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Top Stories Sunday 01 Dec

Pandagon on conservative pundit’s treating of blacks as a monolithic group:

And, by the way, let me explain something about being black – it’s one thing to assume a black monolith, it’s frequent political shorthand. The problem is when persons so far removed from said experience (such as the conservative white man David Horowitz) presume to lecture us as a class that we must do something in order to redeem ourselves or some such nonsense. What if I just sat down and told all the Jews how they could stop making people mad at them, or told the Irish how they could solve all their problems? Give me a large enough podium, and Horowitz’s security force might even make a show of throwing me out, or better yet, the man himself might write some coffee-stained missive about how much of a threat I am to my country.

Max Speak on Islam, stereotyping and multiculturism:

When you see the word “multi-culturalism” uttered in a negative context, it usually means the speaker is referring simply to democratic tolerance. It’s hard to criticize anti-racism or tolerance, so you recast them as an uncritical acceptance of barbaric practices by others (typically equated with ‘culture,’ and thus constructed as a group stereotype, as above). Racists defend themselves by accusing their critics of racism. Once again, I’d like to emphasize that I believe this kind of argument takes place in a confined space in the brains of many warbloggers. I do not think it spills over into personal relatioins, business affairs, or other minorities. I think it stems from the manner in which the emotional reaction to 9-11 is made into a political imperative, an imperative which creates a political need for a bull story about “Islamic culture.”

Top Stories Monday 25 Nov

Ruminate This still wants you to undertake
action about the whole Eli Lilly/Thimerosal mess:

Why not pick up the phone and dial up that toll-free congressional switchboard at 1-800-839-5276, and tell your representatives precisely what you think about politicians…Dems and Reps, who vote for screwing over the families of autism, while crushing American privacy, civil liberties and worker protection…all so they can pander to the special interests, and by extension, save their political skin? We have the power to make a difference. Call them.

Body and Soul publishes a long
thoughful and impressive e-mail exchange with a reader about tolerance, cultural sensitivity, Islam and the left:

Over the past week or so I’ve had an interesting e-mail conversation with a reader about how politics, religion, women’s rights, business, cultural values (and sensitivity) and a lot of other things all weave together. At some point I realized that a lot of the issues we were talking about were things I hadn’t seen much conversation about between people with basically liberal values. Mostly the “conversation” (if you want to call it that) has consisted of liberals defending themselves against attacks by conservatives — attacks that have been outrageous and irrelevant. That the right wing use of the issues has been stupid and opportunistic, however, doesn’t mean there aren’t issues here to discuss. Are liberals too culturally sensitive, too “politically correct”? Is there a conflict between standing up for women’s rights and refusing to demonize people who don’t value those rights? How do you separate encouraging democracy from creating a corporate-friendly (and exploitative) environment? Those are just a few of the questions that arose.

A Dutch treat

The Rittenhouse Review thinks it’s easy to learn Dutch:

?SPREEKT JE NEDERLANDS??: You know, a person who can read both English and German is apt to find learning Dutch to be sort of a breeze. And then from there it?s a quick jaunt over to Afrikaans, which, as a wise man once said, is really just Dutch dumbed-down so the Boers would be able to write complete sentences.

Sadly though, Jim got it wrong. One of the little traps every forreigner falls for is the “t-question”: when to add a “t” to the end of a present tense verb. First person singular (I/ik), you don’t, second (you/je) and third person (he-she/hij-zij) singular, you do. Except, if you ask a question in the
second person singular, like Jim does above, you don’t. Hence, it should be Spreek je Nederlands? instead of spreekt je Nederlands?. The same if you command somebody to do something: Spreek Nederlands!, not Spreekt Nederlands.

That’s what you get when you insult Afrikaans, which can really be an incredibly beautiful and haunting language, even if it does sound somewhat childlike at first to a Dutch speaker; the sentence structure is often similar to how a child would create Dutch sentences. The other main language in the Dutch family, Vlaams (Flemish) also has that sort of fascination for northern Dutch speakers, as again it sounds both beautiful and wrong at the same time if you’re not used to it. It’s far softer then the harsh syllables of Dutch, which some have compared to vigorious throat scraping.

Top Stories Friday 22 Nov

Liberal Oasis thinks he heard this before:

Calpundit on one of my personal bêtes noirs, the McDonalds Coffee case:

Body and Soul has a few thoughts on
that p.c. liberal media:

But this glass ceiling holds us all down, because it effects the kind of news and opinion we get. A survey last year by the Media Management Center’s Readership Institute showed that newspapers with few women newsroom managers had more gender stereotyping in the way news assignments were handed out — men covered politics, women covered human-interest features. According to another study, by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, male reporters are far more likely than women to skew what they cover by citing a disproportionate number of male sources. So not only is the perspective of women reporters lacking in much hard news, but the point of view of women experts gets shortchanged as well. And readers are the losers.

The Rittenhouse Review is cleaning up his blogroll:

P.L.A. on the media’s relationship with Gore and Bush: