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Last month, Indian Country Today released its list of the worst five presidents vis a vis American Indians. Here’s what they came up with:
Andrew Jackson
Dwight Eisenhower
George W. Bush, Jr.
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses GrantA list like this is designed to be debated, and I could make a case here or there. But quibbles aside, there’s no debating the man at the top of the list: Andrew Jackson. Frankly, I would have been shocked if they had picked anyone other than Old Hickory. And indeed, few historians would disagree that he was the worst president for American Indians, and maybe by a long shot.
However, for a number of years now, I’ve been cantankerously telling anyone who will listen that Jackson wasn’t just the worst president vis a vis Indians; I think he’s actually the worst U.S. president of all time, period. And now seems like as good a time as any to make my case, which boils down to three major factors: his aforementioned Indian policy; his economic policies; and his political legacy.
Indian Policy- When it comes to Indian affairs, there has been no shortage of presidential scoundrels. From George Washington to Zachary Taylor, several men (including Jackson) literally killed Indians on their way to the White House. During the nation’s first century, a parade of presidents presided over a shockingly violent colonial conquest of the continent. So what sets Andrew Jackson apart? More…
Via Science Daily
Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.
The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves,” explains Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study’s lead author. More…
In recent years, The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations has become larger, too large in fact as the amount of top-quality material we are receiving has grown. This has occurred even though we have continued to tighten our already-rigorous acceptance procedures.
As a consequence, we have decided to divide the journal into a number of thematically focused journals, plus a highlights journal which contains reprints of top-ranked and invited articles from plenary speakers at the Diversity Conference.
This development will have a number of advantages to authors and readers. The journals will be of a more ‘normal’ size. Individual papers will be published electronically and as a single-article paper offprint as soon as they are ready, followed by the full issue of each journal on regular, scheduled publication dates four times per year both electronically and in print. The journals will be more accessible and coherent, as more closely aligned articles will now be better grouped. For these reasons, the new journals are likely to gain enhanced recognition in journal indexes and citation counts.
In the area addressed by the Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations knowledge community, these will be the journals into which articles will be published:
- The International Journal of Organizational Diversity
- The International Journal of Community Diversity
- The International Journal of Diverse Identities
- The International Journal of Diversity in Education
Each of these thematically focused journals will be clearly linked to the highlights journal with the following subtitle, ‘A section of The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations’.
Authors can request which of the thematic journals they would prefer for the publication of their article, should it receive a favorable review and a reviewer recommendation to publish. Alternatively, when the author does not opt to make a selection, the Common Ground editorial team will curate each paper into the appropriate thematic journal.
Authors will not submit directly to the highlights journal. This journal will consist only of reprints of articles from the thematic journals. This will not be a second publication of the article, and the subtitle of the highlights journal will clearly indicate that this journal only consists of reprints of highlights of general interest from the thematic journals.
Participants at the Diversity Conference and members of the Diversity Open Institute are provided subscription access to all journals in this family of journals for the 12-month period associated with their conference registration or Institute membership dues.
This is an exciting development for the Diversity knowledge community, one which we believe will greatly benefit both authors and readers.
Accommodations for recommended lodging during the conference are now available on the accommodations page of the conference website.
Because of the University of British Columbia’s unique residential location outside of the downtown area, hotels in close proximity to the university are limited. To assist delegates with accommodation options, we have arranged for special reduced conference rates at the deluxe on-campus hotel residences, Walter Gage Residence and the West Coast Suites. Conference rates are available for booking until 10 May, 2012.
To take advantage of these special rates and for more information on the conference accommodations, please visit our web-site.
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books
To Kenneth Roth:
In your Introduction to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2012, “Time to Abandon the Autocrats and Embrace Rights,” you urge support for the newly elected governments that have brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Tunisia and Egypt. In your desire to “constructively engage” with the new governments, you ask states to stop supporting autocrats. But you are not a state; you are the head of an international human rights organization whose role is to report on human rights violations, an honorable and necessary task which your essay largely neglects.
