8 Comments

1. skol:

   Dunno how much yer around the ‘net surface-of-things, but those replies at dKos are kinda the standard of most forums, blogs, etc., out there (y’know, linking pics of kitties). Which is cool, because I think you’ll more of the more curious types there. It’s weird… I think the comments section of most blogs is a soapbox mainly for trolls. The reactionary bits just kick in and you end up with a bunch of quasi-insults (which leads to pics of cats).
   I’m just saying that in general you could find more people looking for some intellectual “hook” at DKos than you might at HuffPo.
   “Stay on the reservation, stay on the reservation, stay on the reservation, leave.” Repeat. I say there’s still some optimism of the intellect if it isn’t yet filled with crap. Lots of fish swimming, and not all in the same school. How many stupid aphorisms was that? I could go on…;)

   14 August 2007, 8:13 am

2. G.:

   After reading many of the responses to your Daily KOS post, I’ve relapsed into questioning whether we’re really worth saving.

   14 August 2007, 2:19 pm

3. BikeSummer!:

   Stan, are aware of this link between KOS and the CIA?

   http://cryptogon.com/?p=1148

   14 August 2007, 6:45 pm

4. DeAnander:

   I wonder if it isn’t more like “stay off the rez.”

   in the sense that going to stand in/on the rez with the people of colour who are being maligned, bombed, conquered, insulted etc. is race treachery — and the rage that gets dumped on the race traitor is a disciplinary action, intended to discourage anyone else from stepping out of the white/male intellectual bell jar and “going native.”

   people generally respond with rage to an idea or person who (they think) threatens to take something away from them — men rage and froth at feminists who critique masculine sexual prerogatives, whitemen (and some women too) rage and froth at anyone who critiques white privilege, “patriots” rage and froth at anyone who critiques USian exceptionalism and dominion… the “deprivation” that is threatened could be material (damn red/greenies want me to give up my SUV? jail ‘em all!) or it could be a threat to the psychic wage, the sense of personal superiority and entitlement that compensates us for the soul-deadening quality of a life of obedience to capricious authority.

   I suspect that what Kossacks were frothing about was the threat to their white privilege and entitlement, but also to their sense of themselves as Good People and Nice Liberals — certainly not racists or imperialists, how very yesterday — why, we admire Black sports and reggae stars, spend big bux on “ethnic” cuisine, and approve of interracial porn! and our tacit support for the invasions and wars that are necessary to keep our decadent way of life staggering along has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with placing a lower value on the lives, cultures, and wellbeing of brown people. nor has our denigration [ahem] of said people anything to do with the need to “lesserise” and “otherise” them so that we can feel good about stealing their oil. those are Rethug values and we are on the other team, so how dare you expose the similarity of our underlying agenda?

   people dedicated to hermetic taxonomies (dualities mostly) like masculine/feminine, gay/straight, Rethug/Demoblican, get very threatened when anyone points out that those borders are porous. essentially their psychic wage or sense of Us-ness is coming primarily from being Not-Them. I can almost imagine Kossacks waking up and reciting “I thank thee O Lord that I was not born a Republican.”

   but I’m rambling…

   14 August 2007, 8:35 pm

5. G.:

   So long as you stay put on the reservation, your cries remain unheard, as very few seem to realize these people exist.

   14 August 2007, 10:31 pm

6. Audrey:

   Stan, in your recent Fog of Fame article, you compared the military tendency to measure success with metrics to the academic tendency to do the same. We use standardized tests to measure things which are not really so quantifiable, and pat ourselves on the back when we meet those target numbers, and wring our hands and fire people when we don’t.

   Myself, I am quite good with statistics. I know this because I am looking at the grades that were just posted up two days ago from my graduate-level statistics class, where I earned a 97%. On paper, I am some kind of statistical genius. There’s no way to reflect in that grade the moments when my eyes were welling up with tears, and my engineer-husband was sitting next to me, trying to explain it in regular words – “No, it’s okay, look, I am covering the formulas with my fingers.” There’s no way to reflect in it the tutorial I wrote in an effort to drag my struggling classmates along, written with passages like this: “We are going to do a ‘pooled estimate of standard error of the difference between two means’ and then take another break. No, I do not have a clue what the pooled estimate actually is, other than we’re lumping things together and estimating stuff – or why we’re using it, but that’s not going to stop me, and it shouldn’t stop you.”

