If they keep everyone healthy for the playoffs, it may turn out to be a brilliant move. But, as we saw with Garnett last season, that is a huge IF. Sheed's a better fit for the Spurs or the Cavs, teams with a good mix of veterans and fresh legs. The Celtics seem like that 2004 Lakers team that lost to the Pistons.
That link goes to an old one -- from 2006. The most recent one is here. (I also ran across this BBC link about a corporate takeover from January.)
I don't play MMOs much, but I find some of the stories from EVE absolutely fascinating. And there are so many of them. It's like the Wild West and the high seas and robber barons and corporate espionage all rolled up into one big ball of libertarian dystopia. And that's the way they like it.
for anyone interested in recent discussions here of the limits of knowledge and the strains that this puts on our ability to be effective citizens see: Liberal democracy 3.0 By Stephen P. Turner
Ta-nehisi,
Your guest bloggers were excellent. They were a very diverse and interesting group of writers who obviously put a great deal of effort into the assignment.
How about what's going down in Western China? It's amazing that a country where 90-95% of the people are the same ethnic group can still have bloody ethnic violence. Reminds me of J.J. Walker's old joke about Northern Ireland.
In Norther Ireland the catholics and Protestants were of equal proportion, not the Han and Iughurs in Western China. The PRC is trying to eliminate them by demographic bombing of Han chines moving from other provinces to Western China, thus slowly taking over by intermarriage and the like! Sinister!
Wouldn't a large majority of one ethnicity make violence against minorities easier? Ethnic conflict against minorities would probably meet little resistance in such a homogeneous society. And in China 10% of the population is still a large real number of people i.e. around 170 million people.
That is some seriously heartbreaking stuff. China has cracked down so heavily on the Uyghurs, restricting their movement, participation in religious festivals etc. Now after this protest the pictures are showing Han men roaming the streets with clubs searching out Uyghurs to give hell to. They seem so convinced that these people need to be punished and taught a lesson, mob mentality with state approval and international not giving an f at its worst.
Worse, they've got a bunch of ethnically Chinese Hui Muslims denouncing the Uighurs in standard Chinese PRC newspeak. The Hui Muslims actually have a comparatively good deal. Meanwhile, Tibet is a popular cause in the US, and we've sent Uighurs to Gitmo with no trial and no real evidence, and are still locking up some who've been proven to have no real terrorist ties.
A friend who visited Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, described the Uyghurs who lived there as despondent and deeply unhappy with Han demographic and economic domination. The Chinese government is flooding this ethnically Turkic region with Han Chinese not only to cement territorial integrity (huge in Chinese post-colonial psyche) but also to relieve the social pressures associated with over-population in the urbanized coasts.
The fate of the Uyghurs, along with the Tibetans, will likely be somewhat better than that of the Native American tribes. They will be absorbed over the next century into Chinese culture and lose most of their ethnic/cultural identity. Tough choice for these people: You can't win, so do you fight on nobly but tragically or do you concede and join the great Chinese economic miracle? But one things is for certain, the Chinese Communist Party will use any means necessary to subdue this sort of disturbance, including patiently waiting decades for birthrates to do its work. The Uyghurs will lose.
"Flooding the ... region" suggests that the government is filling up buses with Han Chinese and dropping them off. Isn't it really a matter of market pressures, or people from crowded areas looking for work and a place to live in uncrowded ones? I'm uncomfortable with the idea of an 'ethnic cordon' to prevent that from happening.
They more or less do exactly that - filling up buses with Han and sending them west. It's been a long time since I've been in China, but there is a public and serious effort by planners to spread economic growth from the coasts to the hinterland. "Go West" is a real program. I simply googled it and came up with this:
"College graduates who take jobs in central or western China will be entitled to a full refund of their tuition fees, the State Council said Wednesday."
Do you think he was a homosexual, and, instead of trying to accept that, he just went off the deep end?
Because, if he was gay, and ashamed or whatever, it would be consistent with him "hating himself" and thus, his becoming a white (kinda) man with straight hair and a thin small nose, who has white children, who are, if my understanding is correct, not even of his blood.
No doubt, in his prime, there was no one better. But, what the f--k caused him to go off the deep end?
DISCLAIMER: the suggestion that he might've been gay has nothing to do with the molestation charges. Whether he was gay or not, IMO, has nothing to do with child molestation.
Don't know, don't care about what was wrong with Michael Jackson. I just know that today he will officially be put to rest and to be honest this makes me very sad. He was the greatest entertainer of all time...
Having way too much cake and too many people around him attracted to it.
If he had kept himself surrounded by guys like Quincy who loved the music as passionately as he did, instead of trying to fill the emptiness inside with his (what seemed to be) limitless purchasing power, he would have been ok.
Dude, with his childhood issues you think he needed something like being queer to f*ck him up further? I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did before burnout set in. He had willpower, getting as far as he did.
Reading a special section in the FT today on Brazil made me think of you. I was thinking that, after you finish your extensive exploration of the Civil War, you might want to do some research on Brazilian history. In a number of ways, Brazil is similar to the U.S., including in having a large black population brought over as slaves from Africa. But Brazil's path from slavery until today has been a lot different: no civil war was needed to free the slaves there, for one thing, though Brazil was last in the hemisphere to abolish slavery (of black slaves, that is. There have been some recent reports of indigenous folks used as slaves in remote areas), and, according to one of the pieces in today's FT, Brazil never had anything like Jim Crow. Might be an interesting history to compare and contrast with ours.
Dave, we meet again. I replied to your last post with a quick comment on the education thread.
A book on race relations in Brazil that blew my mind when I was in college is Michael Hanchard's "Orpheus and Power." He argues that racial democracy (which is actually referred to in the active tense by a subject in the FT) was a myth propogated by Brazilian intelligentsia at the turn of the 20th century, and the ongoing effect is a general denial of racial oppression in Brazil. If you read texts on race in Brazil pre-1980's, they are full of references to racial democracy, even racial paradise.
I think that public dialogue on race in Brazil has increased even since Hanchard published his book in 1998. And certainly there is something to be said for the different racial dynamic in Brazil. I think in many ways it is a society that is more liberated and less oppressive around race than ours, and as you point out, it doesn't have some of our historical trauma. But it has it's problems, too.
I'll take a look at your response on the other thread.
Brazil certainly has its issues, and blacks there tend to be poorer than other groups (which is true, pretty much, of blacks in every country with a significant black minority population), but there's definitely a different dynamic there. I may have mentioned this anecdote here before, but once when I was in Brazil with a friend, in his mangled Portuguese, he accidentally used the word for "black" instead of the word for "plate", and our black waitress calmly, and with zero offense taken, pointed to her arm to show what was black and what was a plate. I think an African American waitress would likely have responded differently, and that's part of the different dynamic down there.
You're also right about the role of mythology in Brazil. Brazil's president acts sometimes as if he buys the mythology uncritically. I took him to task in a blog post recently for throwing rocks at the U.S. from the porch in front of his glass house.
YES! Your guest bloggers were terrific. Lots of good NBA talk, too. Speaking of which, I wonder what's taking the Lakers so long to sign Odom? Do you guys think they're playing hardball because they may have other plans?
A bit late but Yes. On the other hand Professor Blight's Book A Slave No More will be here on wednesday, and I was wondering if it was on anyone's list.
Had to miss your reading last night (a very good friend died suddenly, and so...well, there you are). But I appreciated the nice advance notice you gave on this one as opposed to "I'm at the Greenwich Village B&N in 45 minutes!" posts you used to do. :)
Do please keep up this new-found timeliness with regard to your public appearances. I really want to make the next one.
Here's a piece no one cared about. Meh, whatever, probably the most enjoyable article I did during my stint at TIME. Premiered a month before I got laid-off. The nail in the coffin? Ya think?
Here's me going after Al. I didn't so much have a problem with him, as I had a problem with media acting like this dude was the go-to guy for everything black.
This was my first real story at time. I was writing for the Business section, a real change of direction for me. At any rate, it's about Wal-Mart's attempts to colonize the inner-city. As much as I enjoyed this piece, I mostly enjoyed going out to Chicago, which is a beautiful, beautiful city.
This a piece I did about the cops just outside our nation capitol, in Prince George's County, a few years back. I wanted to offer a counter to the dumb, conventional wisdom that if you paint your police force black, you could eradicate police brutality. In fact, Prince George's--one of the richest, blackest counties in the country--also had one of the most brutal police force's in the country.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
To answer the question, yes haha
So. Sheed to the Celtics. Good move?
If they keep everyone healthy for the playoffs, it may turn out to be a brilliant move. But, as we saw with Garnett last season, that is a huge IF. Sheed's a better fit for the Spurs or the Cavs, teams with a good mix of veterans and fresh legs. The Celtics seem like that 2004 Lakers team that lost to the Pistons.
I think they might be resigned to losing Davis, or at least that's what it indicates to me
I don't think I have time for them most days. Did you hear about the MMORPG banking scandal?
EVE Online, meet your own personal Bernie Madoff. I don't know from sports. I'm more your John Hodgman grade of nerd.
That link goes to an old one -- from 2006. The most recent one is here. (I also ran across this BBC link about a corporate takeover from January.)