You say, “It is important to nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam while standing firm against repression in its name,” but you fail to call for the most basic guarantee of rights—the separation of religion from the state. Salafi mobs have caned women in Tunisian cafes and Egyptian shops; attacked churches in Egypt; taken over whole villages in Tunisia and shut down Manouba University for two months in an effort to exert social pressure on veiling. And while “moderate Islamist” leaders say they will protect the rights of women (if not gays), they have done very little to bring these mobs under control. You, however, are so unconcerned with the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities that you mention them only once, as follows: “Many Islamic parties have indeed embraced disturbing positions that would subjugate the rights of women and restrict religious, personal, and political freedoms. But so have many of the autocratic regimes that the West props up.” Are we really going to set the bar that low? This is the voice of an apologist, not a senior human rights advocate. More…
Courtesy of Edge
On April 22, 2005, Harvard University’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative (MBB) held a defining debate on the public discussion that began on January 16th with the public comments by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, on sex differences between men and women and how they may relate to the careers of women in science. The debate at MBB, “The Gender of Gender and Science” was “on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes”.
It’s interesting to note that since the controversy surrounding Summers’ remarks began, there has been an astonishing absence of discussion of the relevant science…you won’t find it in the hundreds and hundreds of articles in major newspapers; nor will find it in the Harvard faculty meetings where the president of the leading University in America was indicted for presenting controversial ideas.
Scientists debate continually, and reality is the check. They may have egos as large as those possessed by the iconic figures of the academic humanities, but they handle their hubris in a very different way. They can be moved by arguments, because they work in an empirical world of facts, a world based on reality. There are no fixed, unalterable positions. They are both the creators and the critics of their shared enterprise. Ideas come from them and they also criticize one another’s ideas. More…
By Lisa Levy via The Rumpus
Even after he published Prufrock and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot continued to work his day job at a bank. The new volume of his letters reveals his financial anxieties and his unexpected attitude towards work and writing.
From 1917 until 1925, T.S. Eliot worked in a bank. A simple, declarative sentence, a biographical fact. Not the subject of dissertations or the reason two hefty volumes of The Letters of T.S. Eliot (Volume 1: 1898-1922; Volume 2: 1923-5) have just been published, but along with his disastrous and draining marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, Eliot’s employment at Lloyd’s Bank of London was the driving force of his life in the years of these letters, until he left Lloyd’s in October 1925 for a position as an editor at the publishing house Faber & Gwyer (later to be Faber & Faber).
There is a general antipathy about hearing too much about a writer’s day job once he has become successful, and Eliot’s successes piled up as he rose at Lloyd’s: Prufrock and Other Observations was published in 1915; his essays collected in The Sacred Wood in 1921; The Waste Land stormed both sides of the Atlantic in 1922, etc. Like Eliot at the bank, we know Wallace Stevens sold insurance, but nobody wants to think about the poet at the water cooler, or, even worse, pouring over actuarial tables. Same goes for William Carlos Williams being a doctor: Do we want a man so skilled with words to perform our annual physicals? It’s fine for a writer to have a quirky or strange day job, like nude model, “oyster pirate,” even garbage man. Yet the point of the writer’s life must remain to end up at the writer’s desk somewhere, with all that nonsense left behind. More…
By Nicholas Confessore via The New York Times
Matt Rourke/Associated Press
For some decades now, a popular conservative narrative of modern America has gone something like this: Our center-right nation, devout and industrious, is ruled by a politically liberal elite that disdains family, despises religion and celebrates indolence with government handouts. Many people find this story convincing. It helped fracture the postwar Democratic Party and midwifed the culture wars. Today it feeds the political frustrations of the Tea Party movement.
