I’ll fully admit there have been a few stories post-election concerning Senator-Elect Tester that I grumbled about but I certainly think that he is setting the right tone after the election. While Burns is joining his fellow Republicans in doing nothing during their last few weeks as the do-nothing Congress, Tester is touring the state to say thanks and engage in “community conversation.” He’ll be in Helena this Saturday, 4pm at the Pattern House for that purpose. Here, here. That is a little more like Montana…
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Joe Lieberman is a much more moral man than I am. He, unlike me, is concerned about violence and its terrifying impact on children. Does this concern manifest itself in policy proposals to alleviate the poverty in inner cities that leads to horrific violence against American children? Not so much. How about supporting a withdrawal from the Iraq War, a conflict that is costing the lives of hundreds of Iraqis–children included–every week? Nope.
Instead, the brave Senator is attacking the most pressing cause of violence: video games. Along with the National Institute on Media and the Family, Senator Lieberman is grandstanding today on the issue of video game violence:
“These games are brutal, primitive,” Sen. Joe Lieberman , D-Conn., said Wednesday.
“Pay attention to the games your kids, our kids, are playing,” said Lieberman, who joined institute officials at a news conference. “It‘s really time to focus on the parents and urge parents to pay attention.”
I’m exhausted by the repeated claims of the paternalistic left and moralistic right (both of which are embodied by the good Senator) that media is to blame for American violence. The internal logic is absurd: given claims of hundreds of thousands of exposures to media violence by each child, I’ve never understood why every American child hasn’t attacked a school or killed a classmate. It’s a simplistic, knee-jerk response that’s no different than parents blaming rock and roll for sex in the 1950s
More importantly, though, non-controversial attacks on violent images in the media are just cover. Instead of root causes: violence, racism, structural inequity, we’re fooled by showy condemnations of Grand Theft Auto, instead of thoughtfully examining the social conditions that lead to violence.
Maybe it’s time for someone to develop a new video game: one in which the protagonist makes a real difference instead of deceiving us with nonsense.
In an effort to shake off the derision directed at his repeated claims that the next six months would be critical for Iraq, Thomas Friedman today offered a bold new Friedman Unit: now, it turns out, the next ten months are critical. Friedman’s not unique because he has almost totally reversed himself on the Iraq War; the number of elite punditocracy retroactively being skeptical of the war is growing every day. What makes Friedman unique is just how shameless he is about it.
In a sense, it fits the dominant metaphor of this war perfectly. In a war that has only demanded sacrifices from the men and women fighting it, not the decision makers who created it and the chattering class in the media who whipped up public support for it, it’s perfectly appropriate for egotists like Friedman to try to escape without losing their credibility. No sacrifice at all.
In today’s Times, Friedman writes:
Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years.
But Iraq is in so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army, that nobody seems able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war — it’s gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle.
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I don’t mean to get all Freudian, but it certainly seems like Senator Corey Stapleton has an unusual way of expressing himself. Criticizing Mike Cooney and Sam Kitzenberg for taking jobs at the state, Stapleton offered this insight:
The top Republican in the state Senate said Monday that two pivotal Democrats have cast a “stain across the Senate” because they both took unadvertised jobs in state government.
“We’re not quite sure how we’re going to discharge that stain,” said Sen. Corey Stapleton, R-Billings, newly elected Senate minority leader.
I feel a little dirty now.
There’s an interesting piece in the New York Times magazine this morning, discussing a variety of strategies to deal with the difficulty of educating students from the lowest economic brackets. The strategies discussed in the article range from the answer Mississippi has adopted (lowering standards to claim that all students are proficient) to controversial charter schools with strict standards and expectations. One proposal, both in the article and making the rounds in the inevitable way of educational fads, that middle class class values need to be instilled in poor students, deserves a closer look.
I teach in a school that is struggling with reading issues. A large percentage of our students are not at high school proficiency in terms of reading when they arrive, and, unsurprisingly, they struggle mightily when confronted with reading heavy classes like social studies, science, and English in the freshman year. Our experience is similar to the information presented in the article: while students across the economic spectrum struggle, the most pervasive problems are found in students who live in poverty. This gap, as the article notes, is not an isolated problem:
The gap between economic classes isn’t disappearing, either: in 2002, 17 percent of poor eighth-grade students (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches) were proficient in reading; in 2005, that number fell to 15 percent.
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As you may well of heard, Palestinians have resorted to using human shields to deter Israeli millitary strikes. I don’t know the official international consensus on this, but the BBC had this to say -
“Palestinians can unite in confronting their enemy and the passive resistance of the human shields will be admired from around the world. ”
Admired?!
This should be condemned in the strongest terms. The only reason that this is even an issue is because Israel calls ahead of time to allow Palestinians to evacuate before airstrikes, so the strikes destroy only objects, not lives. Palestinians have cynically twisted this to prevent the destruction of weapons caches and millitant meeting areas. The BBC went so far as to call it “David and Goliath” (particularly ironic, considering David was a Jew, and Goliath came from the region around where Gaza is today). More like Achilles’ heel, with Israel’s heel being some shred of decency. (I can guarantee you that if Hamas could, they would deliberately target bunches of Israeli civilians akin to the ones they are using to deter airstrikes.) Of course Israel has done indecent things in the past, but their refusal to bomb people who are knowlingly putting themselves in harms way while Israeli civilians just living life are getting hit by rockets puts them a step above Hamas. Israel is the real ‘hero’ in this situation, not Hamas.
