Lets send books to Iraq

I've often wished I could help the cause in Iraq. Not in a destructive way, not in any fashion which serves to promote the seemingly broken Bush agenda, but in a more productive, creative manner. I think I've found out how.

Send a book, build democracy

In Christopher Hitchens' latest column for Slate he wrote that the American University of Iraq has just opened its doors and is badly in need of books. I can't think of a better way to help than to give a few of the books that have helped me so much.

Here is the address where we can send them:

Nathan Musselman
The American University of Iraq—Sulaimani
Building No. 7, Street 10
Quarter 410
Ablakh Area
Sulaimani, Iraq
(+964) (0)770-461-5099

Shifting Zeitgeist

Creationist critics get their comeuppance
Richard Lenski's 20 year experiement of maintaining E Coli cultures and tracking their evolution has creationists bumbling in their attempts to remove their feet from their mouths.

Is Dobson's Obama Hit Backfiring?
It is so nice to see that people, even Christians, are no longer stomaching James Dobson's intolerance and bigotry.

Pew Study finds 70% of Americans believe in more than one path to Salvation
While belief in salvation certainley should take its place in the archives of ancient beliefs our species has entertained, I will admit that this study is undeniably progress. I see this is as part of the slow errosion of fundamentalism, a stepping stone on the path to clear thinking.

Oil

I guess all the 'no oil for blood' stickers are going to start making a lot more sense:

Bush gets what he wants.

It is disheartening to see that what the US has cared about all along was not the liberation of Iraqis but the ability to award no-bid contracts to filthy oil companies. So, thousands of dead soldiers and civilians for what... a 50 cent price cut at the pumps? Will Americans accept this? Without hesitation.

Movie

Bill Maher has a new documentary coming out called "Religulous" and it looks pretty good based on the trailer:

I think Maher's approach - hitting the mainstream with an easily accesible movie - is a good compliment to the spree of books we've had published in the last few years by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennet, and co.

The Fighting 44s

I came across an interesting website recently, “The Fighting 44s”, a sort of in-group community for Asian-Americans to express their anger at what they perceive to be the egregious injustices dealt to them by the white power structure in America.

A cursory browse of their message boards gives a brief overview of the subjects the community collectively views as relevant to their plight: asian stereotypes, anti-asian bias in the workplace, media, political scene, and in every day life. The following is a random list of post titles I found on the first 2 pages of the website’s message board:

-Racist Volkswagon commercial?
-Blatant acts of point our your’e Asian
-Why do white people tend to make more average(sic) than Asians?
-Why do PC white people...
-White privilege at its most blatant

The above threads, among many others, are full of a unique yet utterly boring vitriol apparently posted without any hint or notion of irony. If I hadn’t known any better I would have guessed that the entire forum was a decent attempt at self parody, an exaggerated way to show the humor of complaints registered by a group who has nothing better to do than create problems of out thin air. But nope, the people on this website are dead serious.

So why the anger? The average Asian household in America makes $57,518 a year, the average white household $48,977, and the average Hispanic and black households make $34,241 and $30,134 respectively. Clearly the Asians in America are not doing too bad financially.

But then I found it, the ‘features’ section. Herein is contained what can only be described as hate concerning the state of interracial dating in America today. The main target of the outburst: white guy, asian woman relationships. The following are quotes from some of the editorials:


“…nothing affects Asian Americans quite like the Eurocentric racial preference in dating. It affects us through alienation and misunderstanding. It causes a societal loss of spirit, a zeitgeist of hopelessness that permeates everything that we do. Between Asian men and women, it has caused countless misunderstandings and mischaracterizations, even in interactions that are not sexual in nature.” http://www.thefighting44s.com/archives/2008/02/13/so-what-do-your-parents-think-about-the-white-guy/

“Remember, that when you choose your wife or husband or life partner or relationship, you are not only making a statement to yourself, not only making a statement to that other person, but you are also making a statement to the world. You are saying that at present, this is the person I love, the person I trust, the person I can most relate to in all the whole wide world. And if the person you love, trust, and most relate to in all the whole wide world, is not Asian, and you’re an Asian activist, then that is a symbolic statement to the world that you don’t actually stand for the advancement of Asian interests in opposition to colonial racist interests, you stand for some broader human interest that takes you out of the Asian advocacy sphere. You have found that you relate best to someone who is not Asian, and you have gained better access, willingly or not, to some of the advantages of colonial racist privilege which you are supposedly struggling against.” http://www.thefighting44s.com/archives/2007/07/18/inter-racial-dating-by-asian-americans/

“You are an Asian advocate. You speak for Asians. You fight for Asians. The question is simple: do you stand for “Asianness” or not? If you marry someone white, then you don’t stand for “Asianness.” You stand for something else entirely.”

“Remember, racism and colonialism benefits heterosexual white males the most. When you treat everyone “equally” in the classical Liberal sense without accounting for social and economic power structures, the heterosexual white man ends up on top. So to actually achieve “equal” treatment, you have to form advocate and special interest groups (a distinctly “unequal” thing to do) to chip away at that heterosexual white male power. It’s very hard to chip away at heterosexual white male power when we are making love to the heterosexual white male.”

Do you smell it? If you don’t you should. It’s the stench that permeates every bad argument, every false premise, every empty platitude. It’s the smell of bullshit, and it is rank within this site and these quotes.

As a member of the ‘white colonial establishment’ the members of this website would have me labeled a domineering racist simply because my wife is from Taiwan. My marriage to her, in their egotistical vision of a racist America, is one of subjugation and oppression. I must have married her because of an innate desire to oppress the asian male, to support the white-power status quo, and to satisfy some perversion of the mystical ‘woman of the east’.

Now, lets indulge an interesting thought experiment. Take the above quotes from the Fighting 44 website and replace “asian” with “white” and then read them aloud. What results is something anyone and everyone would identify as unabashedly racist, yet when written by an asian man it becomes a critique on American culture. Sniff, sniff?

Am I offended? Not really, and offense is not an argument anyway. What does anger me is the brazen stupidity of this type of ‘racial awareness’. In the attempt to eliminate what they view as vestigial biases of a past age they unwittingly resurrect the rotting corpse of racism. Without any apparent self-awareness these editorials advocate against interracial marriage, advocate for race-pride, and perpetuate empty and dangerous stereotypes. Now of course you can only expect so much from our species, given our love of everything irrational, but this website just reeks of self-flagellation. Asian men angry that some Asian women are marrying white guys. Cry me a river.

Worthless Majors... ?

I'm a sucker for top 10 lists so naturally when I found one called "Top 10 Worthless Majors" I had to read it because I knew philosophy just had to be on there.


Philosophy - Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job:
This isn’t ancient Greece: No one is going to pay you money, or allow you to sodomize their attractive son, in exchange for your knowledge of existence. Never has there been an employer who’s said “Man, we’re having all kinds of problems, I wish we had someone on our team who could reference and draw conclusions from the story of Siddhartha that would pull up our fourth quarter numbers.” I took many philosophy classes and it involved reading and smoking a shit pile of weed. You don’t need to pay 20,000 dollars a year to do that. All you need is twenty dollars and a library card.
What Job You’ll End Up With:
Thanks to your extensive knowledge of philosophy, you’re now self-aware enough to know that most jobs out there will make you totally miserable. So most likely you’ll wait tables part time and hope someone starts paying you for the bi-monthly entries on your blog.

Ok sure. I chuckled inside my head a little but the author could have done a lot better. There are a lot of philosophy major sterotypes he could have exploited for better humorous effect. But oh well.

As I kept reading it turns out my buddy Nate's major, communications made the list too!

Communications - Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job:
Go into a communications class on any given day and it’ll smell like dried semen and booze. Reason being, communications is the major for anyone who wants to graduate, but doesn’t want to stop getting totally wasted on weekdays. Here’s the bad news, if an employer is going to hire someone to help decipher how human beings communicate, he’s going to hire someone with the letters “Dr.” before their name, not the person who first checks to see if a class is offered online, then when they find out it’s not, let’s out a “gaaaaay bro.”
What Job You’ll End Up With:
You’ll go to several job interviews that turn out to be pyramid schemes, even though at first you won’t realize this and come home and tell your parents, who you still live with, “They said I’ll probably be making six figures in less than a year just by selling these beer cozies.”

If I was going to make my own list I would have added 'Minority Studies', 'Queer Studies', or 'Hawaiian Studies' to my list; only on the basis that they are equally non job specific and pretty funny all in their own right. But really I'm glad university's have niche or ancient degrees like philosophy, queer studies, communications, or even art history. If I was purely concerned with making money I would have went to a trade school and not a university!

Life - It Rolls

My friends, the Morses, landed in Bellingham not long ago.  In fact they live not more than a 20 second walk away; certainly a convenience.  For me the feeling is kind of surreal; its like we are still in college but without the classes.  We've all been able to retain the looseness and air of freedom that college students usually have but have emerged into the 'adult' life.  

Its been nice being able to share the mountain with Natemare.  I think many more adventures are yet to come.  The Ride is far from over.