Interesting post and I definitely agree with the assertion that US public education, and its evolution in our society into its current state and form, encourages a prolonged adolescent period which did not exist in human societies until our very modern period of institutional education. To take it further, perhaps you should discuss the inherent power structures established in secondary education and their relationship with the overarching power structures of our capitalistic republic and Western society in general. Particularly the relationship between authority figures and the emerging independent thinker our system is supposedly set up to produce, which in actuality is geared towards making citizens easier to control and manipulate.

Also - I wonder what your solution to the problem of institutional education would be.

Labels: AgeMaj, Educ, Lib, MorPa, OthBlo, Ra

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:52 PM

An MLK day rerun: The January and March 1965 issues are racial milestones

Have a look at this post from a year ago.

Labels: ArtEnt, ArtPic, Cintv, PM, Ra, Sp

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:37 AM

December 26, 2006

Left-wing puritanism in Ms. magazine’s “No Comment” section

“A number of companies have removed offensive ads in response to your feedback. Keep writing and calling the offending advertisers at their contact information above.”—Ms., Fall 2006, p. 80

The editors of Ms. would certainly deny having anything important in common with the boycott-happy Christianists of the American Family Association. But consider the damning evidence on the back page of every issue. “No Comment” shows miniature reprints of newspaper and magazine ads that supposedly degrade women enough to require angry letters and phone calls. With a few remotely possible exceptions, the outrage reinforces the stereotype of the humorless feminist. An ad can offend merely by associating a product with the sensual appeal of the female form or laughing at the foibles of human sexuality. Some might seem to glorify violence against women—if you’re determined to see that message in them. Does this ad for Royal Elastics shoes, blacklisted in the summer 2005 Ms., encourage men to kick women in the head? Was the “crushed flower” sniffed on one occasion by animated superhero Mighty Mouse actually cocaine, as AFA chairman Rev. Donald Wildmon alleged with about as much plausibility?

In some cases, the offensiveness is as hard to discern as the subliminal dirty pictures Wilson Bryan Key finds in the ice cubes of liquor ads (Key makes Wildmon look like an amateur). In fall 2006, Ms. wagged its finger at American Apparel’s ad with a photograph of an attractive young woman of Indian and Pakistani heritage under the caption “India meets Pakistan.” I wondered and wondered why anyone but the Church Lady would take offense at the very mildly titillating image. It turns out that it contains racism and pedophilia detectable only with specialized lab equipment. AA’s website seems to have deleted its photos of that particular model in response to the controversy. But as I write, it still has the guts to post a similar ad. Kudos.

“No Comment” is not unusual in its “progressive” prudery. The “liberal” battles against tobacco, fast food, and breast implants are waged under the same banner. For further explanation of how moralists (like mystics) all speak the same language, try this article by Radley Balko for the very unpuritanical Reason.

Update, December 29, 2006, 12:26 p.m.: I have answered Pandagon.net’s criticism of this post.

A related earlier post:
Playboy is more feminist than some feminists

Labels: AgeMaj, BGC, Femi, Lib, MorPa, NPH, OthBlo, Ra, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:46 PM

November 28, 2006

Jesse Jackson, enemy of free speech

Until today, I could take comfort in the fact that, if people have overreacted to Michael “KKKramer” Richards’ performance at the Laugh Factory the other day, at least no prominent figure has called for the government to step in. But in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Rev. Jesse Jackson breaks that barrier:

Our forefathers created the First Amendment to ensure a robust public debate and to prohibit the government from making laws to squelch political speech, even speech critical of our leaders. But obscenity has never enjoyed that protection, nor should it. Yelling “fire” in a crowded theater does not have protection. Similarly, hate speech—like that wielded by Richards—has and should be illegal.

Jackson’s proposed change in the law could affect me personally. In the title of one of my recent posts, I’ve used the word nigger metaphorically to make a point. Should I be arrested, Reverend?

While you still can, enjoy these hilarious video clips from the National Lampoon and Chappelle’s Show. For all this post’s external links, I tip my hat to a comment thread at Hit & Run.

A related earlier post:
Did Michael Richards need to apologize?

Labels: Cintv, Lib, MorPa, OnVi, OthBlo, Ra, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:57 PM

November 24, 2006

The Playboy Forum smears a libertarian as a racist

In his brief article for the December Playboy Forum, Ishmael Reed would have you believe that The New York Times’ resident whatchamacallit libertarian, John Tierney, applies a double standard to methamphetamine use among whites as opposed to blacks. First, Reed regurgitates some recent Times scare stories about meth. Then, he wildly misinterprets Tierney’s calm, rational, anti-prohibitionist approach to meth as a sign that “for Tierney...to admit that meth use among whites in the heartland is a serious problem would dispute the neoconservative [sic] formula that inhabitants of red states are all God-fearing and virtuous and those of blue states secular and decadent—or that whites dwell in a sort of Lake Wobegon utopia, yet the problems of blacks can be traced to their culture.” (p. 57) Whoa! That’s a hell of a lot of words to put in someone’s mouth.