I don't play MMOs much, but I find some of the stories from EVE absolutely fascinating. And there are so many of them. It's like the Wild West and the high seas and robber barons and corporate espionage all rolled up into one big ball of libertarian dystopia. And that's the way they like it.
If you watch only one completely insane Michael Jackson tribute video today, make it Ron Artest's. There... there are no words.
for anyone interested in recent discussions here of the limits of knowledge and the strains that this puts on our ability to be effective citizens see: Liberal democracy 3.0 By Stephen P. Turner
Ta-nehisi,
Your guest bloggers were excellent. They were a very diverse and interesting group of writers who obviously put a great deal of effort into the assignment.
Agreed.
Yep, all good choices and good contributions.
How about what's going down in Western China? It's amazing that a country where 90-95% of the people are the same ethnic group can still have bloody ethnic violence. Reminds me of J.J. Walker's old joke about Northern Ireland.
In Norther Ireland the catholics and Protestants were of equal proportion, not the Han and Iughurs in Western China. The PRC is trying to eliminate them by demographic bombing of Han chines moving from other provinces to Western China, thus slowly taking over by intermarriage and the like! Sinister!
Wouldn't a large majority of one ethnicity make violence against minorities easier? Ethnic conflict against minorities would probably meet little resistance in such a homogeneous society. And in China 10% of the population is still a large real number of people i.e. around 170 million people.
That is some seriously heartbreaking stuff. China has cracked down so heavily on the Uyghurs, restricting their movement, participation in religious festivals etc. Now after this protest the pictures are showing Han men roaming the streets with clubs searching out Uyghurs to give hell to. They seem so convinced that these people need to be punished and taught a lesson, mob mentality with state approval and international not giving an f at its worst.
Worse, they've got a bunch of ethnically Chinese Hui Muslims denouncing the Uighurs in standard Chinese PRC newspeak. The Hui Muslims actually have a comparatively good deal. Meanwhile, Tibet is a popular cause in the US, and we've sent Uighurs to Gitmo with no trial and no real evidence, and are still locking up some who've been proven to have no real terrorist ties.
A friend who visited Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, described the Uyghurs who lived there as despondent and deeply unhappy with Han demographic and economic domination. The Chinese government is flooding this ethnically Turkic region with Han Chinese not only to cement territorial integrity (huge in Chinese post-colonial psyche) but also to relieve the social pressures associated with over-population in the urbanized coasts.
The fate of the Uyghurs, along with the Tibetans, will likely be somewhat better than that of the Native American tribes. They will be absorbed over the next century into Chinese culture and lose most of their ethnic/cultural identity. Tough choice for these people: You can't win, so do you fight on nobly but tragically or do you concede and join the great Chinese economic miracle? But one things is for certain, the Chinese Communist Party will use any means necessary to subdue this sort of disturbance, including patiently waiting decades for birthrates to do its work. The Uyghurs will lose.
There's also a lot of natural resources in that area, which is another reason the Chinese are keen to strengthen their hold on it.
"Flooding the ... region" suggests that the government is filling up buses with Han Chinese and dropping them off. Isn't it really a matter of market pressures, or people from crowded areas looking for work and a place to live in uncrowded ones? I'm uncomfortable with the idea of an 'ethnic cordon' to prevent that from happening.
They more or less do exactly that - filling up buses with Han and sending them west. It's been a long time since I've been in China, but there is a public and serious effort by planners to spread economic growth from the coasts to the hinterland. "Go West" is a real program. I simply googled it and came up with this:
"College graduates who take jobs in central or western China will be entitled to a full refund of their tuition fees, the State Council said Wednesday."
http://english.sina.com/china/p/2009/0107/210055.html
Yo,
Why did Michael Jackson go Crazy?
Do you think he was a homosexual, and, instead of trying to accept that, he just went off the deep end?
Because, if he was gay, and ashamed or whatever, it would be consistent with him "hating himself" and thus, his becoming a white (kinda) man with straight hair and a thin small nose, who has white children, who are, if my understanding is correct, not even of his blood.
No doubt, in his prime, there was no one better. But, what the f--k caused him to go off the deep end?
DISCLAIMER: the suggestion that he might've been gay has nothing to do with the molestation charges. Whether he was gay or not, IMO, has nothing to do with child molestation.
Don't know, don't care about what was wrong with Michael Jackson. I just know that today he will officially be put to rest and to be honest this makes me very sad. He was the greatest entertainer of all time...
How can anyone ever really know the answer to that question? The one and only person who truly knows is now gone.
All I know is that MJ -- an extremely, extremely talented individual-- was, in the end, a sadly troubled soul. May he RIP.
