Jason Hurd, ladies and gentlemen

He's still fighting the good fight...

Quote for the day

This could have come straight out of Catch 22 (which I finished yesterday; highly recommended). But it actually came from an American-born Japanese student during the escalation of the Sino-Japanese War:

"This dying for your country is not my idea of living a long life."

That's right up there with one of my favorite Bertrand Russell quotes:

"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."

Words for the non-committal.

Fitna update

Here are some alternate translations of verses cited in the Fitna film (below):

[8:60] You shall prepare for them all the power you can muster, and all the equipment you can mobilize, that you may frighten the enemies of GOD, your enemies, as well as others who are not known to you; GOD knows them. Whatever you spend in the cause of GOD will be repaid to you generously, without the least injustice.

[47:4] If you encounter (in war) those who disbelieve, you may strike the necks. If you take them as captives you may set them free or ransom them, until the war ends. Had GOD willed, He could have granted you victory, without war. But He thus tests you by one another. As for those who get killed in the cause of GOD, He will never put their sacrifice to waste.

[4:89] They wish that you disbelieve as they have disbelieved, then you become equal. Do not consider them friends, unless they mobilize along with you in the cause of GOD. If they turn against you, you shall fight them, and you may kill them when you encounter them in war. You shall not accept them as friends, or allies.

It seems that the main difference is the qualification that these things can be done in warring circumstances. I'm no Arabic scholar, so I wouldn't know how to get to the heart of these translations, but I thought it was only fair to post them. Regardless, my central concern remains: Within the context of a liberal democracy, that rests on the viability of open, reasonable exchange, antiquated texts simply don't do us a lot of good. I think Sam Harris said it well when he said that reference to such texts or beliefs is simply a conversation-stopper. When trying to come up with practical answers to contemporary problems, I don't see the benefit in simply pointing to a text, whether it be the Bible, the Quran, or the Constitution. I have similar problems with Supreme Court decisions that treat the Constitution and its amendments as if it was a sacred document that is without error.

Cultural offering

One of my fellow librarians passed this on to me, I thought it was pretty neat:
Book art

Time to kill?

Here's one way to waste the day:
Cute with Chris
Click on View Recent Episodes for a good dose of web video humor. My favorites are his renditions of T Pain's brilliance (just google 'cute with chris t pain' to see for yourself).

Fitna (schism)

I haven't quite decided how I feel about this. When I get the chance I'm going to go through and check the quotes from the Qur'an to see if there are alternate (less sadistic) translations. Regardless of theological interpretation, the fact that some of these views speak to an audience at all is troubling, raising the question: How does a liberal democracy confront decidedly illiberal ideologies within its borders? Hopefully I'll have that all figured out by the time Jason and I run for the presidency.

Oh, for fu...

According to the (I assume flawless) polling of CNN, 47% of Democrats plan to vote for McCain if their candidate doesn't win the primaries. Granted, in 2004 I thought, "no way is America going to RE-elect (or elect) Bush," and we see how right I was. But seriously, I really didn't think we would have another 4 years of a Republican executive. If Democrats can't realize the lack of difference between Obama's and Clinton's policy positions, and can't realize the drastic difference between either of them and McCain, maybe they deserve whatever is coming to them. There goes the idea that democracy rests on rational discourse. Maybe Gorgias was right after all.

Oh, and happy birthday Viagra. 10 years strong, apparently.

Why I am so old...

Perhaps not as inspiring as "Why I am so clever," or "Why I am a destiny," but if you were expecting the prose of Nietzsche, you were looking in the wrong place to start.

Seriously though, you might reasonably ask yourself, "Why is a 24 year old claiming to be old?" It's all relative, you see. You must consider context. When a 24 year old rolls up to the local skate park, chances are good he will have 10 years on 50% of the population. So that's a start. But the other thing is my attitude towards the youth of today. Those darn kids. Because back in my day, ("When I was their age," if you will), skateboarding had a social element to it. Yes, skateboarding has always been an 'individual' sport, but that's only part of it. That part's about the freedom of going out and skating by yourself and not needing a team or a coach or what have you. The other part, and perhaps one of the most important parts, was the sense of community you got by recognizing a fellow traveler by the torn up sneakers and logo-laden t-shirt. This was the part that allowed you to walk up to a complete stranger in a new place and start a conversation because you already knew that you had at least one thing in common (with the likelihood of many more things, given the circumstances). But alas, those days are behind us. Or so it would seem. Most days when I get to the skate park, usually earlier in the day when there is a smaller crowd, my greetings go unheard. Those greetings being the ones I extend before I realize the floppy hipster hair-do is covering up the ear buds connected to the iPhone that will inevitably be answered as the skater lazily cruises through the middle of the park, oblivious to his surroundings. The whole iPod at the skate park thing only furthers my contention that technology is slowly sapping our ability to communicate with each other like normal humans (as I type away at my blog). The fact that I have composed the above rant proves that I am, in fact, so old. Oh, and my knees hurt. I can't even sit cross-legged anymore.

And we respected our elders. We gave the old man credit when he actually landed a flip trick, no matter how sloppy. Because, hey, at least he didn't early-grab. Little punks.

Got Faith?

These guys do:


These guys don't:



Happy Easter everyone!

Website

Skateboard culture time waster:
Epicly later'd

Melodrama

So I'm watching a basketball game (not something I do often) and I've determined one thing: Basketball players are overly dramatic when it comes to injuries. I just watched a guy rolling on the ground screaming and making terrible faces because he came down on his ankle a bit wrong. It was apparently so bad that he had to sit out for like, five minutes. Not to say that skateboarders are way tougher or anything, but I can't help but remember the time Jake Brown fell about 30 feet to flat on a vert ramp and walking away after regaining consciousness (see link below for video documentation). I guess he should have milked it and made a bigger show out of it; after all, he did break a couple of bones and suffer some internal bleeding. But twisted ankles do hurt. Real bad.

Jake Brown Slam

Barack Obama Speech

I assume many of you have already seen this, but if not, I highly recommend it. I kept hearing people say it was the best speech they've heard from this generation and I assumed they were blowing hot air. But I think I can get on board. I can't remember the last time I heard a politician sound so insightful. But enough from me, here's Obama:
Obama speech, 03/18/08

Impossible Subjects Book Review

I write this partly so people know that I write about history from time to time. Also because this is really an important book, even if it isn't always easy to get through. It illustrates the historical contingencies that underlie a number of legal categories that we take as given, such as 'illegal immigrant' and it raises issues about what such categories say about a supposedly liberal democratic society. This is probably the worst work I have done in grad school, to be honest, so don't be surprised if you catch yourself thinking, "Wow, Dunstan has lost his touch." Oh, and here's a taste of what I'm doing with library science:
FBI Pathfinder
Women's History Selected Bibliography
Without further ado...

Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Illegal immigration has become, in recent years, an issue of seemingly grave importance in the minds of many Americans. It is seen as a natural label for those who have crossed U.S. borders without going through the proper channels. Mae M. Ngai’s Impossible Subjects challenges such a naturalized view of the illegal immigrant, arguing that the very phrase denotes a relatively recent phenomenon born of restrictive policies that were themselves products of American views of race, citizenship, and the nation in the twentieth-century. In doing so, Ngai suggests “that a historical perspective might show us how sovereignty’s content and relationship to other legal and moral norms are contingent—and, therefore, also subject to change” (12). Drawing largely from immigration service records, judicial and congressional decisions, as well as oral histories and contemporaneous periodicals, Ngai uses the experience of numerous immigrant groups to persuasively ground her argument. While her use of sources might strike some as indicative of a top-down approach, and the structure of the work sometimes rejects a smooth narrative, both features ultimately prove to serve her purposes well.
Impossible Subjects spans the years bridging the first restrictive quota immigration bill, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, and the more liberal, yet still restrictive, 1965 Hart-Cellar Act. Ngai begins by documenting the changing attitudes following the first World War that led to more racialized and territorial legislation. New racial concepts and stronger borders resulted in different trajectories for European and non-European immigrants, in terms of racial formation and “prospects for full membership in the nation” (13). The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act’s passage imposed a numerical limit on immigration and created a quota system founded on nationality and racial desirability, placing illegal immigration at the forefront of immigration law (17). Ngai goes on to show how the policing of the borders and the accompanying deportation policies further solidified illegal immigration’s status.
On establishing ideological premises of illegal immigration, Ngai provides case studies for four nationalities acutely affected by judicial and legislative policies. She argues that the U.S. treatment of Filipinos and Mexicans in the 1920s betrays a colonial relationship, the former explicitly due to their colonial status, and the latter implicitly due to their migrant status within the American politic. Mexican workers in the United States created a system of ‘imported colonialism,’ or a “de facto socio-legal condition embedded in formally noncolonial relationships and spaces, in which free citizens of Mexico, an independent nation-state, voluntarily contracted to putatively free, waged labor, within the United States proper” (129). The third section shows what effect international relations had on policy towards Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans and in what ways these relations differed from those with immigrants of European descent. Ngai tells a different story of the Japanese American internment, focusing on the multiplicity of loyalties of those interned, leading to renunciation in a number of cases. Following World War II and the Communist takeover of China, fears of Communist Chinese loyalty during the Cold War led to a campaign calling for the confession of ‘paper sons.’ This campaign revealed complex networks of real and fabricated familial relations and acted to further cement racialized notions of illegal immigration, even as it attempted to project benevolence in accepting honest Chinese Americans into American membership. Finally, Ngai reconsiders the scholarly acceptance of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 as an inherently liberal measure. In fact, the act “promoted both greater inclusions and greater exclusions” (263). While abolishing the national origins quota system, it also restricted immigration from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin American to a greater extent than ever before. The book concludes by noting the paradox of this act actually increasing levels of illegal immigration.
The strengths of Ngai’s work are unique insofar as they initially presented themselves as weaknesses and eventually came to crystallize as assets to the project at hand. Regarding sources, Ngai’s reliance on congressional and judicial decisions at first came off as unhinged from the socio-cultural climate in which these decisions were made. However, on reflection, I realized that this utilization of sources solidified her initial claims that the laws not only reflect the popular sentiment of a particular time, but go further in codifying the normative conclusions such sentiment entails. Her analysis of these texts highlights the naturalization of ideas and inclinations that at one time were not so natural.
Regarding structure, I was at first put off by the lack of narrative flow between sections and chapters. The work reads, at times, like a collection of essays with brief introductions to each theme. But again, on reflection, I found this to reaffirm her contention regarding the contingency of different alien groups becoming illegal. In many ways the judicial treatment of different nationalities within the United States lacks a smooth narrative flow, and reflects the specificity of particular conditions that allowed such policies to take hold. No better chapter illustrates the matter of contingency than that dealing with Filipinos, who act as a unique case study due to the colonial conditions that grounded their initial status in the U.S. and the multiplicity of classifications that took place within a single generation. In this chapter, Ngai argues that “Filipino migration lay bare contradictions between the insular policy of benevolent assimilation and the immigration policy of Asiatic exclusion, which had fully matured by the 1920s and domestic racism generally” (97). The United States initially accepted Filipinos into America as U.S. Nationals, neither alien nor citizen. Filipino migration to the U.S. increased during the 1920s, only to be met by racial violence fueled in part by fears of perceived economic competition and gendered prejudices. In response to this violence, supporters of exclusion called for the independence of the Philippines with the intention to repatriate Filipinos in America who desired to go back to the Philippines, without the option of returning to the U.S. Though full exclusion did not succeed, due to Filipino alliance in World War II, Ngai sees the Filipino in America “to return to a state of invisibility” (126). Thus the Filipino experience stands out as an example of how the contingencies of domestic and international policies prove to categorize individuals in decidedly illiberal ways.
Overall, I found Ngai’s Impossible Subjects to be an engaging and thought-provoking read. The work was able to document a unique historical phenomenon that presents serious difficulties to liberal democratic thought without coming off as overly preachy. While it is obvious that Ngai has an ax to grind over the consequences of classifying individuals as ‘illegal aliens,’ it is equally apparent as to why this is, and should be, the case. In a time when illegal immigration is listed amongst Americans’ top five chief concerns, it behooves us to recognize what a recent phenomenon this issue is, and the racialized thinking foundational to its existence.