Yeah, not sure what to do with the blog. Here's some of what I've been reading lately:

Zuky - Satire of the Stupid

The New Yorker cover, despite its intention and despite being sarcastic, is not satire ... It does not interrogate the validity of those racist stereotypes, but rather accepts and gleefully embraces their marginalizing and dehumanizing power, then implies that it's ludicrous for conservative yahoos to think that the Obamas are those kinds of blacks; the Obamas are good blacks, not scary militant blacks or Muslims; the Obamas do not sport Afros or turbans, they are not reminiscent of dangerous Sixties radicals, no sir, they are down with the program, they are safe for whites...

The lives of people with Afros, the lives of people who wear turbans, the actual legacies of the Black Panthers and 60s social justice activists, are all distorted, discarded, and mocked in the service of asserting the palatability of the Democratic nominee to provincial white sensibilities. And there's nothing even remotely cosmopolitan or sophisticated or iconoclastic or hip about that.

Feminist Economics: An interview with Susan Feiner

Feminist economics differs from mainstream, orthodox, plain vanilla economics in a couple of major different ways. First, or at least first for me, is that feminist economics is deeply influenced by feminist "science studies," the scholarship that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s (continuing today) which shows the deep flaws in the idea that knowledge is "objective."

Through most of the 19th century and until quite late in the 20th economists always talked about "rational economic man," and they did mean MAN. Through these often (but not always) unconscious moves mainstream economics excluded women and women's activities from consideration. This reinforced laws that excluded women from owning property, entering contracts, or taking jobs.

That's the first major difference - feminists reject the idea that all of human productive behavior can be reduced to the exchange of goods for money, and money for goods. The economy is larger, much larger, than THE MARKET.

The second difference is that economics completely abstracts from power. In all the textbook models the default assumption is that markets are impersonal, and no one buyer and no one seller influences the outcome. This is patent nonsense. Feminist economists in contrast explicitly incorporate power—who has it, how it's used, and why it's important—into their work.

Poise - So you think you wanna elope

You should elope. Every single one of you who has a person they love and who they want to spend the rest of their life and they want legal and financial rights that one gains by getting married should elope. Every one of you who wants those things but doesn't want the ceremony, the conventions, the pressure, the decisions, the drama, the details should elope. But, you should only elope if . . .

The Trouble With Spikol - Is suicide preventable?



Ask Metafilter:
- Who are some great comedians I've probably never heard of that I can watch on youtube?
- Book recommendations for introductions to feminist thinking.
- Were produce and meat really better in the old days? How can we be sure?

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