Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?

Intelligent Design

I’ve mentioned this before, and I favor evolution over ID, but I thought I would address one of The Evangelical Outpost’s commenters, Mr. Ed:

Why is it that simple? It seems you are making ‘science’ an arbitrary label. What is it that makes ID antithetical to science. And what is so different about the set of deductions that leads to a theory of evolutions and the set of deductions that leads to a theory of ID?

Answer: ID is based on what is not known, whereas evolution is based on what is known, i.e. can be proven.

You know, it occurs to me that there is a solution to the teaching of ID in schools: have school vouchers.

Geography lessons

Here’s a bit of a doozy from ESPN.com:

Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama has been chosen by the United States Soccer Federation for the first home qualifier in March when the national team will face Guatemala.

It will be the third time Birmingham, home of Auburn University, will host the national team, but it is the first World Cup qualifier for the stadium. In March of 2002, the U.S. beat Ecuador 1–0 on an Eddie Lewis goal – but the stakes will be much, much bigger on March 31st.

Aside from the minor geographic problem with the article, though, it also appears they got the date wrong, which means I’ll be watching on ESPN2 (since I teach Wednesdays) instead of going to Birmingham for the game.

Rule 1: You don't talk about Poll Club

A Kansas sports page editor is inviting a visit from the media neutrality goons:

The Associated Press is the largest news-gathering agency in the world. In this country, it hasn’t had any real competition since United Press International went belly-up about a quarter-center ago. The AP’s mantra, like all media, is to report the news.

At the same time, however, the AP manufactures news. That’s what a poll is. Manufactured news. Polls are released Mondays or Tuesdays because those are the traditionally slow news days, and the polls fills air space on radio and TV and columns in newspapers.

Basically an AP poll is a bunch of media-types—in this case sports writers and sportscasters—who band together to produce news that isn’t really news in order to sell more newspapers and lure more listeners and viewers. There’s nothing wrong with that in a business sense, but more and more, newspapers, in particular, are beginning to sense they’re sending the wrong message.

The media engaging in agenda setting and making up news? Never!

Relative-blogging

My cousin Melvin Ely’s most recent book, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War continues to draw rave reviews; the latest is from James A. Miller in Sunday’s Boston Globe.

Update: Joe Gandelman uncovered the article on his own and has some interesting thoughts (and discussion) on the matter. Comments of my own below the fold.

I would have posted these comments at Dean’s World but my registration isn't approved yet:

First: this is too weird. Melvin Patrick Ely is my cousin, a history and African-American studies professor at William and Mary. (Monomer: he's white.)

Second: I'm not sure this was a "single exception"; there were quite a lot of free blacks in the South. Not, by any stretch of the imagination, a majority, but on the order of tens of thousands (out of a population of a few million). Israel Hill was one community of free blacks, but there were many others in Virginia and elsewhere.

Third: I think the history of race in the South is complicated, and I think Melvin's two books have captured that in a way that more simplistic approaches don't. That doesn't mean that we should excuse slavery, torture, mutilation, lynchings, the separated families, and terrorism that typified the South prior to, and after, the Civil War, but it does mean that there's something to learn about how people behaved, not as proscribed by legal codes, but in their day-to-day affairs. Political institutions don't determine behavior, but they do shape it.

As to Dean's point: one thing Melvin has pointed out (if not in the book, then in his discussions of it) is that the civil relationship between the free blacks of Israel Hill and their white neighbors may have only been possible to that extent because the free blacks were a minority who did not have a chance of gaining political power. When they did become (potentially) politically powerful, with the 13th-15th amendments and the “corrupt bargain” that ended Reconstruction, that's when the apparatus of suppression kicked in to a greater degree, and things for previous "free" blacks got worse and things for ex-slaves again became essentially the same as they were under slavery.

Monday, 27 December 2004

Intelligent Design

Geography lessons

Rule 1: You don't talk about Poll Club

Relative-blogging