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Thursday, May 30, 2002 |
See, we believe in limited government
The Right Wing tells us they believe in limited government. Limited, that is, when it comes to helping the poor or enforcing environmental or consumer safety laws. But when it comes to poking into what we read, or where or whether we go to church, what we say in mail, what sex toys we use, and a lot more, then it's a different story. All in the name of keeping us "safer."
They say we're fighting a "war." But this is an undeclared war. It's a war that's so vague that we won't ever know if we've "won" or "lost." I'm reminded of the perennial war that was waged in 1984. It's as much a way to keep us quiet as it is anything else. This "war" won't ever end. Bush keeps talking about "freedom" but what freedoms are we protecting when we have a secret police that can be "proactive" about crimes we might commit?
Support the ACLU. And the EFF. Write letters to your congressmen, tell your friends. And, of course, fire up your pirate radio station.
9:14:09 PM Permalink
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The Problem of the Twentieth Century
Gosh, one would think that it probably doesn't need to be said at this late date, but of course it does: there are no real differences between what we call "races," and rapid developments in understanding genetics make this point forcefully. The Atlantic Montly has a review of Steve Olson's "Mapping Human History, along with an interview with the author. They link to an article from March 2000 which makes some of the same points in the book, "The Genetic Archeology of Race." Both this review and the article are well worth reading:
...[D]ifferences between [racial] groups are profoundly superficial, the result of just a few genes having been changed over time by different environments or cultural preferences. (For example, northern Europeans developed light hair and skin so that they could better soak in the weak sunlight in their part of the world.) According to the history inscribed in our DNA, there has been both too little time and too much mixing among peoples for groups to have diversified in deeper, more meaningful ways. As Olson writes, "The genetic variants affecting skin color and facial features probably involve a few hundred of the billions of nucleotides in a person's DNA—an insignificant amount. Yet societies have built elaborate systems of privelege and control around these minuscule genetic differences."
Most of us, probably, in the gut, have a hard time accepting this:
when I began writing this book, I, like many other people, tended to view human groups as fairly distinct and as the product of historically separate trajectories. I realized in the course of doing research for the book that that is an illusion. Humans as individuals and as the members of groups are much more closely related to each other than you would think. I now view the biological distinctions among groups as essentially meaningless. Culturally, of course, I'm affiliated with some groups much more closely than with others. But I see myself as no more closely related biologically to one human group than to any other. The distinctions we make are in our heads, not in our genes.
It's also really wonderful that The Atlantic is putting much of its archives online. Linked from this story is a 1901 piece by W.E.B. DuBois, "The Freedmen's Bureau," in which he states that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Judging from its infancy, the same may be true of the twenty-first.
The Atlantic Archive is really fun to root around in, though slow. The March, 2000 article, however, shows one problem with the web: linkrot. In a sidebar, there's a link to a site "offering a description, charts, and timetables documenting the evoution of modern humans." But going to that location -- http://daphne.palomar.edu/homo2/default.htm -- brings up a 404 Not Found error.
7:50:09 PM Permalink
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Look Out Corporate America!
The Onion: Look Out, Corporate America, Here Comes my Pirate Radio Station.
Think "weblog" when you see "radio station" in this piece.
7:20:42 PM Permalink
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Lying Republicans?
Na, couldn't be. Those moral Republicans would never lie. Only the likes of Bill Clinton ever lie!
This is the story: because the 'pubs are moral people (or say they're moral people) then whatever they do must be moral and good and true. In reality, it's the other way around: people are honest and moral because they behave morally, not, as we're told, actions are moral because they're committed by moral people.
7:13:02 PM Permalink
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Art Science Research Lab
There was a nice piece on All Things Considered today about Art Science Research Laboratory, founded by Stephen J. Gould and his wife, Rhonda Roland Shearer. (The audio, they say, will be posted after 10 pm tonight, so I'll add a direct link to the story then.) I'm glad I caught the story; I hadn't known about this site, and it sounds interesting to me. They were talking about Gould's interest in Marcel DuChamp and how his art was influenced by the science of the day. Of particular note, I think, was a bit about some "found object" art he created; the interesting thing was, this wasn't "found" art at all, but faux found art.
The Art Science Research Lab site is very slow now; hope that's because of all the hits they're getting because of the ATC piece. I need to remember to go back to it in a couple days.
Later: The All Things Considered archive for May 30 is at http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm?PrgDate=05/30/2002&;PrgID=2. The Gould/Duchamp RealAudio segment is at http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/20020530.atc.17.ram.
6:19:09 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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