It’s National Bacon Day
And you thought we get Monday off to celebrate the labor movement!
Posted in Culture, New | 8 Comments »
‘Culture’ Articles
Hoover v Roosevelt (v Obama & Others)
As a follow up to Gregg’s last post (with out regard to you know who.)
From Russ Robert’s EconTalk podcast:
David Kennedy of Stanford University and the author of Freedom from Fear talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the Great Depression and its political and economic relevance. Kennedy talks about the economic policies of Hoover and Roosevelt, and how the historical narrative was shaped and evolved over the decades. The conversation concludes with Kennedy’s thoughts on the nature and value of history.
Kennedy on the Great Depression
Kennedy would be better if he studied a bit more economics. But I think it’s a fair assessment even with his obvious approval of big government paternalism.
Crack a beer or two and give it a listen.
Posted in Culture, New | 4 Comments »
‘Red Corner’
Talk about a forgotten slice of Montana history: A new history monograph, Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana, details the history of communism in Sheridan County (Plentywood).
This was real, hard-core, hammer-and-sickle communism; the county elected a communist state senator (also the editor of The Producers News) and a sheriff. They extorted their opponents, and firebombed a rival newspaper.
The book, which I just got the other day, leads with a story of a 1930s funeral, where a 14-year-old girl was memorialized at the Farmer-Labor Temple, her casket draped with the red flag, with mourners singing the International. Bizarre.
Personally, I’m a bit surprised one doesn’t hear about this chapter of Montana history more often.
Posted in Culture, Literature, New | 38 Comments »
Just Thought You Should Know
American taxpayers will pay the imam behind plans for a mosque near the Manhattan site of the Sept. 11 attacks $3,000 in fees for a three-nation outreach trip to the Middle East that will cost roughly $16,000, the State Department said Wednesday.
The department said Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf will get a daily $200 honorarium for the 15-day tour to Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which is intended to promote religious tolerance.
Posted in New, Religion | 4 Comments »
A Gay Bar…for Muslim Men…At Ground Zero?
I actually like the idea:
In the brouhaha over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” there’s been a lot of inconsistency among all sides. Many conservatives, including former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have been advocating against property-rights (something they’ve gotten rightfully upset about regarding the Supreme Court’s atrocious ruling in Kelo vs. New London). Liberals such as New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg have finally found a religious institution they can get behind–one utterly unaffiliated with traditional Christianity or Judaism.
One person who has formulated the exactly correct approach has been Fox News late-night host Greg Gutfeld who has brilliantly illustrated the absurdity of the whole affair by trying to raise money to build a bar catering to gay Islamic men right by the proposed site of the controversial mosque.
Posted in National Politics, New, Religion | 39 Comments »
WMD
Well, I see the leftists in the White House have finally brought out their big guns:
In an interview earlier today with the South African Broadcasting Corporation to air in a few hours, President Obama disparaged al Qaeda and affiliated groups’ willingness to kill Africans in a manner that White House aides say was an argument that the terrorist groups are racist.
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“In short,” the official said, “al Qaeda is a racist organization that treats black Africans like cannon fodder and does not value human life.”
Posted in Culture, New | 29 Comments »
Ground Zero
Posted in Culture, New, Religion | 9 Comments »
Big Time!
Hey! Montana made the national news:
The Helena Public School system is considering a comprehensive plan for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. It includes teaching first graders that people can be attracted to the same gender. In second grade students are instructed to avoid gay slurs and by the time students turn 10 years old they are taught about various types of intercourse.
According to the draft proposal obtained by FOX News Radio, fifth graders should “understand that sexual intercourse includes but is not limited to vaginal, oral, or anal penetration.”
Unfortunately, no one in Helena noticed. They were all..ahem…otherwise disposed…
Posted in Education, New | 28 Comments »
For you History nerds…
What happens when hundreds of thousands of people flush into a massive open prairie in the course of a decade, transforming a place the size of Ireland into a farmland carved up into parcels about 10 city blocks wide and long? One would think social discord and economic domination by a clique—and that, for a long time, has been the view of “progressive” historians on the matter.
In his enterprising new scholarly work, Jon Lauck invites us to question the stereotype of the lawless, corrupt, hang ’em high “Wild West,” and instead paints a picture of a healthy, vibrant, quintessentially Jeffersonian Prairie Republic…
I’m finished with my book review for the next National Review of the scholarly work Prairie Republic: Political Culture in Dakota Territory, 1879-1889; the above is the lede. I’ll be sure to let ECW’ers know when the full review is available. If you’re into Western history, read this book — though it does assume a lot about people’s knowledge of figures like Frederick Jackson Turner.
