“Meanwhile, in a move that was more covert until the Wall Street Journal uncovered it, the Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.”
—Arizona Ethnic Studies Classes Banned, Teachers With Accents Can No Longer Teach English (via dixiecupua)
April 2010
166 posts
“Now do you really think that a guy with a name like that has a chance of ever being elected?”
—Democrat David Krikorian, who is running for his party’s nomination and the right to take on Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) in Ohio’s 2nd congressional district, about his challenger, Indian-American businessman Surya Yalamanchili. (Think Progress) (via abbyjean)
“Stephanie Grace sent out an email suggesting that black people are genetically intellectually inferior to white people. That is not a new point; it is not a point that should have to be rationally debated anymore, any more than we would rationally debate whether or not the Earth is flat. If a PhD candidate in a science program suggested that the sun revolved around the Earth, I can just about guarantee that there would be no calls for rational debate on the issue — whoever she said it to would roll their eyes and label her a complete jackass. If she sent out an email screed about it, it would probably be forwarded for laughs and for shared outrage at how a person this ridiculous could have gotten into this academic program and institution. It would not be defended under the pretense of free speech or academic freedom”
—
Stephanie Grace, racist Harvard emailer. — Feministe
Please note the difference between free speech and rational discussions. Stephanie Grace has a right to say certain things about black people, but some of these things cannot be admitted in any rational debate about race because they’ve been disproven by facts or are simply illogical .
pass the cultural capital, please » Contexts Crawler →
contexts.org
Sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann argue that being a foodie isn’t just about consuming good food, it’s also about garnering cultural capital. Says Johnston:
A lot of elements of foodie culture are still relatively exclusive, and part of what foodie culture is about is dabbling in all sorts of different ethnic cuisines and food traditions. What makes that a kind of privilege is to have the kind of knowledge to go to all of these kinds of places [whether it’s a fancy restaurant or hole-in-the-wall eatery], so you’re not just familiar with one type of ethnic cuisine, you’re familiar with the whole range of them. And that can end up constituting a kind of cultural capital people use to display their sophistication.
“If you’re angry at Jobs, here’s a hint: anybody who looks for moral authority from technology CEOs is barking up the wrong tree. Ideologies that are life and death to hardcore open source partisans are just pragmatic decisions to someone like Jobs. The guy doesn’t use BSD because it’s the right thing to do, any more than he locks out interpreters to fuck with you, personally, and ruin your day. He sells closed systems, and if you don’t want one, you don’t buy one. He doesn’t want Flash, so he isn’t buying it.”
—Giles Bowkett: Steve Jobs Isn’t A Hypocrite
“I struggle to breathe myself, trying to explain how gender and sexuality are not the same thing, how someone can feel himself to be a boy, even if he was not born with the boy kit. How nothing is clear-cut, if you are honest about it. Girls play football, boys like to sew, everyone cries. How society has made the rules, issued the uniforms, the lists of approved activities, but where it counts, in your heart, in your head, the truth is always far blurrier.”
—Falling in Love with a Transgender Man - Oprah.com (via dixiecupua)
“
Yes, racism is everywhere. It is in law schools, and it is in law students before they ever get to law school. But it plays out in law schools in a very particular way. Law schools are environments that traffic heavily in discussions about logical consistency. In class, you read and discuss cases that all work off of each other in developing law. You start with one basic theory or set of laws, and then look at how the courts apply those theories to new sets of facts and circumstances; you look further down at how the courts use the outcomes of previous cases to draw conclusions in subsequent ones. Law school trains you to think in a particularly linear way — not “what is just here,” but “what is consistent here.” Often, consistency is the closest we can get to justice, and it offers a way to evaluate our laws in light of varying circumstances. It at least attempts objectivity. It’s a helpful way to learn how to think, and it certainly helps in the practice of law.
But it’s also a fairly narrow way of thinking, in a lot of ways. It eliminates, or at least lowers the value of, concepts like justice and social privilege and real-life inequality. In other words, while it is a helpful tool to use in order to be an effective attorney or advocate or debater or writer or thinker, it cannot be the only tool in your chest if you strive to be not only effective, but also conscientious.
For some law students — and for some lawyers — it seems to be the only tool in the chest.
” —Stephanie Grace, racist Harvard emailer. — Feministe
When you only have a hammer, all problems look like a nail. Classic rookie mistake: applying the same reasoning framework to different problems. It’s like hearing a republican advocating a free-market solution to every problem, or someone proposing a purely-technological solution to to a problem that clearly asks for a social one.
How Dare NFL Teams Question Myron Rolle's Commitment to Football? -- NFL FanHouse →
nfl.fanhouse.com
All too often in American sports today the ball uses the athlete. We see it in the one-and-done rule of the NBA that threatens the very fiber of college basketball. We see it in the number of football players who leave college after four years and test sub-literate on the Wonderlic. How is it possible that someone could stay eligible on a college campus for four years and not have a test score high enough to be employed as a janitor?
And they have a college diploma!
We see it in the NFL, where league owners want dumb players so they can make more money than any other professional sports league while failing to guarantee employment to their players for more than one year at a time. Dumb players equal a dumb union. And a dumb union equals more money.
