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Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Real letters about real bloggers

Bob McRuer (whose paper at the Disability Studies conference, “Crip Eye for the Normate Guy,” was one of the highlights of the weekend) writes to say,

My own web surfing of late convinces me that Real Bloggers Do Electoral College Predictions.  I say Kerry holds the Gore states and picks up New Hampshire, Nevada, and Ohio.  My occasional flashes of panic/fear are most often occasioned by Wisconsin and Iowa.  And I’ll really go out on a limb and say Kerry picks up D.C., despite the 2 or 3 gay Republicans who after deep soul-searching and wallet-checking decide that they’re going to stand by their man, giving him two arms to cling to when nights are cold and lonely.

Even though he does things they don’t understand, yes, I know.

OK, then, I’ll get around to mapping out the Electoral College Map one of these days.  And I haven’t even finished picking out Kerry’s cabinet yet!  I have Lani Guinier for Attorney General and Brad DeLong at Treasury, Doug Henwood at Commerce and Al Gore at Interior.  But I just can’t decide on Agriculture-- and it’s a tossup between Jonathan Kozol and Henry Louis Gates at Education.  So much to do, so much to do.  Suggestions welcome!

UPDATE:  The first suggestion is to move Henwood over to the Office of Management and Budget.  Good one!  Keep ‘em coming. . . .

Posted by Michael on 03/09 at 06:58 AM
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Fifty thousand and more

Sometime during the night we surpassed 50,000 visitors for the year.  It took 44 days to cross the 25,000 mark and another 25 to get to 50,000, and if we keep increasing readership at this pace, all 6.5 billion people on Earth will be visiting this site daily by May 16 or 17 of this year.  Honestly, I thought world domination would take much longer than this-- I was planning on late 2009, myself.

Thanks to everyone for stopping by.  Remember, you don’t have to do a thing to keep this site free and open to the public.  And if you’re so inclined, have a look around in the essays section while you’re here.

Posted by Michael on 03/09 at 06:44 AM
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Conference final

Well, the Disability Studies and the University conference rocked.  Fine presentations, fine facilities, much camaraderie, and a lively sense of what to do next.  In the next few weeks I might post my own paper here, but in the meantime I have to rewrite it and make it longer so that I can present it at Columbia the week after next, and maybe at Ohio State in April.  In the meantime I have to give a talk to the Down Syndrome Association of Greater St. Louis.  No, most of the time I’m not this busy travelling; on the contrary, most of the time my life is every bit as boring as I said it was back in my second post to this site.  But this month is an exception.  It’s hard to travel when you’re teaching MWF, anyway, and the tiny turboprops give me backaches, dropsy, psoriasis, vapors, and mossy teeth.

One of these days I want to put together an academic conference that addresses the phenomenon of academic conferences.  It will be called “The Longer Version,” and will be distinguished by three features:  one, every paper will have a respondent who, instead of waiting for the paper to end, will simply snort, harrumph, and blurt “I think not!” at random moments during the paper.  Two, questioners will be required to begin all questions by saying, “this is really more of a comment than a question-- I wonder if you could say more about X,” on the condition that X was either unmentioned in or tangential to the paper itself.  (Questions must be at least three minutes long.) And three, every speaker will be required to answer these questions by saying, “I actually address this question in the longer version of this paper,” regardless of whether there is a longer version or not.  (If the conference proceedings are published, they will consist only of sections of papers that were cut for time during the actual conference.)

Actually, one of the reasons the Disability Studies conference was fun was that the Q and A parts of the conference really were full of Qs and As.  Amazing but true!

Posted by Michael on 03/09 at 05:54 AM
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Thursday, March 04, 2004

Fear of a queer constitution

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to rise above satire in my posts about the right’s opposition to gay marriage (here and here)-- it’s just that when I come across certain culturally conservative positions in their violent death throes, I find that ridicule is sometimes the emotionally safest response I have.  If I were gay, chances are I’d be more inclined to engage the issue more substantially, and object to-- among other things-- the serious limitations entailed in most contemporary thinking about forms of companionate coupledom.  Safer for me, I suppose, to imagine my Mullah/Senator Rick Santorum showing up in New Paltz, New York asking for permission to marry his dog.

Fortunately, I have some brilliant queer theorist friends and the technological capacity to link to their latest work.  Check out these two essays-- one by Robert McRuer, the other by Lisa Duggan.  You’ll be glad you did-- and you’ll be both smarter and queerer for reading ‘em, too.

UPDATE:  Oops, forgot to explain that headline.  From the closing grafs of McRuer’s piece:

It’s ironic that the culture has increasingly and quietly assimilated queer cultural and relational forms even as we have been surrounded by loud cultural conversations about the need to protect the sanctity of heterosexual “marriage.” In the face of this irony, LGBT folks could, perhaps, push for a constitutional amendment to keep straight people away from our sacred institutions. . . .

I didn’t want to leave the impression that on the subject of gay marriage, I was the Satire Guy and Bob was the Straight Man.

