Politics
Big Table
For those who haven’t been following, Obama’s been doing his best to alienate the progressive left. That’s resulted in him butting heads with two of my favorite people: John Edwards and Paul Krugman. And while it may result in more corporate fundraising for Obama, he’s come out looking much worse for the wear.
Obama has framed […]
Green
Red A recently had a post which seems to imply that Taiwan’s own hosing bubble is about to burst, with housing prices way above their actual value. I haven’t shopped for a place here on the East Coast, but I know that things are a lot cheaper and that there is rampant housing speculation.
Looking […]
陸克文
I would like to congratulate Australia on finally ridding itself of John Howard. In 2002 I wrote about ““Howard’s openly racist policies” and more recently we’ve had some excellent discussion on Savage Minds about his use of the “Little Children are Sacred” report to undo decades of progress on Aborigine autonomy. I’d really begun to […]
Ivory Tower vs. Real World
[Cross-posted at Savage Minds]
In our discussions about anthropologists in the military the term “ivory tower” has come up again and again, as has its antipode, “the real world.” These terms work rhetorically to oppose academic elitism and detachment against the difficult moral choices one must make in everyday life. A couple of things really bother […]
Free Burma
{Burma, activism}
Model Minority
This NY Times story made me wonder: Do Indian-Americans really want to have a small vocal minority whose views diverge strongly from their own represent them? But then I realized, its the other way around - its this small vocal minority who want to speak for all Indians. Too bad the NY Times can’t tell […]
Media Transparency
If you don’t know Cursor or the Center for Media Transparency, you should. Cursor is the premier alternative news aggregation site. Since the start of the Iraq war they have been playing an important role aggregating the best of the blogsphere, making it easy for the rest of us to know what’s out there. Similarly, […]
One America
The text of John Edward’s Hanover speech reprinted in full (via Crooked Timber):
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery: “To Build One America, End the Game”
Hanover, New Hampshire
August 23, 2007
This election is unlike any we have faced before. The stakes are higher. And the challenges we face as a nation are greater than at any time in […]
Chinese Democracy
Three interesting quotes about democracy in China. Each pointing in a different direction:
The first from a Rick Perlstein review of Mann’s The China Fantasy in The Nation:
Nicholas Kristof dishonored the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre in 2004, Mann points out, with a column titled “The Tiananmen Victory.” The democracy activists had won: “After the Chinese […]
Ousmane Sembène
I only recently learned that Ousmane Sembène, “the ‘father’ of African Cinema” died last month. Sembène was much more radical, much more of a brechtian filmmaker, and much more influential than Michael Moore could ever hope to be. Sembène was a writer who went into filmmaking because of the high rates of illiteracy in his […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
