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Category: General

Sand Creek

[ 25 ] November 29, 2014 |

On November 29, 1864, the Sand Creek Massacre took place, one of if not the worst and most disturbing massacre of Native Americans in the history of the United States. The Colorado militia, under the command of Col. John Chivington, an ardent abolitionist, attacked a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho in southeastern Colorado, killing around 200. We have discussed this event before here in conjunction with Ari Kelman’s book. Ned Blackhawk, one of the leading historians of Native America, notes the connections between the Civil War and the final crushing of indigenous peoples on the Plains.

Sand Creek, Bear River and the Long Walk remain important parts of the Civil War and of American history. But in our popular narrative, the Civil War obscures such campaigns against American Indians. In fact, the war made such violence possible: The paltry Union Army of 1858, before its wartime expansion, could not have attacked, let alone removed, the fortified Navajo communities in the Four Corners, while Southern secession gave a powerful impetus to expand American territory westward. Territorial leaders like Evans were given more resources and power to negotiate with, and fight against, powerful Western tribes like the Shoshone, Cheyenne, Lakota and Comanche. The violence of this time was fueled partly by the lust for power by civilian and military leaders desperate to obtain glory and wartime recognition.

Expansion continued after the war, powered by a revived American economy but also by a new spirit of national purpose, a sense that America, having suffered in the war, now had the right to conquer more peoples and territories.

The United States has yet to fully recognize the violent destruction wrought against indigenous peoples by the Civil War and the Union Army. Connor and Evans have cities, monuments and plaques in their honor, as well as two universities and even Colorado’s Mount Evans, home to the highest paved road in North America.

We have also talked about this recently in terms of Andrew Graybill’s new book on the Marias Massacre in 1870. The miitiarization and industrialization that the Civil War wrought were very easily turned against Native Americans. That doesn’t mean that without these things somehow the bison are not exterminated and Native resistance crushed eventually, but it wouldn’t have happened so rapidly and with such brutal force at that time. Moreover, it’s really important to think of the devastating conquering of indigenous people in the West as part and parcel of the larger Civil War. The brilliant tactics we rightly laud William Tecumseh Sherman for when used against slaveholders we can equally say were horrifying when used against Native Americans, in no small part because when racism was added to them, the murder of women and children was openly practiced by the military in the West when it was not in the South.

….See also this excellent piece on a man who discovered his ancestor was directly involved in the atrocities at Sand Creek.

“Rice did not lie”

[ 62 ] November 28, 2014 |

As appalling as Ray Rice’s underlying behavior was, this is clearly the correct decision.  Yes, if the NFL had a competently designed system of punishment, knocking a woman unconscious would not merit a significantly lower suspension than using recreational drugs.  Nonetheless, the NFL did not have such a system when Rice committed the offense (and, for that matter, doesn’t now, but anyway.)  The idea that Rice should retroactively receive a greater punishment than Goodell thinks a domestic offender should get in a standard announced after the fact because he “lied to Goodell” is absurd on its face.  And the absurdity is compounded by the fact that it’s vastly more likely that Goodell is lying than Rice is.

Obviously, Rice may never play an NFL game again; he was a replacement-level player at the NFL’s least important offensive skill position last year, and if his behavior means NFL GMs don’t want to gamble that he has something left in the tank I don’t have a problem with that.  But the Ravens should pay him what they owe him, and he shouldn’t be singled out for uniquely harsh discipline from the NFL.

Death to America

[ 18 ] November 28, 2014 |

I wonder if Iran is accepting American entries to its Death to America festival:

As part of the campaign, Ouj also launched the “Death to America Grand Award” festival, sponsored by themselves and other similar organizations. The festival took place for the first time last year and gave away considerable cash prizes to its contestants. Now that the Vienna nuclear talks have ended inconclusively, the second festival is in the pipeline and billboards have gone up across the city to promote it.

According to reports, its sponsors also include Hezbollah Cyber, Saraj Cyberspace Organization, Tasnim news agency, Fars news agency and Nasr TV Network—all of which are affiliated to the Revolutionary Guards.