Charles Murray, the influential conservative scholar and provocateur, believes this story is wrong. In his new book, “Coming Apart,” Murray flips the script that has energized Republican politics and campaigns since Richard Nixon: the white working class, he argues, is no longer part of a virtuous silent majority. Instead, beginning in the early 1960s, it has become increasingly alienated from what Murray calls “the founding virtues” of civic life. “Our nation is coming apart at the seams,” Murray warns — “not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.”
Using a statistical construct he calls Fishtown — inspired by an actual white, blue-collar neighborhood of the same name in Philadelphia — Murray sorts through demographic data to present a startling picture. Women in Fishtown now routinely have children outside of marriage. Less than a third of its children grow up in households that include both biological parents. The men claim physical disability at astounding rates and are less likely to hold down jobs than in the past. Churchgoing among the white working class has declined, eroding the social capital that organized religion once provided. More…
By Alexander Borinsky via n+1
In November 2008, by a narrow margin, the voters of California passed the California Marriage Protection Act, popularly known as Prop 8. The law limited the state’s recognition of marriage to heterosexual couples. Six months later, two couples—Kristen Perry and Sandra Stier, and Jeffrey Zarrillo and Paul Katami—decided to challenge the law by applying for marriage licenses. Both were turned down. So the couples sued the state of California and its legal avatar, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, arguing that denying homosexuals the ability to marry violated their constitutional rights.
In the resulting trial, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which took place in the summer of 2010, witnesses were called to testify on a wide range of topics. Far from arguing narrow legal points, the lawyers for each side posed empirical questions about the nature of homosexuality, and considered angles economic, historical, and psychological. The Perry lawyers in particular seemed intent on rewriting the entire mythology of contemporary gay life: No more drooling fags grabbing each others’ crotches in bathroom stalls; no more swaggering dykes revving their Harleys and pawing at cherry-cheeked girls in petticoats; no more melancholy boys with mirrors trying on mascara and their mothers’ summer dresses. The plaintiffs’ witnesses introduced the court to a New Gay: hardworking, wholesome, and unambiguously gendered; adorably installed in a long-term relationship; too busy volunteering at church and attending children’s soccer games to have time for deviant behavior.
In the muggy last days of that June, while the trial was ending, I was busy wearing out the kindness of a boyfriend. When the boyfriend said affectionate things, I smiled and changed the subject. On Saturday mornings I’d slip out of his bed by nine thirty; on Saturday nights I’d return to my own bed and text him to say I was too tired to make the long subway trek back to his. More…
By Schumpeter via The Economist
Being gay-friendly is cheap and good for business.
IN “LITTLE BRITAIN”, a television comedy, Daffyd Thomas, who insists he is “the only gay in the village”, tries to expose the homophobia of his fellow Welsh villagers by wearing outrageous clothes (bright red rubber shorts are a favourite) and picketing the local library. But he is constantly frustrated: the inhabitants of Llanddewi Brefi are all either tolerant or gay themselves.
The corporate world is not yet as gay-friendly as Llanddewi Brefi. But attitudes have changed dramatically. Some 86% of Fortune 500 firms now ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, up from 61% in 2002. Around 50% also ban discrimination against transsexuals, compared with 3% in 2002. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an American pressure group, measures corporate policies towards sexual minorities in its annual “equality index”. Of the 636 companies that responded to its survey this year, 64% offer the same medical benefits for same-sex partners as for heterosexual spouses. Some 30% scored a fabulous 100% on the group’s index.
Progress has taken place in a wide range of industries. The 100% club predictably contains plenty of talent-driven outfits such as banks and consultancies (including Mitt Romney’s old employer, Bain & Company). But it also includes industrial giants such as Alcoa, Dow Chemical, Ford, Owens Corning and Raytheon. Lord Browne, the boss of BP who resigned after his sex life made headlines in 2007, said he always remained in the closet because “it was obvious to me that it was simply unacceptable to be gay in business, and most definitely the oil business.” Today Chevron, one of BP’s toughest competitors, has a 100% rating. More…
