March 2011
22 posts
“Sometimes, I wish I could reblog Questions and Answers. Easily, without copy pasta or screen captures. Oh well!”
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I’ve seen a few posts in the last few days about “I wish I could do X with tumblr” - “I wish I could reblog replies”, “I wish there was an easier way than screen-capping and pasting and uploading and and and…”.
I found out about Missing e a few days ago, and so far it’s been perfect. It works when you need it to work, and stays out of your way for the rest of the time. Features can all be turned on and off, so you just use the bits you want.
I’m not going to go into its full features for fear of this sounding like a commercial for it, but take a look at the Missing e website.
Available for Chrome (which is what I use), Firefox and Safari.
“But you’ve probably read about Richard Nixon acting erratically, drinking heavily as Watergate closed in on him. You may not have read about the time he told a dinner party at the White House, “I could leave this room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead.”
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Nuclear weapons: How Cold War major Harold Hering asked a forbidden question that cost him his career. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine (via mikehudack)
“In other words we have risked the fate of the earth, the fate of the species, on the mental stability of a few ambitious politicians who rise to the top of the heap, not necessarily because of their rationality. There is no foolproof command and control system.”
Regarding "The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron"
What your doing is called Segregation. It doesn’t work. AND this writing is going after whites in particular. That’s racist. Period.
I should point out that I didn’t write that piece, it was by Kil Ja Kim. I’ve edited the post to reflect that.
I also happen to agree with you. It’s particularly concerning that in trying to address segregation, racism and imbalance; the author lumped together every white person, as if a homogeneous entity - key features that racist policies and ideas have used throughout history.
In addition, I thought it came across as a vindictive piece that offered no real way forward (other than possibly to hate whites). To white people, it could be read as “it doesn’t matter what you do in life, you offend and subjugate me”, which can hardly be seen as constructive.
Thanks for the thoughts!
The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron (An Open Letter to "White Anti-Racists") ~ by Kil Ja Kim
I received an annoying e-mail about white people and their struggle to do anti-racist work. I keep reading and hearing white people talk about their struggle to do anti-racist organizing, and frankly it gets on my nerves. So I am writing this open letter to white people who engage in any activist work that involves or affects non-whites. Given that the US social structure is founded on white supremacy, and that there is a global order in which white supremacy and European domination are at large, I would challenge any white person to figure out what movement or action they can get involved in that will not involve or affect non-white people.
That said, I want to begin with what has become a realization for me through the help of different politically conscious friends. There is NO SUCH THING AS A WHITE ANTI-RACIST. The term itself, “white anti-racist” is an oxymoron. In the following, I will explain why. Then, I will begin to detail how this impacts non-white people in organizing work specifically, along with how it affects non-white people generally.
Economists And Psychopaths →
urantiansojourn.com
One of the most studied fields of applied game theory is economics. Kudlow embraces a particular theory of economics that might best be described as economic Darwinism, a zero sum game where for every winner there’s a loser. Tellingly, the theory originated with studying the actions of poker players, each of whom is assumed to want to take all the other guys’ chips. Decades of subsequent social science studies, perhaps the most famous of which is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, undermine such a simplistic, selfish view of human nature. As the late Quentin S. Crisp summed it up in his Economists and Psychopaths:
“It has been found that the only people who really fit the simplified mathematical model of self-interested rational behaviour at all times are economists and psychopaths.”
As much as I find Game Theory fascinating, my (admittedly minimal) economics education does seem to be quite unrealistic right now. Neoclassical economics seems like an oversimplification purely to make the maths work out, rather than to adequately understand the economies of the real world.
“In school, the grading system has created the moral hazard of game play. It has replaced the real reward – learning for learning’s sake – with artificial rewards, these arbitrary letters. And when you replace the real with the artificial, you invite people to game the system and take the actions that would earn them these artificial rewards.”
—Seth Prierbatsch Keynote at SXSW 2011 (via curiositycounts)
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
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Marcus Aurelius (via droppingtheball)
A wager better than Pascal’s.
9 Afghan Boys Collecting Firewood Mowed Down by NATO Helicopter →
nytimes.com
Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents, according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO, which apologized for the mistake.
The boys, who were 9 to 15 years old, were attacked on Tuesday in what amounted to one of the war’s worst cases of mistaken killings by foreign-led forces. The victims included two sets of brothers. A 10th boy survived.
The NATO statement, which included an unusual personal apology by the commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said the boys had been misidentified as the attackers of a NATO base earlier in the day. News of the attack enraged Afghans and led to an anti-American demonstration on Wednesday in the village of Nanglam, where the boys were from. The only survivor, Hemad, 11, said his mother had told him to go out with other boys to collect firewood because “the weather is very cold now.”
“We were almost done collecting the wood when suddenly we saw the helicopters come,” said Hemad, who, like many Afghans, has only one name. “There were two of them. The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting. They fired a rocket which landed on a tree. The tree branches fell over me and shrapnel hit my right hand and my side.”
The tree, Hemad said, saved his life by covering him so that he could not be seen by the helicopters, which, he said, “shot the boys one after another.”
Anyone want to guess what Hemad’s new career choice is going to be?
“I don’t care about the apology,” Mohammed Bismil, the 20-year-old brother of two boys killed in the strike, said in a telephone interview. “The only option I have is to pick up a Kalashnikov, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] or a suicide vest to fight.”
Am I saying terrorism is justified? No, of course not. But dear goodness, America, how long is it going to take us to implement a realistic, humane foreign policy? Can we please begin to acknowledge the existence of blowback? (There’s a video at the bottom of this post, by the way. It’s not really showing up on the dashboard, so make sure you click the little icon to view it.)
Was there any other predictable outcome from this? I completely agree with Bonnie about blowback; it’s obvious that acts like this do nothing but undermine efforts to combat terrorism.