   At the same time that was happening, I was reading about researchers watching first-graders do math. As one of the little ones explained to a researcher: “I don’t know what it means, but I did it.” I feel some solidarity with that 6 year old. We have both learned how to succeed in the system, which perhaps is more important than understanding in our gut what we are doing.

   I also feel some solidarity with the folks on kos. It’s a whole lot of work for voters to back up and say wait, maybe we need to stop and regroup and reassess what our values really are. It’s more satisfying to say “Look! We won! We elected x many democrats to congress, we control x many branches of government now!” Sometimes I have the uncomfortable sense that electing more democrats has itself become the end goal, in the same way that my 97% became my end goal. If pulling out of Iraq is not an electable position for a democrat to take; it’s a trolling position for you to take. It doesn’t phase them that perhaps slaughtering Iraqis isn’t okay – even if it does mean we elect more democrats into office. You know, we continue to kill them for another 6 months, and then look how strong our political position will be. If we can continue the occupation for another year, then for sure we can get a democrat in the White House.

   That’s not just kos; I’ve seen it on other political blogs and forums as well. I’ve seen people say that if Cindy Sheehan runs as a democrat, they’ll openly support her, but as long as she runs as anything else, they’d have to oppose her – and that’s independent of what her positions are. The goal isn’t withdrawing from Iraq; it’s electing more democrats.

   I had an interesting discussion with one of my classmates, a fellow schoolteacher, about devotion to quantifiable goals versus meaningful substance. She writes that all of her students need to stand and say the pledge. I pointed out that there is an 80 year old supreme court ruling, stating that one cannot force students in a public school to stand for or recite the pledge because it violates their first amendment rights. She responds: “That is so sad to me that we have abused our first amendment rights to the point of allowing children to dictate what they will and will not stand up for. It is not an option in my class period. I really don’t worry about all the legal mumbo jumbo because that is what we do in my class.” The “legal mumbo jumbo” she refers to is the constitution and the Supreme Court, but all that is an annoyance to her; what matters is that 100% of the children pledge their allegiance to a symbol of those things.

   If you could pledge allegiance to the democrats, Stan, and ignore all that mumbo jumbo about the way they are voting and the wars they are funding, I think the folks on kos would be a whole lot happier with you.

   15 August 2007, 2:01 pm

7. DeAnander:

   I think what the teacher is really pledging allegiance to is her personal authority in the classroom: no law should permit the children to defy her. Civil rights laws are always troublesome to authority, because the very definition of authority is “you must knuckle under and obey me, you are not allowed to disobey or complain or fail to conform.”

   15 August 2007, 4:38 pm

8. Craig:

   Audrey:

   I don’t feel solidarity with Kossacks or with any of the regulars on a liberal blog. If you want to get the “reality-based community” to insult you and subject you to ad hominem attacks, just make an anti-capitalist or anti-Democratic statement, and then you’ll find out you’re a troll who doesn’t understand your own self-interest, and who owes the Democratic Party everything. Even if you pledge allegiance to the Democrats, you will get nothing, except the galling reaction of snarky apparatchiks acting like you’re a chimp who just learned a bit of sign language. Then the board will explain to you how the Democrats don’t have the power to end the war, how they can’t end the war even if they do, and how extending the war and letting thousands of people die is smart politics.

   Also, you’re spot-on about the abuse of numbers. When I taught calculus, I taught students with a wide variety of abilities, but all of them had 700+ scores on the math section of the SAT’s. Standardized tests, especially multiple choice tests without a universally known curriculum, are useless, and lead to armies of students who think that unthinking processes like differentiation represent actual understanding.

   I can’t speak for the military, but the Bush administration’s push for a greater emphasis on testing is probably a product of an MBA culture. Rumsfeld, the former CEO, is also a product of this culture, and it helps explain his Revolution in Military Affairs. This culture says that you read a company’s balance sheet, crunch some numbers, and then set a price and projection for growth. It ignores the kinds of systemic flaws and paradigm shifts that lead to financial upheavals such as the current liquidity crisis, which have led some “quantitative” hedge funds to blow up. It’s really easy to measure and quantify everything in a static system, whether that system is financial or military.

   15 August 2007, 6:31 pm

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