Imam Rauf, who is in charge of the proposed Lower Manhattan Islamic Cultural Center, was on CNN last night discussing the controversy. (You can watch a heavily edited version of the interview here, or click here for part 1 of the full version on YouTube–although being copyrighted material I don’t know if it will stay up.) It’s interesting viewing. Here’s what jumped out at me:
Continue reading »
Sep 092010
Aug 312010
Make sure to read this excellent article by Stanley Fish, Law Professor and New York Times opinion contributor. This gist of his observation is this:
“If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the individual. But if the bad act is committed by someone whose profile, interests and agendas are uncomfortably close to your own, detach the malefactor from everything that is going on or is in the air (he came from nowhere) and characterize him as a one-off, non-generalizable, sui generis phenomenon.”
The Anti-Defamation League (the ADL; an organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism) has participated and encouraged closed-minded and offensive behavior. They ought to know better, and I think they (and many other people in this instance) owe an apology to every person of faith.
Alright, now that I have your attention I should take a few steps back and explain what I’m talking about.
Continue reading »
Jan 132010
So I am oddly fascinated by this week’s media frenzy over Harry Reid’s use of the word “negro”.
The Washington Post summarized the contents of the book “Game Change” as follows:
The authors describe Reid assessing Obama’s strengths as a candidate. Reid, they write, “believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ as he said privately. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.”
I thought this was fascinating especially since the Census bureau announced it is including “negro” (as in “black or African-American or …” ) on the 2010 census forms because 50 thousand, usually older, people hand wrote it on the 2000 census. But this too has caused outrage. (This article has a nice summary and claims that the bureau is reevaluating its decision. Census to Drop ‘Negro’ After Backlash. Google has lots of other similar articles.)
Also, Washington Post has two nice opinion pieces about Reid’s comments:
Harry Reid’s comments were crudely put, yet true
Anyways. I was surprised that the use of the word “negro” had gotten Reid into so much trouble. Painfully old fashioned, sure, but so is he and more to the point so are the people who self-identified as negro on the 2000 census. In fact, in my parents’ lifetimes negro was the polite term that you would see in respectable publications. I’d have thought it was the content of his comment that would be more likely to offend.
Jul 292009
What is the number one watched program on cable news? If you guessed The O’Reily Factor, as I’m sure most of you did, you’d be correct. Bill is averaging these days close to three million viewers on any given weekday. In case you were curious, that’s about twice as many people as The Daily Show, while the major networks evening news shows can expect somewhere between 4.5 million and 8 million.
OK, so here’s a tougher one: Who is #2? I’ll give you a hint: he’s also on Fox News.
Continue reading »
Recent Comments