One need not be as libertarian as Tierney on the issue of drugs to see a kind of racial McCarthyism in Reed’s attack. (That brand of McCarthyism has made me think twice about joining the Michael Richards–condemning bandwagon.) Although Playboy rightly invites diversity of opinion among its contributors, I would have hoped that its long history of opposition to drug-war hysteria could discourage the editors from letting a black man call another man a racist for speaking against a policy that disproportionately hurts blacks—a multilayer cake of depressing irony.

A related earlier post:
Playboy can no longer tell friend from foe

Labels: ArtPic, DruPo, Lib, MorPa, Ra, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 8:57 PM

November 21, 2006

Did Michael Richards need to apologize?

(Thanks to your votes, this post finished in a strong second place in Battle 11 of the Philosophy Blog War.)

I have to wonder. Richards, best known for playing Kramer on Seinfeld, was performing stand-up comedy at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood on Friday. Losing his temper with a black heckler in the crowd, he repeatedly called him a nigger. Although Richards’ moment of ethnic transgression lacked Sarah Silverman’s finesse, I found myself laughing along in a spirit similar to my laughter at her work.

Call me evil, but I was somewhat disappointed to see Richards apologize with such painful contrition on the Late Show with David Letterman last night. I felt sorrier for him than for anyone he offended. In a protest yesterday, one activist said, “These kind of comments hurt all of us.” Well, how, exactly? Considering how unified blacks, whites, and Latinos have been in shaming him, race relations in America don’t seem to have been adversely affected by his words. Maybe the dreaded n-word doesn’t have such power to twist our souls after all. Maybe no word does.

I was ambivalent about my own wish to defend Richards’ onstage rant until someone used it to condemn the classic film Blazing Saddles. Then I knew for certain which side of the controversy I was on.

A related earlier post:
Teenagers are the new niggers

A related subsequent post:
Jesse Jackson, enemy of free speech

Labels: Cintv, Lib, MorPa, NPH, OnVi, OthBlo, Ra

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:54 AM

November 20, 2006

The draft makes it easier, not harder, for politicians to wage dubious wars

“There’s no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way,” says Congressman Charles Rangel of New York.

I very much doubt it. As Thomas DiLorenzo at LewRockwell.com has observed, the saddest irony of Rangel’s endorsement of involuntary servitude is that he happens to be black. Considering the misery-loves-company mentality by which parents rationalize the time-wasting, humiliating drudgery of high school for their own teenagers, I don’t believe the older generation can be trusted with the power to force the younger generation to pay for its geopolitical fuck-ups.

As a thought experiment, consider what would have happened if the crowned heads of Europe had been politically incapable of conscripting their subjects in 1914 or thereafter. Some unfortunate young men might still have been swept up in early war mania and volunteered for service in the trenches, but their leaders would have had so much trouble replacing them that peace would soon become the only option. Almost certainly, the madness of war wouldn’t have lasted long enough to beget the madness of the Treaty of Versailles, which begot the madness of Hitler and another war. The twentieth century would have been much happier.

Labels: AgeMaj, ForPo, Lib, MR, OthBlo, Ra, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 7:26 AM

January 16, 2006

The January and March 1965 issues are racial milestones

The black actress Nichelle Nichols seriously considered leaving the original Star Trek after playing Lieutenant Uhura in its first season. But then she had a chance meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who convinced her that she had become an important role model for black Americans through the show. She stayed on.

If an allegedly frivolous element of pop culture like Star Trek can be dignified in some sense by its anecdotal connection to Dr. King and civil rights, then it should be perfectly tasteful for me to use the occasion of King’s birthday to celebrate two racial milestones in Playboy—one an interview, the other a centerfold.

From the beginning, the Playboy Interview had been a sounding board for blacks and the difficulties they faced. It had debuted in the September 1962 issue with Alex Haley as the interviewer and Miles Davis as the subject. Much of the two men’s dialogue had been about racism and the fight against it. Haley had interviewed Malcolm X for the May 1963 issue. But being a Southern Baptist minister, King was reluctant to give an interview for this particular magazine. Haley would later explain how he persuaded him: “I got to somebody close to him and gave him a breakdown of the audience. I told him these people were vital to King’s interests, for anyone with a cause. Think what you will about the girls, but you can’t ignore this audience. That’s what I told Malcolm, too.” (quoted in Thomas Weyr, Reaching for Paradise: The Playboy Vision of America, Times Books, 1978, p. 139) King would tell Haley that the January 1965 interview “was the best [King] ever had.” (Weyr, p. 138)

Jennifer Jackson, Miss March 1965, is the first black Playmate of the Month (is, not was, because there’s no such thing as a former Playmate). Racial tensions were so high when her centerfold was published that Playboy’s editors chose not to mention her race at all in the accompanying text [not work-safe]. Perhaps it was prudent then. But now, Jackson deserves to be honored in the same way and for the same reasons as any pioneering black athlete or entertainer. Do you not agree?

I also tip my hat to Reneé Tenison, who became the first black Playmate of the Year in 1990.

Labels: ArtPic, Cintv, NPH, PM, Ra

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:10 PM