Here’s an image I just made for this morning’s lecture on writing systems of the world (and specifically why we know so little about the Mayan writing system):

July 2nd, 2009 | Category: linguistics, photos, politics | Leave a comment

As long as it’s still June (and even when it’s not!), check out these amazing photos by Diana Davies from the early days of the Gay Liberation movement in New York. Lots of lovely color photos.

June 30th, 2009 | Category: photos, politics | Leave a comment

Hondureños blocking army tanks with their bodies

One frustrating fact for Americans who want to show their support and solidarity with protesters in the streets of Iran is the narrow leverage that they have. Any involvement coming from the US is going to be viewed with real suspicion — and rightly so, of course. At the same time, US imperialism has pretty much shot its bolt as far as Iran is concerned. They can’t really threaten sanctions or take much of any other active steps to apply pressure to the government there, which means we can’t mobilize one way or another around their attempts to do so.

I don’t have a good solution as concerns that problem, but if you do want to take proactive steps to support democracy, you are in luck this week! The leadership of the military in Honduras arrested their President this weekend, rushing him into exile in Costa Rica and forging a letter of resignation — just like the Venezuelan reactionaries tried to do in 2002. They’ve sworn in a sham president and tried to act as if it were a legal transition of power rather than a violent coup — though they have also given the lie to that by arresting cabinet members and journalists across the country.

Honduras has long been closely tied to the United States. I haven’t looked up exactly how many times the US has invaded their country in the last couple centuries, but I’m going to guess quite a few. During the Reagan years, Honduras was the regional base where the US could train reactionary armies and send them across Central America.? So the people of the US have a special responsibility to Honduras (as we do to Latin America more generally), and we have a federal government right now which has made good noises about not recognizing the coup government (although Hillary Clinton seemed to be sliding away from that pretty quickly today), and may be susceptible to pressure.

I missed the protest outside the Honduran consulate in San Francisco today, but I’ll look to be there in the coming days if they rally again. Now is the time to rally and distribute flyers, call your Congress people, and generally make some noise to support the people of Honduras against government by the gun. Yes to democracy, no to military coups!

June 29th, 2009 | Category: politics | Leave a comment

“The [Indian] central government under the leadership of Queen Victoria’s favorite poet, Lord Lytton, vehemently opposed efforts … to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with marked forces. All through the summer of 1876, while the vital kharif crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India (Kaiser-i-Hind). As The Times’s special correspondent described it, “The Viceroy seemed to have made the tales of Arabian Fiction true … nothing was too ruch, nothing too costly.” “Lytton put on a spectacle … which achieved the two criteria Salisbury had set for him six months earlier, of being ‘gaudy enough to impress the orientals’ … and furthermore a pageant which hid ‘the nakedness of the sword on which we really rely.’ Its “climactic ceremonial” included a week long feast for 68,000 officials, satraps and maharajas: the most colossal and expensive meal in world history. An English journalist later estimated that 100,000 of the Queen Empress’s subjects starved to death in Madras and Mysore in the course of Lytton’s spectacular durbar. …
 
“[Sir Richard] Temple [who was in charge of famine relief efforts in Madras] … now publicly disdained the protests of Cornish and medical officers. They erroneously, and “irresponsibly” in his view, elevated public health above public finance. “Everything,” he lectured, “must be subordinated … to the financial consideration of disbursing the smallest sum of money consistent with the preservation of human life.” He completed his cost-saving expedition to Madras by imposing the Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877, which prohibited at pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market-fixing of grain prices. He also stopped Buckingham from remitting onerous land taxes in the famine districts. In May, after Temple had reported back, the viceroy censured Madras officials for their “exaggerated impressions” of misery and “uncalled for relief.” Temple meanwhile proclaimed that he had put “the famine under control.” (Digby sourly responded that “a famine can scarcely be said to be adequately controlled which leaves one-fourth of the people dead.”)”

– Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

June 22nd, 2009 | Category: bibliophilia, politics | Comments (2)

o hai.

It’s been a little while. Reasons are several; most recently I’ve been fairly preoccupied with lesson planning for my summer school course which begins on Tuesday. Probably the most troubling moment this week was on Wednesday afternoon in the library, when my laptop suddenly started to go up in flames. Not good! But a replacement charger just arrived here this afternoon, so I hope that things will continue on an upswing from here. In terms of the lesson plans, it feels like every day things are more under control than the day before, so I should be good to go by Tuesday.

(via)

So, Iran. I hate to write about the news of the day that everyone and their uncle has already picked apart; but on this one I’m feeling so much “someone on the internet is WRONG!” frustration at liberal and leftwing discussions that I’ve seen online about the situation, that I would like to put in my oar.

Unfortunately, in this case my oar isn’t worth that much, since I can’t claim any special knowledge about the subject.? So I’ll do the next best thing and point to some resources and discussions that I found useful for knocking down myths and figuring out what questions to ask about what’s going on in the Islamic Republic.

