Does anyone in the world think it’s a coincidence that elections in Iraq, which have dominated the news cycle in the U.S. for the past four days (Did anything else happen in the rest of the world since Friday? Seriously…I’d like to know.), were scheduled for just before Bush’s first State of the Union address of his second term?
And if it’s not a coincidence, how confident must the Republicans have been that they’d secure a second term for Dubya when they announced the date for elections?
Spring is coming. Yes, indeed it is.
Only
until pitchers and catchers report for spring training
*Household debt clock represents total outstanding consumer credit (non-mortgage) as of Jan. 7, 2005.
Stop it. It’s not woolly. Nobody gets woolly. Women get weary, they don’t get woolly. Nobody’s got stress, they’re wearing a dress. God damn I hate people that get the words wrong.
— Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) to Ebby Calvin ‘Nuke’ LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) on Nuke’s mangled rendition of Try a Little Tenderness in Bull Durham
Words. Throughout human history words have had power. By naming things, people claim power over them; indeed, some Romany (Gypsy) traditions provide for members of a given tribe or community to have a name they use within the community and a name they give to outsiders. Courtland Milloy doesn’t understand the power of words. Indeed, he doesn’t understand words at all despite the fact that he’s a professional journalist.
Writing about the Project Implicit black-white race bias test at Harvard University (take it; it’s interesting) and his own results in his column in today’s Washington Post Milloy gives us this:
“Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Black relative to White,” the summary of my test results said.For some readers, no doubt, this is confirmation — if any was needed — that I am a “reverse racist.”
Let’s say up front that Courtland Milloy is a black man. Now let’s pause for a moment while we consider the fact that as a black man in America, sadly, Milloy should be intimately familiar with the definition of racism. As a writer and a journalist, Milloy should know that by denotative defintion reverse racism can’t exist. How do you reverse something that has no inherent direction?
It may be that because of his personal experience with racism, Milloy believes that the connotative definition restricts the defintion of racism to “discrimination for whites and against blacks.” I’d ask, then, how Milloy would explain the discrimination that arabs, hispanics, and east Asian people face without using the word racism?
Words are important. How we use them matters because when we use them wrong people get the wrong idea about what we mean. They make judgements based on false conclusions.
My punishment for Courtland Milloy is not that he should lose his job, nor is it that he should be hit across the back of the head with my beloved, compact-OED. No, I imagine something far worse: lingo.
Courtland Milloy should be forced to sit through several hours of meetings where people proactively respond to information presented in a granular matrix while deciding which issues are online and which should be discussed out of pocket.
Yes, I know. I’m evil.
And as a side note, I finally heard Jeb Bush speak yesterday. Can someone explain to me why Jeb speaks with basically no accent and his brother W opens his mouth and sounds just like a down-home, good ‘ole boy? And which one of them is faking it?
In case you’re like me and you have a blog and you’re using Movable Type but you don’t spend a lot of time reading the Movable Type web site: there’s a bug. A big, huge, nasty, “please, yes, use my site host’s server like a spam bitch” bug in all the versions of Movable Type.
Check out the article (www.movabletype.org/news/2005/01/movable_type_315_release.shtml), and install the plugin or the update.
Personally, I’m a little fucked off with MT just now: I have to register a Typekey account to get the update, and that works fine, but when I try to login from the update page it tells me it can’t find my account.
Fortunately, the patch is available. MT themselves are probably taking care of hosted blogs on TypePad.
Oh, and to top it all off, there’s an ice dam in the gutter in the back of my house that is even now melting and dripping behind the siding because someone didn’t get the gutters cleaned out like she said she was gonna.
Yes, I know, too much information. More on the topic of too much information later.