The Language of Politics

I found that there were a few racially slanted leads in this film,especially where the film was discussing gang violence and they showed not only a picture of black men carrying a coffin, they also showed what could have been labeled a gang "meet and greet". This showed that the film was made several years ago. I do not believe that this type of thing would escape the cutting room floor anymore. As for the idea that there is so much emphasis on environment...yes, I believe that environment is a large percentage. I also believe that we can counteract environmental factors. I did find the film to be very good though.

Bill Maher addresses the use of the word "elites" as a weapon to beat liberals with.

Watch it here.

The weekly roundtable discussion on Weekday (KUOW) this morning focused heavily on the Imus issue, and the issue of racism in langauge.

Listen to it here. (Scroll down to hour two.)

This entry mostly pertains to process in the classroom and how we frame discussions. Some would call this a personal rant of sorts.

The first week has already gone by and I am still very confused about what I am supposed to do for the project. can any one help me out?

...on last night's discussion, here are some links that you might find interesting:

Jim Sidanius's Lab at Harvard
Franz de Waal: Are we in anthropodenial?

Also note that I've changed the readings for next week.

The video that we watched in class was built entirely on the premis that all human beings on earth are more alike than unlike eachother. I don't feel like any racial bias was intentional or malicious. I respect the views of those in class who were concerned about unbalanced racial content, but I'm not convinced that it is relevant enough to the topic at hand to devote significant class time to.

Let's talk about racism, injustice, where they come from and how we can change them; but let's do it from the standpoint of politcs and language. If we pick apart all of our material like this we will miss the information it is trying to convey. (Last night's video was about EP, not the paradigm of power in race)

I'd like to start my blog career by stating that I appreciate the potential of the type of studies evolutionary psychologists are undertaking.  A number of important, relevant and potentially useful points have been elucidated in the discourse's history, for example: in Cosmides and Tooby's article they mention that adaptation does not necessarilly imply a qualitative or qunatitative increase for the species involved.  This argument could be used to build a critique of racism (a hot topic tonight).  For instance, while racism was produced out of a response to a set of circumstances in which a part of 'coalition building' entailed the superficial classification of those that didn't resemble the agent as an 'other', one could argue that racism today represents a threat to the survival of the species (in regards to concepts of environmental racism, genocide, the threat of nucleur war, etc.). 

Tens of thousands Iraqis had a very clear message, "The United States is not wanted in Iraq." At first I doubted Saddam Hussein would have ever objected to such a protest, but then it occured to me that probably wasn't what the White House was getting at--it's more like, "Look, now your voice is being ignored by our government just like the American citizen's voice is."