Month: June 2008
Religion and the Legacy of Slavery
This is an older post that never got posted for some reason. ————————- You won’t hear the word “nigger” on broadcast TV anymore. It means you won’t hear “sand nigger” or “kike” or “gook” either. The lack of degrading names is the great victory of “liberal” media. The reality is that race, and constructions of racial power, constitute one of the most important subtexts in American public discourse. Racist language persists in most parts of mainstream media, but it is now heavily coded. Dave Neiwert does an admirable job of trying to decode that language on his blog Orcinus (read…
Eating Your Own
In the last month three articles have come out regarding the Muslim attack on Islamist ideologues. Chris Dickey came out in Newsweek with a few good examples in the Muslim majority world. My two (minor) gripes are that he didn’t mention the stuff happening here in the US, for example, that’s been going on much longer, and the gates of ijtihad never closed for the Shi’ah, so the debate is very different. Lawrence Wright has a wonderful piece in The New Yorker that highlights the nuances involved in the ideological dispute happening in AQ now. Most importantly what emerges is…
Torturing America
Via Juan Cole, it seems that we’ve been holding innocent people and torturing them for fun. CNN is reporting from a different source that torture is being carried out by us. I say “we” because we are all complicit in this act. As Americans we should be holding ourselves to a higher standard, and demand that our representatives hold themselves to an even higher standard than that. Everywhere we turn we see how deep the wrong-doing done in our name has spread. We deny the truth, just as our representatives do. Every time one of these people is flogged, our…
Rudy Ain’t No Saint
New Yorkers have known this for a while. Glad to see the DNC realizes other people need to realize that “9/11” Rudy was around as “’93” Rudy. New Yorkers generally dislike the man, and if he’s America’s mayor because of New York, you’d think we know best. (h/t Atrios) Election 2008, terror[ism][ists], 9/11
More Obama Rumors
More rumors about Sen. Obama here. Start the campaign! Election 2008, Obama, Obama
Reading: Architecture vs. Extremism
Can architecture battle extremism? Considering the beating the Serena Hotel took at the hands of the Taliban, and the Bamiyan Buddhas, I’m not so sure. Aga Khan Award for Architecture, architecture, extremism