Posted by Michael on 03/04 at 04:59 PM
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Blogorama

Part of the fun of blogreading, I’ve learned, is the sheer metonymic skid involved.  A system of differences with no positive term . . . hey!  this means the blogosphere is structured like a language!  I feel a Theory coming on!  Terry Eagleton, this one’s for you!  No, wait a second.  Hold that order.

Maybe I should put this another way:  blogs lead to blogs lead to blogs, and sometimes you make new friends and bump into old ones.  For instance: University of Chicago physicist Sean Carroll has a new blog, definitely worth checking out.  It’s called “Preposterous Universe,” and Sean should know, because he’s a cosmologist.  (I had a brief fling with astrophysics as an undergraduate and just loved it-- not only because it’s managed to figure out where we live and roughly how most of the neighborhood works, but also because at its bizarre theory-edges, the field is willing to entertain completely weird-ass possibilities like Dirac’s Large Numbers Hypothesis, never mind the existence of antimatter and the eleven-dimensional strings wound up in Calabi-Yau spaces . . . hey, wait a minute, there is such a thing as antimatter!  And maybe string theory really works!  Hey, it’s a preposterous universe out there.  Go ask Sean about it.) Also, the very funny and very smart Roger Ailes gave me a shout and a blogroll link on his “enemies list” (that’s irony, I think-- unless . . . unless . . . unless he really is that Roger Ailes, and wouldn’t that be terrible?).  Thanks, Roger.

Then there’s a pair of fine, fine critics and very Bad Subjects with blogs-- Charlie Bertsch and Steve Rubio.  These guys rock.  Just one thing, Charlie.  Back on February 29, apparently, you wrote

Late Night Louisville

Many of the bars here stay open until 4am.

How can Kentucky have a more civilized “beer o-clock” than California?

And what were the chances that I would be discussing Habermas’s theory of communicative action, particularly the paradoxical temporality of his “ideal speech situation,” at 3am?

I’m not sure why you’re so surprised by this.  The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was itself based on a number of Habermas’s 4am bar-conversations-- sure, when the book was published, J?ērgen claimed he was talking about “coffee houses” instead, but come on, we all know what he really meant.  The theory of communicative action, and the “paradoxical temporality” of which you speak, is built on the premise that certain kinds of potentially (mutually) transformative modes of reciprocal recognition can be realized only in public institutions that create the conditions of possibility for direct, face-to-face interaction.  And these would be?  Hello?  Maybe places with pool tables and juke boxes, hm?

So in the end, this one’s for you, J?ērgermeister, dude.  Stop by these sites and say hello to everyone-- I’ll get around to updating the blogroll when I get back from Atlanta.

Posted by Michael on 03/04 at 03:50 PM
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Hitler/ bin Laden ‘04

I didn’t say it-- U. S. Representative Tom Cole (R- Oklahoma) did:

Republican Congressman Tom Cole claims a vote against the re-election of President Bush is like supporting Adolph Hitler during World War Two. It’s what he said recently before a meeting of Canadian County Republicans.

U.S. Representative Tom Cole might have stirred up Democrats by saying a vote against the re-election of President Bush is like supporting Adolph Hitler during World War Two. Or supporting Osama bin Laden now. “If George Bush loses the election, Osama bin Laden wins the election,” Cole is quoted in this week’s edition of the Yukon Review which covered the recent meeting of the Canadinan County Republicans where Cole was a speaker. The newspaper says Cole claims if Bush loses his re-election bid, the enemies of the U.S. will interpret it as a victory for bin Laden. No comment so far from Oklahoma Democratic party leaders to see if they think Cole is comparing John Kerry to Adolph Hitler or Osama bin Laden. In the Yukon Review article, Cole is quoted as asking what Hitler might have thought had Franklin Roosevelt not been re-elected in 1944.

If Bush loses the election, bin Laden wins the election?  What dimension did this guy come from?  First of all, a vote for Kerry is not a vote for bin Laden-- it’s merely a vote for someone who has long been a close associate of bin Laden.  Yes, there’s a possibility that Kerry might appoint bin Laden as his Secretary of State or Defense, but no, when you vote for Kerry you’re not electing bin Laden directly to the Presidency.  So let’s get that straight.  Second, it makes no sense at all to ask Oklahoma Democratic party leaders if they think Representative Cole is comparing John Kerry to Hitler or bin Laden-- quite clearly, the good Congressman said no such thing.  He merely said that voting for Kerry is like supporting Hitler or bin Laden.  And third, just because voting for Kerry is like supporting bin Laden, that shouldn’t be taken to mean that bin Laden supporters are voting for Kerry.  Al-Qaeda’s official position on the 2004 race is already a matter of record, although apparently some bin Laden supporters are holding out for Roy Moore, on the grounds that they would prefer to “vote their consciences” rather than support the “stale duopoly” of American politics.

Posted by Michael on 03/04 at 07:44 AM
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