December 2011
“Mr. Frank gave Mr. Knox his irritated squinty look. He eyeballed his press credentials. Then he burst into an Edith Piaf imitation, singing, “Je ne regrette rien,” and walked away.”
—You guys, Barney Frank is sort of the best. (His questionable proclivity for public/private partnerships notwithstanding.)
November 2011
Audit finds race discrimination in housing based on voice identification →
equity.lsnc.net
A telephone audit conducted earlier this year in Solano County, California of 40 rental housing properties in which nearly 5,500 people reside, found at least some negative differential treatment toward African-Americans in 65% of the cases and no case in which African-Americans were treated more favorably. The most prevalent type of differential treatment uncovered (found in nearly 50 percent of the cases) was African-American testers receiving inferior, less flexible terms and narrower options, in terms of amount of rent, security deposit, minimum income requirements and move-in specials. The audit also found that a significant number of the African-American testers (as opposed to white testers) received less information about the availability of units.
Fair Housing of Marin with the help of the Solano County office of Legal Services of Northern California, conducted the audit following similar audits with similar results in neighboring jurisdictions, including Sonoma County and the city of Richmond. Undergirding the audit methodology and approach are studies by Stanford University linguistics professor John Baugh which found the existence of race and ethnicity discrimination based solely on speech patterns. As the audit states, Baugh’s March 1999 article (co-authored) Perceptual and Phonic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification showed that people are able to identify correctly the race of a speaker 80 percent of the time by the mere utterance of the word “hello”.
“His previous books “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” and “Between Facts and Norms” were of course somewhat different than the merry post-modern shadowboxing of French philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. What’s more, another of Habermas’ publications, “Theory of Communicative Action,” certainly has its pitfalls when it comes to his theory of “coercion-free discourse” which, even before the invention of Facebook and Twitter, were fairly bold, if not perhaps naïve. Habermas was never a knife thrower like the Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek, and he was no juggler like the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.”
—
It’s worth noting that Der Spiegel has a circulation in Germany of 1.1 million, which is equivalent to a magazine like Time or Newsweek selling more than 4 million copies a week. And yet it still happily publishes long profiles of Jurgen Habermas, dropping names like Baudrillard and Sloterdijk like you’re meant to know who they are. (Which, you are.)
Also, occasionally, the ladyfolk.
“But the Occupy protesters sure have a greater chance of scoring results, steering policies and pestering politicos, if they zero in on cities. And local politics is an area that the Left has long conceded to the organized Right. Policing policy, a thorny issue if there ever was one, might not be such a terrible place to start.”
—
“All Occupation Is Local: Policing Policy and the Protests”
And I’m out.
Heart of Chambers
Beach House
beach house - heart of chambers
“If Saul Bellow is Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth is Tyler Perry.”
—Nailed it.
Nuclear War (Version 1)
Yo La Tengo
Talking about. (Yeah.) Nuclear war. (Yeah.)
“I think I can only claim this sense-making, pulling you along with me in hope, because I’ve been pulled along all my life. When I was a kid it was sort of a running gag in our house that whatever we asked Why? about, our mom could take us back to Because God is God and shut us up. I suspect she was really saying Wait. Raising kids Christian is a good way to keep them on their intellectual toes, if you do it right. Your kids will never expect all the answers. They will seek recklessly. (Raising kids scientists probably has a similar effect, again, if done right). I grew up seeing our lives as one long story. I sat on the top of the stairs and thought about how we would look when we saw our real faces at the Resurrection. And I dared myself to actually stay put, there on the carpet, until the end of the world.”
—My Mom, too.
“One idea that the former Georgia congressman proposed that Freddie Mac didn’t pursue was initiating a program with the Boy Scouts of America to teach youngsters the importance of saving money and maintaining good credit so they would qualify to buy a home later in life.”
—Unclear why this made me laugh.
“This wound should be left open and gaping and raw in the bright sunlight where everybody can see it, for years and years and years, until the raped children themselves decide that justice has been done.”
—
So. Jerry Sandusky’s defense attorney did this. And now there are ten additional victims coming forward.
It is time to carefully read Charles Pierce.
The New Worst Move In Journalism: The Phoney Gulp →
mentholmountains.blogspot.com
I started to notice this phoney-casual maneuver a couple years ago.
Now I see it everywhere:
“Germany wants other countries to be more, well, German.”
“All of which makes the very notion of the Great American Novel sound,
well, un-American.”
“The Indianapolis Colts have looked lost. The Jacksonville Jaguars have looked like, well, the Jaguars.”
“I knew the White House wanted a compromise on the debt ceiling. I just didn’t expect them to do quite so much, well, compromising.”
“Robbe-Grillet’s interest in sexual violence will be alien to someone averse to sadism, and Lin’s interest in twee midnight adventures is going to seem ridiculous to someone without any interest in, well, twee midnight adventures.”
I wonder if this affectation is related to trends discussed in this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/another-thing-to-sort-of-pin-on-david-foster-wallace.html?pagewanted=all
Well?
David Berman, blogger. You’re the only ten I see. (via)
“Christian challenges Muslim for congressional seat.”
—Heyo.
“I still don’t understand why, if this is all as obvious as it seems to me, equities aren’t down 20% now, rather than 2% or 3%.”
—
“Not with a bang but with a bunga-bunga.”
(via nickbaumann)