It was particularly funny writing a book review which concerned Dakotans meeting in constitutional and party conventions, even while I myself was at a political convention.
, http://electriccityweblog.com/?p=9987
Posted in Culture, New | 8 Comments »
The Worm Turns…
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Respect My Authoritah | ||||
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Posted in Humor, New | 2 Comments »
Taking Heat
Some blogger named Montana Cowgirl, whose portfolio includes rehashes of Democratic office-holders’ press releases and a broad issuance of smears, has decided that National Review published something she deems racist in the mid-1990s, when I was 10, and that, because I worked there a decade hence, I, too, am a racist.
Luckily — and this is something I was unaware of — I have a raft of liberal admirers who have come to my defense. Thanks guys! I’m touched. It’s pretty nasty to be accused of writing racist/misogynist things, but in this case I regard it as nearly comical. My CV on the matter is rock solid–you don’t get to be a Gates Scholar or appear in peer-reviewed journals on Africa if you’re a big racist, even a “racist” by association.
But for the purposes of reinforcing what I was saying below about Claude Levi-Strauss (never let a crisis of anthropological understanding go to waste), let me replicate for you what Montana Cowgirl thinks is the smoking gun–the writing which she believes proves me, once and for all, to be a racist. It dates to Barack Obama’s election, which I was reporting on from Kenya and was published on NRO’s The Corner, the racist blog which is the 11th-ranked site on the Technorati Authority scale, which is just to say there’s a lot of racists out there:
It’s Obama Day in Kenya [Travis Kavulla]
Nairobi, Kenya – It must be the first time one country has celebrated the election of another country’s president with a day off. But that is just what has happened here in Kenya, where President Mwai Kibaki, with all the caprice of an African leader, has declared today a public holiday in honor of Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan. Work is at a standstill, banks are closed, as are all government offices and most shops. (Ironically, Kibaki’s 2007 campaign slogan was ‘kazi iendelee’ – let the work continue.) Bars, however, are open and people are still hawking Obama paraphernalia and stars-and-stripes apparel. And then there are the glue-sniffing street children, who continue to beg. Sad that the first concrete effect of an Obama presidency on Kenya would be to further depress the productivity of a country that could really use a booster shot in that department.
So let’s review. In one corner, we have Montana Cowgirl who, despite never being to Africa and knowing approximately nothing about the continent, observes that this post is “riddled with racist undertones.” Oh, I’m sorry. Is it impolitic to point out the glue-sniffing children? Is it racist to say a tribalist, opportunistic individual like Kenya’s Mwai Kibaki is acting “with all the caprice of an African leader,” who are typically tribalistic, opportunistic, dictate-from-above type of guys?
Cowgirl also writes about AIDS and condoms. She says my criticism of the myopic policy of condom promotion in Africa makes me a misogynist, a woman-hater. Huh. In my book, there is a growing body of evidence–not just from conservatives, but from people like the New York Times-contributing Helen Epstein–that the promotion of condoms is a policy which is premised on how the disease is spread through the social network of New York, not Nairobi. I think that we miss a lot of Africa’s cultural texture, which might be used in the battle against AIDS and which traditionally militates against condoms and prophylaxis. Cowgirl is out to lunch on all of this scholarship and, for her, racism is about discussing cultural difference of others in a way which is unpleasant for her to hear, no matter the objective truth of what you are describing. It’s the old “shoot the messenger” thing. And, unfortunately, I know many African journalists who are honest about what they see, but not too honest–unless you want to set off the reaction of clueless do-gooders like our Cowgirl.
Here we come back to my point about Levi-Strauss: We have stopped taking cultural difference seriously, whether our subject be Africans or Islamists or Native Americans, and “multiculturalists” and “liberals” and “progressives”–which is purportedly what Montana Cowgirl is–ironically tend to look at the world’s problems through the lens of Western culture. Such is the policy of condom promotion, which worked wonders on the American AIDS epidemic, even while it has routinely failed in Africa, where sexual culture and therefore the disease’s epidemiology is much different. You can read my 8,000-word social history of AIDS in Africa here if you want to get a fuller view on the topic.
If I understand Cowgirl correctly, my mere suggestion that it might not be such a good thing for our AIDS policy in Africa to encourage condoms as an article of faith, means I hate women and want them to suffer. You tell me: who is the inhumane, close-minded, racist one here? Someone who attempts to understand the texture of African society and comes up with solutions premised on local culture? Or someone who rushes in with a Western dogma, ready to castigate anyone who does not fully endorse it?
Posted in Culture, New | 48 Comments »
Natural Law & a conservative multiculturalism
My retrospective of Claude Levi-Strauss’s work and life is finally publicly available on The New Atlantis’s website.
The piece discusses the anthropologist’s attempt to document the differences which separate cultures, and to see what unites them underneath it all. This noble effort is in juxtaposition to “a vanilla ‘multiculturalism’, which acknowledges and is premised upon enduring and important cultural difference, but which, in spite of this, rarely advocates for a serious interrogation of the differences that divide cultures.”
An excerpt:
This new multiculturalism has given us little real insight into the human condition; rather, it has become a strategy to achieve harmony in the school or workplace, or a political criticism of a caricature of “the West.” In practice, multiculturalist sensitivity tends to render other cultures as mere foils of Western civilization. Ideologies and cultures with lives of their own are thus transformed into cheap proxies, tools for Westerners to criticize themselves. Such is the fate of indigenous Americans in our pop culture, who through Pocahontas, Captain Planet, and Avatar become spokesmen for fashionable Western notions about ecology. More perilously, it is how many Americans conceive of Muslim fanatics, treating their behavior as a mere reaction to U.S. foreign policy or Western culture without attempting to understand it within the comprehensive and alien theological world in which the genuine Islamist operates. The multiculturalist tendency to play down those aspects of another society which a Westerner would find unbecoming is an indication that, far from respecting other cultures, we distort them to fit our own models of reasoning and theology. This denial of the Islamist’s or the Native American’s agency, integral to multiculturalism’s myopic critique of the West, ironically contributes to the very syndrome the ideology purports to abhor: cultural imperialism.
Read the whole piece here.
Posted in Culture, New | 18 Comments »
Summer Reading
Well, I’ve got a campaign to gear up for.
But I’ve also got a book to read, which I’ve been asked to write about for National Review.
I’ve not yet started, but it’s on the seminal decade of territorial history in the Dakotas before statehood was granted. The book, Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889, is written by one of Sen John Thune’s senior advisers, and it looks to be an interesting spin on a history which too often has been told through the uncomplicated dynamic of “oppressor versus the oppressed” (probably the best example of this, if only because it’s close to home, is the Great Falls Leader journalist Joseph Kinsey Howard’s book, Montana: High, Wide, & Handsome). Anyways, I look forward to reading it, and if you want to join along, you can purchase the book on Amazon here.
Posted in Culture, New | No Comments »
I knew it was bad…
…but I had no idea it was this bad. I mean, come on, didn’t we pass the levy?
Posted in Humor, New | 1 Comment »
Ticking them Off
“If success breeds contempt, then bloggers are finally making it big.”
After outlining a number of attacks on bloggers from both sides of the aisle, the author writes: “Still, some actually see these attacks as a positive sign. ‘Criticisms of a blogger’s credibility further justify their entrenchment in our country’s conversation, because once you become a scapegoat in the news cycle it means influential people are paying attention,’ Maegan Carberry told me. ‘If something isn’t credible or relevant, high-profile figures would not acknowledge it at all.’”
As someone who has been put down as just one of a bunch of bloggers (I can’t find the reference), I respond to public officials’ criticism of the blogosphere as follows: Who cares?
Posted in Culture, Media, New | 4 Comments »
A Public Servant
None of you should miss this wonderful poem by John Snider (snider@msun.edu), an English Professor at MSU-Northern. He’s not ‘one of the gang,’ according to him. An excerpt:
You know the mayor lies and the alderman lies and the senator lies and the college president lies and the priest and minister lie.
You know the policeman is not your friend, and lies as well.
And late at night you see them all gathered, and not in your dreams but for real, behind the courthouse sodomizing a child and then setting her aflame, all so they can have enough light to read the evening papers.
Wow, that’s heady stuff. Is it happening in your town too? I had no idea Havre was such a rough place!
(H/T: Havre Daily Corrector)
You know the mayor lies and the alderman lies and the senator lies and the college president lies and the priest and minister lie.
You know the policeman is not your friend, and lies as well.
And late at night you see them all gathered, and not in your dreams but for real, behind the courthouse sodomizing a child and then setting her aflame, all so they can have enough light to read the evening papers.
Posted in Education, New | 10 Comments »
Now For Something Completely Different
These are for all of you that long for a simpler time when marginal tax rates were high and unions controlled the labor markets.
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Posted in Culture, New | 8 Comments »
Money for Nothing
Posted in Humor, New, Pastiche | 3 Comments »