Current news:

The best place for photos and videos and important updates is Saeed Valadbaygi’s “Revolutionary Road” blog. Saeed is a leftwing student in Iran and he’s been posting non-stop. People on facebook should also friend Saeed to get running updates there.

One of the biggest questions for me is whether the Iranian working class is going to get active in support of the protest movement. Some signs that they might: a work slowdown at Iran’s major automobile company, and a statement of support for the protests from the Vahed Bus Company Trade Union.

On the election results:

Did Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win the election fair and square? Short answer: yes. Slightly longer answer: we don’t know, but the official results are very plausible and consistent with polls and there hasn’t been any evidence of fraud produced so far.

For a typical statement of the case for fraud, see this Christian Science Monitor story. Note the total lack of real evidence of fraud; the claims basically boil down to “this seems unlikely…” or “this was not what analysts expected”.

For an argument that the results seem pretty reasonable, here’s one piece. For discussion of various anti-Ahmadinejad rumors and hoaxes, see here.

One must also mention Louis Proyect’s beautiful piece laying out the hypocrisy of Western media and mainstream politics when it comes to Iran vs. US-aligned countries in the Middle East. Those Americans who would go green to support the opposition in Iran, when did their hearts bleed for the people of Saudi Arabia and Egypt?

On the execrable idea of a “twitter revolution” in Iran:

http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/americas-iranian-twitter-revolution/

http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/the-irony-of-irans-twitter-revolution/

Some background on the Iranian revoluton:

A basic rundown here. I’m not familiar with the site so I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it’s a quick and easy to read summary that seems to lay things out plausibly at least.

There’s a gallery of the Iranian left here. What’s striking is how few old people you see in these pictures. Being a leftwing revolutionary in Iran seems to have never been the kind of job that many people get to retire from.

How the first-world left should understand and relate to what’s happening now:

The best discussion I have seen anywhere has been taking place at Lenin’s Tomb, the Hausblog of the British SWP. You can see their posts on Iran here. The discussion there has been shaped by the differing positions of two of the site authors; one is arguing for the left to support Iran as an anti-imperialist stronghold and the Iranian regime as more or less legitimate as confirmed through the most democratic political system in the middle east.

The other position sees the election contest in Iran as a clash between members of the ruling class, which the left should not be involved with; but also looks for the potential in the protest movement to develop into a more profound revolutionary socialist upsurge. Though I have a strong predisposition toward the latter position, I think the discussion here is still useful, especially as it unfolds together with the rapidly moving events.

Much more tepidly, I would point out this article. Though it’s rife with irritating internet jocularity* and some very problematic ethnic stereotyping, it does draw on some regional and local history to make a serious point about the difficulty of understanding and analyzing events that have some specificity to another culture and history. Officially disrecommended — see comments.

Obviously I am not in favor of abandoning such analysis (though I dunno about the author of this article); but the importance of taking imperialist ideology and the effacement of the specific culture and history of third world peoples is important.

And I have to admit I did like some of the turns of phrase in that article, like describing Ahmadinejad’s look as “hungover Soviet janitor” or Ayatollah Khomeini as “Dracula’s mean uncle.”

Anyway. Blah blah blah politics, let’s end with a photo from the garden!

If you’re asking yourself, “Is that a frog inside a squash flower inside Jesse’s garden?” — then let me tell you, hell yes it is.

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* This from the guy who began this post with lolcat jargon? Honestly.

June 20th, 2009 | Category: photos, politics | Comments (5)

Pamphlet from the International Socialists’ gay caucus:

June 6th, 2009 | Category: gender/queer lib., politics | Comments (1)

(via)

Reports that I posted this while myself being a man sitting on the couch cannot be confirmed at this time.

June 3rd, 2009 | Category: gender/queer lib., politics | Comments (4)

Once again flickr delivers amazing stuff. Here is a photo — turned into a postcard maybe? — showing a participant in the Spartacist uprising in Germany after being captured by the military. (I don’t know if that’s the regular military, the Freikorps, some militia or something else, but experts in WW1-era Germanicana could surely tell you.)

There’s not much more info on the flickr page, so I don’t know who this guy was or exactly what happened to him. But we can speculate that things didn’t turn out much better for him than they did for the German revolution.

May 30th, 2009 | Category: photos, politics | Leave a comment

There are some things you pass by day in and day out for many years, but never actually see them until you notice them on yelp.

Had breakfast at one such place today. Paula’s is perhaps my new favorite restaurant in town. $1.99 for potatoes, eggs and toast; $1 for coffee; and best of all, you can eat in the VW van they have set up parked in front of the restaurant, complete with table and chairs, TV and VCR with an extensive collection of surfing and canoeing videos.

Anyway, life goes on here; am starting to get into serious planning mode for my summer class, which begins in less than a month. Also trying to finish a dissertation chapter draft and one or two proceedings papers between now and then. So all in all I should probably be spending less time in the garden, but time and tide wait for no man; and that’s why I made a new raised bed plot today and mulched the squash and corn patch. Priorities, people, priorities.

May 27th, 2009 | Category: uncategorized | Leave a comment