Winning contestants at the festival last year were awarded their prizes by the likes of Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, a commander in the Revolutionary Guards, and Hossein Shariatmadari, the managing editor of the hardliner daily Kayhan, the day before the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

According to Mohammad Hasani, the festival secretary, the event will start on December 7 and people taking part must incorporate themes such as, “Why death to America?” “America and Human rights” “America and Islamophobia” “America in the Embrace of World Zionism” “America and Nurturing Terrorism” and many more, into their artwork.

According to festival organizers, the “Death to America” Grand Prize will have a main competition for pictures, posters and cartoons and a side competition for documentaries, video clips, songs, articles, blogs, software and mobile apps. The winning prize in the main competition is $3,700, with a runner-up prize of $1,800 and a third prize of $750. While in the smaller competition, the first prize is $1,100, the second prize is $550 and the third prize is $260.

The festival’s finale will take place on February 11, 2015 on the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

Wouldn’t pictures of Black Friday be enough to win?

“We must all remember how Our Lord and Savior suffered when the Romans stabbed Him in the McRibs.”

[ 60 ] November 28, 2014 |

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The “church branding agency” probably should’ve went with Chick fil A — what with the in-built demographic crossover — but I can see “the McMass project” working out just as well.

How Often Do “Disruptive” Business Practices Actually Mean “Illegal” Business Practices?

[ 103 ] November 28, 2014 |

Uber, once again proving the “sharing” economy capitalists are as bad as any traditional economy capitalists you could create:

Security researcher GironSec has pulled Uber’s Android app apart and discovered that it’s sending a huge amount of personal data back to base – including your call logs, what apps you’ve got installed, whether your phone is vulnerable to certain malware, whether your phone is rooted, and your SMS and MMS logs, which it explicitly doesn’t have permission to do. It’s the latest in a series of big-time missteps for a company whose core business model is, frankly, illegal in most of its markets as well.

Taxi-busting ride share app Uber might have an operating model that suits customers better than traditional, regulated taxi services – but the company’s aggressively disruptive (and frequently illegal) business practices don’t seem to stop at harming the taxi industry.

Its vicious attacks on competitors have included ordering and cancelling more than five and a half thousand rides through its chief competitor Lyft. Its senior Vice President of Business, Emil Michael, casually mentioned at a dinner that maybe Uber could start digging up personal dirt on journalists critical of the company.

Black Friday Strikes

[ 5 ] November 28, 2014 |

While you are engaging in America’s most consumerist day of the year, a real feat given the competition, remember the workers struggling to make ends meet that serve you. Especially remember the Wal-Mart workers. Some are engaging in Black Friday strikes, the 3rd consecutive year of these protests:

Kicking off the third consecutive year of protests, Walmart workers in six states have formally submitted strike notices to their bosses ahead of the Black Friday shopping frenzy, calling for higher wages and better hours, according to OUR Walmart, the group representing the workers.

OUR Walmart did not provide an estimate on how many workers planned to take part in the strikes this year. It did, however, say that workers in Wisconsin, Louisiana, Florida, California, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., have already delivered notices, and it anticipates workers in Illinois, Minnesota, Texas and Pennsylvania will do so as well.

Charles Brown, an OUR Walmart member who unloads trucks at a Walmart in Newport News, Virginia, said he plans to miss three shifts this week to take part in the demonstrations. Brown said he joined the group in September to demand a greater say in scheduling as well as “more respect” from management.

“Some [other workers] may want to do a strike as well but are hesitant,” said Brown, 27. “They need to know they don’t have anything to be afraid of. If we don’t stand up, no one else is going to stand up for us.”

Black Friday has become an annual rallying cry for the anti-Walmart crowd, with labor activists and other progressives pillorying the world’s largest retailer over its wages and scheduling practices for store employees. It also marks the most contentious week of the year between the Arkansas-based retail giant and OUR Walmart, which is backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union that’s been working to organize Walmart employees for years.

The $15 minimum wage and full-time work are among the major demands, although it depends on the worker and the store.

Non-believing clergy

[ 116 ] November 28, 2014 |

An interesting but flawed and limited take on a phenomenon I’ve long been fascinated with. I’ve met a few such people, over the years, and they’ve suggested to me the ranks of clergy who fit that description are far greater than anyone realizes. Clergy have a set general tasks–counselor, community organizer, etc.–and their and their parishioners religious beliefs and commitments are one of the primary tools they’re expected to use in these tasks. This gives them a perspective on their faith lay people are considerably less likely to have–they see how it can work, but also how and when it doesn’t. There are a variety of ways to cope with that, and some of them, it seems to me, could have a significantly corrosive effect on faith.