The NFL doesn’t want thinkers, it wants big, dumb idiots who think nothing of the future. It wants to ensure the ball uses them, it’s more profitable that way.
“
I worry that many folks from the classical world judge all music based on the notes, rhythms, counterpoint, etc. – essentially what the score would look like … Indeed if one were to take most pop music, be it The Beatles or Lady Gaga, the notes and rhythms laid out onto a score would look pretty simple. But that is only a fraction of where the care and work come into play. The producers behind the scenes meticulously shaping the audio work with just as much care and skill as ‘art music’ composers. No one would have heard of The Beatles if it weren’t for Sir George Martin. Behind every pop artist today is a producer (or producers), many of whom’s artistry is astounding, even if they tend to be ignored by the classical music establishment.
Whereas composers write crescendos they automate faders; whereas composers build sonic textures with instruments they create them. The crucial decisions about mic-placement, compression levels, synth patches, reverb, mixing, stereo panning, and hundreds of other facets are *musical* decisions. And whereas a great pop album might sound like a collection of loosely-related songs to the untrained ear, it is truly a unbelievably complex symphony of audio sounds, usually with hundreds or thousands of hours put in by the producers and engineers.
” —Pop-o-matic Trouble - Matt Marks (via llimllib)
MOS DEF LYRICS - Mathematics →
azlyrics.com
Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks but increased police presence
And even if you get out of prison still livin
join the other five million under state supervision
This is business, no faces just lines and statistics
from your phone, your zip code, to S-S-I digits
The system break man child and women into figures
Two columns for who is, and who ain’t niggaz
Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings
but you push too hard, even numbers got limits
Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret: the million other straws underneath it – it’s all mathematics
“
Is there anything creepier than a big, beer-breathed celebrity athlete exposing himself in a night club and hitting on underage girls, all the while protected by an entourage of off-duty cops? Well, yes. It’s the big, corporate sponsor — Nike, in this case — that continues trying to sell product with the creep as their role model…
What, exactly does it take for Nike to dump a jock? Dog-fighting will do it. After Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick pleaded guilty to running a felony dog-fighting ring, Nike took action. “We consider any cruelty to animals inhumane and unacceptable,” the company said at the time.
But cruelty to women is O.K…
” —Nike’s Women Problem
(via brooklynmutt)
(via thepoliticalpartygirl)
“I have not moved out of the comedian’s box into the news box. The news box is moving toward me.”
—Jon Stewart
Mind Hacks: Cultures of foreplay →
mindhacks.com
in most cultures, sexual intercourse is preceded by some degree of foreplay—that is, sensory and sexual stimulation intended to induce arousal. This stimulation may be visual, tactile, or otherwise. When visual, it may be the sight of the partner or parts of his or her body or clothing, but these may vary across cultures (Bhugra, 2000). Kissing as part of sexual foreplay is common in the West but virtually unknown in other parts of the world (Ford & Beach, 1965). There are some cultures where penetration was the key element to intercourse, and neither foreplay nor afterplay was recorded. Ford and Beach pointed out that physical pain and biting are sometimes permitted as part of sexual foreplay and, therefore, such behaviors are likely to be readily incorporated into the sexual repertoire. Thus, individuals learn about methods of sexual arousal and sexual activity from their cultural habits and, in order to avoid being labelled and treated as deviant, they conform to prevalent and expected mores.
“With the spacing issue corrected on Gelman’s “Choose Haiti” shirts and the first consumer-worthy items starting to roll off the assembly line, we witness an event all too rare since the devastating quake: a group of Haitians smile.”
—An Entrepreneur Manufactures a Haitian Recovery - TIME (via dixiecupua)
Truck driver forced to show birth certificate claims racial-profiling | Phoenix News | Arizona News | azfamily.com | Featured Videos →
azfamily.com
A Valley man says he was pulled over Wednesday morning and questioned when he arrived at a weigh station for his commercial vehicle along Val Vista and the 202 freeway.
Abdon, who did not want to use his last name, says he provided several key pieces of information but what he provided apparently was not what was needed.
He tells 3TV, “I don’t think it’s correct, if I have to take my birth certificate with me all the time.”
3TV caught up with Abdon after he was released from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in central Phoenix. He and his wife, Jackie, are still upset about what happened to him.
Jackie tells 3TV, “It’s still something awful to be targeted. I can’t even imagine what he felt, people watching like he was some type of criminal.”
Abdon was told he did not have enough paperwork on him when he pulled into a weigh station to have his commercial truck checked. He provided his commercial driver’s license and a social security number but ended up handcuffed.
An agent called his wife and she had to leave work to drive home and grab other documents like his birth certificate.
Jackie explains, “I have his social security card as well and mine. He’s legit. It’s the first time it’s ever happened.”
Both were born in the United States and say they are now both infuriated that keeping important documents safely at home is no longer an option.
Jackie says, “It doesn’t feel like it’s a good way of life, to live with fear, even though we are okay, we are legal…still have to carry documents around.”
A representative at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) returned 3TV’s calls after researching the incident and she said this was standard operating procedure. The agents needed to verify Abdon was in the country legally and it is not uncommon to ask for someone’s birth certificate. She also said this has nothing to do with the proposed bill or racial profiling.
