty." - is pure crap. A position cannot be a whore or a hooker, a lady of the evening or a woman of ill-repute. Simply put, the dodge fails. Perhaps that makes me "dense and humorless," but I am not sure how. Unless, of course, referring to someone like Ms. Fluke as a slut or a prostitute might be defensible in this circumstance. Maybe Landsburg actually thinks so. Maybe not. I think there are good reasons why he shouldn't.To his credit, Rush stepped in . . . with a spot-on analogy: If I can reasonably be required to pay for someone else’s sex life (absent any argument about externalities or other market failures), then I can reasonably demand to share in the benefits. His dense and humorless critics notwithstanding, I am 99% sure that Rush doesn’t actually advocate mandatory on-line sex videos. What he advocates is logical consistency and an appreciation for ethical symmetry. So do I. Color me jealous for not having thought of this analogy myself.
There’s one place where I part company with Rush, though: He wants to brand Ms. Fluke a “slut” because, he says, she’s demanding to be paid for sex. There are two things wrong here. First, the word “slut” connotes (to me at least) precisely the sort of joyous enthusiasm that would render payment superfluous. A far better word might have been “prostitute” (or a five-letter synonym therefor), but that’s still wrong because Ms. Fluke is not in fact demanding to be paid for sex. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) She will, as I understand it, be having sex whether she gets paid or not. Her demand is to be paid. The right word for that is something much closer to “extortionist”. Or better yet, “extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement”. Is there a single word for that?
Labels: economists, gender, Limbaugh, Markets, politics, Republicans, sex, Speech on Campus, Steve Landsburg, UofR
“[While] Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position — which is what’s at issue here — deserves none whatsoever. It deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered."Actually, it is Landsburg who deserves the derision. His primary mistake? Like many economists he mistakes the real world for the fictions captured in economic models. The agents who populate such models are sociopaths. Literally. They lack moral sense. They lack emotion. They are hyper-rational. All that may be - actually it is - useful in making economic models, which are meant to explore the conception of narrow instrumental rationality. But in actual life, such characteristics reflect a genuine tone-deafness. It is just the sort of tone-deafness that we see in sociopaths. Landsburg seems unable to differentiate between living in his textbook and living in the world of actual people. (Do you think of your children as externalities? Do you talk about sex in terms of getting 'the incentives right'? Do you tell that to your kids or your actual or potential partners?) In his various opinion-makings, Landsburg seems to present such thinking as a virtue. That is more than reason enough to take a pass on his various writings.
Labels: economists, Limbaugh, Speech on Campus, Steve Landsburg, UofR
Labels: Dyer, pornography, Thomas Ruff
Labels: embedded, Journalists, photojournalism, War
Labels: gay politics, Legal, Marriage, sex
Labels: Bullshit, propaganda
Labels: Obituaries, Women in Photography