It’s limitations and flaws are largely a function of viewing the phenomenon through the eyes of evangelical atheism. Such a perspective treats non-believing clergy instrumentally and teleologically. There’s no evidence any critical energy was directed at the coincidence that the outcome best for Cristina’s political movement is also, exactly and precisely, what is best for such individuals. Now that they’ve abandoned religious belief they rightfully and properly belong on team public atheist; they merely need help to find the resources, psychologically, financially, and otherwise, to make that next big step and become what they’re supposed to be. (The silliest part of the article is the breathless fantasy of a mass public conversion to atheism by clergy triggering the collapse of organized religion.)

But conversion stories are old and familiar. I’m much more interested in those who chose to stay in their positions. Not the megachurch grifters and profit-takers, but the ordinary and decent people making a modest living and trying sincerely to do good and help people. Some of them, no doubt, are like Rumpole’s father: “a Church of England clergyman who, in early middle life, came to the reluctant conclusion that he no longer believed any of the 39 articles” but “as he was not fitted by character or training for any other profession” he soldiered on. Some of these people might appreciate the rescue Christina wishes to offer; others may simply be comfortable where they are. But it’s a third group that interests me the most: those who have ceased to believe but don’t see that as a reason they should leave their position. How do they view the positive value of the religious beliefs they teach and reinforce? How do they counsel or approach fellow doubters? For obvious reasons, such a perspective is very rarely stated forthrightly. Christina closes by quoting and endorsing the position that if churches would merely abandon religious dogma and ritual and become community centers, the good work they do would just continue but would be enhanced. There’s no argument offered for this position, which should provoke some skepticism from anyone as empirically minded as evangelical atheists like Christina purport to be; I’d be far more interested in hearing the perspective of a practicing but non-believing religious leader on the subject.

I Love The Smell of Georgia Burning in the Morning

[ 21 ] November 27, 2014 |

Here’s something not to be thankful for in American history: treason in defense of slavery. Rebecca Onion has a review of what looks to be a very interesting new book on the sensory impact of the Civil War, exploring how the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the war were experienced by people.

Hancock, intent upon serving as a nurse in the aftermath of the battle, brought that average nose to Gettysburg, where she was too late to smell the flowering peach blossoms and the saltpeter of expended gunpowder, but in plenty of time to smell the dead. She wrote home:

“A sickening, overpowering, awful stench announced the presence of the unburied dead upon which the July sun was mercilessly shining and at every step the air grew heavier and fouler until it seemed to possess a palpable horrible density that could be seen and felt and cut with a knife …”

Hancock, Smith writes, was so overcome by the smell that she viewed it as an oppressive, malignant force, capable of killing the wounded men who were forced to lie amid the corpses until the medical corps could reach them. Hancock’s account, vivid in its horror, proves the limitations of the visual record of war. No photograph of the aftermath of the battle, writes Smith, could “capture the sounds, the groans or the rustle of twitching bodies”—and no image could ever capture that smell.

And the meanings of these sensory experiences was complex:

The senses also had social meaning to mid-19th-century Americans, marking differences between types of people. A 19th-century woman like Cornelia Hancock might process the smell of Gettysburg differently than we do because of the contemporary belief that cultivated people had sensitive noses and should guard themselves from unpleasant odors. The besieged citizens of Vicksburg weren’t merely turned off by the poor provisions during the long siege by Grant’s army; they were horrified at the idea of eating the same kinds of foods as the enslaved people around them. In the South, a sophisticated sense of taste was a marker of social status. Black people’s mouths and palates, by contrast, were considered by Southerners to be “physically unrefined and aesthetically immature,” Smith writes, a stereotype “justifying the allocation of plain, functional, and flavorless food to slaves on plantations.” White residents eating a monotonous cornbread and bacon diet inside the crowded city or in their cave shelters felt their social boundaries collapsing, even as they grew hungrier and hungrier.

