[Links]
[links] Link salad moves slowly on a Sunday morning
A reader reacts to Green — Mixed, and largely negative.
Birtherism, socialism, and craziness — Language Log on what real socialism is, versus the Right wing American scare word. I do disagree with their conclusions about polysemy, since the repurposing of the term is a cynical propaganda ploy as opposed to a genuine shift in meaning, but I am probably in the wrong here.
Doonesbury on right wing hate speech — For those of you who foolishly persist in thinking there’s some kind of equivalency in left-right rhetoric in this country.
Priming Christian Religious Concepts Increases Racial Prejudice — Positive correlations have been found between several self-report measures of religiousness and racial prejudice; however, no experiment has yet examined the direct effect of religion on racial attitudes. Hmm. Is this a function of reinforcing one’s tribalism? In my observation most churches (and religions) are very heavily racially segregated. Or am I wrong?
“Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black” – Tim Wise — Yep, no racism here. Just good, honest Real Americans standing up for their rights.
?otD: What’s your favorite comfort (re)reading?
4/25/2010
Writing time yesterday: none (chemo brain)
Body movement: brief suburban walk later
Hours slept: 9.0 (interruoted)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a (scale is out of batteries)
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 7/10 (fatigue, on the pump)
Currently (re)reading: Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett
Posted: 7:30 am Sun April 25 2010 |
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You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
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Cora
April 25th, 2010 at 3:12 pmIt’s not just “Socialism”. Political terms in general seem to have a different definition in the US than in most of the Western world, which makes discussing political matters difficult.
“Liberal” for example is a synonym for “left” or even a synonym for “Socialist” in the US, whereas in the rest of the world “liberal” is the same as “libertarian” in the US. “Conservative” in the US often seems to mean “frothing far right idiot”, the people we call conservatives are called “centrists” in the US. For some reason, there also seems to be a confusion between the meaning of “Socialism” and “Fascism” in some quarters, apparently US right-wingers are the only people who actually bought into the “Socialism” bit in “National Socialism”.
Though the people the Language Log poster met in Britain in the 1970s would have been called Communists or Trotzkists. Socialists usually were more moderate.
Cora
April 25th, 2010 at 3:28 pmOh yeah, I forgot the comfort read question.
Oddly enough, category romances (Harlequin, Silhouette, Mills & Boon, that sort of thing) are ideal comfort reads, because they are short, not overly taxing and guaranteed to have a happy ending, i.e. they won’t depress you. They’re ideal when you’re tired or sick, that’s why I always have a few lying around just in case. You have to be careful about the different imprints though, as some have gender relations right out of the stone age. The Christian ones could also be a turn-off.
For comfort rereading, I reach for Isaac Asimov, Georgette Heyer, J.D. Robb or Shanna Swendson’s Enchanted Inc. series.
Stephen Watkins
April 26th, 2010 at 8:27 amIt’s an interesting observation that religiosity strongly correlates to racial attitudes, and it is self-evident that church congregations tend to be very racially segregated, usually on a self-selected basis.
But it is a significant error of thinking to associate correlation with causation. That highly religious people tend to be more racially bigotted does not immediately lead to the conclusion that religion causes or encourages racial bigotry or racially bigotted attitudes. Nor, for that matter, does it imply that it does not.
I, for one, am deeply religious. I happen to attend a very mixed-race congregation. In fact, it’s been a recent challenge for us that we have several congregants that speak only French and Swahili, and we have been trying to find a way to service the spiritual needs of these people for whom English is a very distant third. On the other hand, although my particular congregation is very mixed, my denomination as a whole is a largely white-centric religion (although Latinos are slowly becoming the majority ethnicity in our religion). Understanding this dynamic is of great interest to me, but one thing that is clear is that it is not a simple dynamic at all.