Having way too much cake and too many people around him attracted to it.
If he had kept himself surrounded by guys like Quincy who loved the music as passionately as he did, instead of trying to fill the emptiness inside with his (what seemed to be) limitless purchasing power, he would have been ok.
Dude, with his childhood issues you think he needed something like being queer to f*ck him up further? I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did before burnout set in. He had willpower, getting as far as he did.
Also, Ta-Nehisi,
Reading a special section in the FT today on Brazil made me think of you. I was thinking that, after you finish your extensive exploration of the Civil War, you might want to do some research on Brazilian history. In a number of ways, Brazil is similar to the U.S., including in having a large black population brought over as slaves from Africa. But Brazil's path from slavery until today has been a lot different: no civil war was needed to free the slaves there, for one thing, though Brazil was last in the hemisphere to abolish slavery (of black slaves, that is. There have been some recent reports of indigenous folks used as slaves in remote areas), and, according to one of the pieces in today's FT, Brazil never had anything like Jim Crow. Might be an interesting history to compare and contrast with ours.
Dave, we meet again. I replied to your last post with a quick comment on the education thread.
A book on race relations in Brazil that blew my mind when I was in college is Michael Hanchard's "Orpheus and Power." He argues that racial democracy (which is actually referred to in the active tense by a subject in the FT) was a myth propogated by Brazilian intelligentsia at the turn of the 20th century, and the ongoing effect is a general denial of racial oppression in Brazil. If you read texts on race in Brazil pre-1980's, they are full of references to racial democracy, even racial paradise.
I think that public dialogue on race in Brazil has increased even since Hanchard published his book in 1998. And certainly there is something to be said for the different racial dynamic in Brazil. I think in many ways it is a society that is more liberated and less oppressive around race than ours, and as you point out, it doesn't have some of our historical trauma. But it has it's problems, too.
Sam,
I'll take a look at your response on the other thread.
Brazil certainly has its issues, and blacks there tend to be poorer than other groups (which is true, pretty much, of blacks in every country with a significant black minority population), but there's definitely a different dynamic there. I may have mentioned this anecdote here before, but once when I was in Brazil with a friend, in his mangled Portuguese, he accidentally used the word for "black" instead of the word for "plate", and our black waitress calmly, and with zero offense taken, pointed to her arm to show what was black and what was a plate. I think an African American waitress would likely have responded differently, and that's part of the different dynamic down there.
You're also right about the role of mythology in Brazil. Brazil's president acts sometimes as if he buys the mythology uncritically. I took him to task in a blog post recently for throwing rocks at the U.S. from the porch in front of his glass house.
Just testing this out.
TNC - When are you going to regale us with your tales of Aspen? You must have some juicy scoop on Sullivan, at the very least.
YES! Your guest bloggers were terrific. Lots of good NBA talk, too. Speaking of which, I wonder what's taking the Lakers so long to sign Odom? Do you guys think they're playing hardball because they may have other plans?
Random thought on MJ service ... I worship Smokey Robinson. So good to see his face and hear his voice today.
I liked his story about ten year old Michael taking his song and singing it like he knew what it was about. Smokey looks good.
A bit late but Yes. On the other hand Professor Blight's Book A Slave No More will be here on wednesday, and I was wondering if it was on anyone's list.
T-N:
Had to miss your reading last night (a very good friend died suddenly, and so...well, there you are). But I appreciated the nice advance notice you gave on this one as opposed to "I'm at the Greenwich Village B&N in 45 minutes!" posts you used to do. :)
Do please keep up this new-found timeliness with regard to your public appearances. I really want to make the next one.
Z-B
Congrats Andy to an epic final. You did good.
ESPN is discussing who the best active athlete is right now. In my book - Tennis is above most sports in what it takes and in terms of everything.
And...
Here the highest view counts of some famous people on YouTube:
Michael Jackson: 21,420,519 views
Justin Timberlake / Beyonce: 13,273,176 views
Madonna / Britney: 5,462,093 views
Magic Johnson: 2,004,345 views
Kobe Bryant: 4,950,989 views
NFL: 8,378,586 views
NBA: 13,865,743 views
Cristiano Ronaldo: 18,698,602 views
Pele: 3,590,553 views
Ronaldinho: 29,358,501 views
No surprises on Dinho, I hope he regains his form. Although I'm surprised Messi isn't up there too.
Dinho needs a reason to get in form and the World Cup is coming soon. Here are Henry and Messi:
Henry 8,030,323 views
Messi 4,687,902 views
So I'm gonna go ahead and assume O'Reilly might come up tomorrow for this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/06/gretchen-carlson-michael_n_226707.html