I love the smell of Georgia burning in the morning.

Happy Carbonara Day!

[ 16 ] November 27, 2014 |

Obligatory Calvin Trillin link, supplemented by a Kosher version. But whether you have turkey or choose something that tastes good instead, happy Thanksgiving!

Also, I’ll have more on this later this weekend, but hopefully this is a literal but not figurative #slatepitch.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[ 173 ] November 27, 2014 |

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Let’s learn a bit the lovely people we are remembering today:

On May 26, 1637, a Puritan force fortified by Native allies massacred a Pequot fort in Connecticut, killing as many as 500 men, women and children and burning the village to the ground.

…

McBride called the Pequot a “complex society” and the Pequot War one of the most controversial and significant events in Colonial history. The attack at Mystic Fort, which was the first of three massacres that occurred during the war, changed the way Native forces looked at warfare.

The massacre, led by English Captain John Mason, was the first documented use of “total war” against American Indians, meaning the English force slaughtered all Pequot they came in contact with, making no distinction between armed warriors or helpless women and children.

“By any standards, it was a massacre,” McBride said. “The English did intend to kill everyone there, but they did not do it to steal land or to control trade. They did it out of fear that the Pequot and their Native allies would perpetuate a region-wide attack on the English.”

Justifying his conduct, Captain Mason declared the attack was an act of God, he wrote in his Brief History of the Pequot War, published posthumously in 1736.

God “laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn making [the Pequot] as a fiery Oven… Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling [Mystic] with dead Bodies.”

Native peoples in North America understood war. They didn’t understand genocide, at least not until the Puritans brought it to them in 1637.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Milk, Brought to You by Coke

[ 111 ] November 26, 2014 |

Coca-Cola is dealing with lagging soda sales by investing in moo juice:

With soda sales sagging, Coca-Cola is moving into the dairy business. It plans to offer milk with some big differences to the stuff now on supermarket shelves: For starters, it will cost twice as much.

A Coke exec told a conference last week that the company’s Fairlife will be “a milk that’s premiumized and tastes better and we’ll charge twice as much for it as the milk we’re used to buying,” the Guardian reports. Chief Customer Officer Sandy Douglas said the milk, which is being produced in venture involving 92 family-owned farms and will launch next month, will contain 50% more protein and 30% less sugar than regular milk.

A filtering process will also make it lactose-free.

Why, yes, I would love to pay twice as much for my milk! And I know that if there’s one company I trust to produce milk that is lower in sugar and higher in good things for you, it’s Coca-Cola.

I’m not lactose-intolerant so I can’t speak to this, but is there a real appeal to a lactose-free milk that would convince people to pay twice as much as regular milk? I know dairy-free faux dairy products, such as the unfortunate “cheese,” are not great, but there are lots of other ways to cook as well. Just curious here.

The problem with eyewitness testimony

[ 13 ] November 26, 2014 |

More on the legal process in the killing of Michael Brown.

A host of psychological factors make eyewitness testimony far from reliable. . .The easiest way to sum up those factors is this: People are as a general matter actually quite bad at recalling accurately what they’ve witnessed, and, worse yet, they (we) tend to have great confidence in our ability to recall events accurately. More perversely still, people attempting to judge the credibility of eyewitnesses put great stock in the level of confidence a witness displays in regard to the accuracy of the witness’s recall, even though experimental psychology has demonstrated that there is no correlation between such confidence and accurate recall.

Many other factors conspire to make eyewitness testimony unreliable: confirmation bias leads us to see what we expect to see, even if it isn’t actually there, while misinformation effects produce false memories of things that never happened. A famous example of the latter is a Dutch psychology experiment in which more than half of the subjects recalled seeing film footage of an airliner crashing into a building, after researchers referenced the footage in interviews with the subjects. Although the plane crash was a real event that the subjects all recalled vividly, no footage of the crash ever existed.

In another famous experiment, subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by two basketball teams wearing different colored jerseys. In the midst of the game, a man in a gorilla suit walked slowly across the court. When asked afterward if they had noticed anything unusual during the game, nearly half of the subjects didn’t recall anything noteworthy. Such experiments illustrate our tendency to miss even the most obvious evidence when we are under various kinds of cognitive stress.

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