In case you all are looking for a place to donate, you can go here.  If you want a quick read on Haiti’s current social and political situation, go here.

Update: org.theory has lots more places to donate

Via Matt Yglesias ,

The new CQ study gives Obama a higher mark than any other president since it began scoring presidential success rates in Congress more than five decades ago.

Yglesias thinks that legislative success won’t lead to electoral success in the 2010 mid-terms because to get these legislative victories, he’s had to alienate his base on the left thereby eroding support among the die-hard activists needed to work for democratic candidates to keep them in power.

He’s probably right. At least that’s what history would say. But I can’t shake a nagging feeling that our assumptions of a Republican landslide won’t come to fruition. I still hold to the view that this president is playing a different game than his opponents. The fact of his legislative successes is testament to this. While he has received non-stop criticism for his handling of health care, he’s about to get near universal coverage (imperfect bill, I know). He seems to be able to “grind out” policy debates until the opponents run out of steam.

This grinding has undoubtedly taken its toll on his popularity. CNN has his approval rating at 46%, an all-time low for him.

It seems to me that what makes Obama a special politician is he has a keen sense of politics as narrative. He seems to have these periods where he doesn’t seem in control of the message, where he’s allowing others to define him (e.g. 3 am phone call). But when this happens, he has a unique ability to respond to what others might consider a political crisis (Pastor Wright, Nobel Prize, etc.) and actually coming out stronger for it. I have a hunch he’s playing some kind of “rope a dope” with his political opponents, but I’m not sure how it’s going to end

An elegant poem highlighting the varying ways in which Western (and some non-Western) writers make Africa the “other.”

This highlights a delicate balance that we must strike in teaching students. On one hand, we want out students to be engaged in the world, but we want to ensure that their engagement isn’t entirely on their terms….one in which they get to construct themselves as the “savior” towards the “less fortunate.” How do we achieve humble engagement in ourselves and our students….my thought for the day 🙂

A good video for talking about privilege on a global scale.

From RuShay Booyen

Big shout to co-Contexts blogger Kari Lerum at Sexuality and Society for bringing attention to a vile piece of legislation in the Ugandan Parliament that would allow the “crime of homosexuality” to be punishable by death.  As academics we are trained to take detached, analytical approaches to events in the social world.  Understandably, we don’t want to inject ourselves into the affairs of other nations.  This tendency to not want to be paternalistic, however, too often drifts into a tenuousness on the part of our students about the world that is both disturbing and understandable.  I wrote an op-ed about this in my local paper.

There are times when academics need to take stands.  I urge everyone to write their elected officials and ask them to put pressure on the State Department to strongly suggest to Uganda that there would be serious consequences for passing such a law.

BTW, I don’t often post links from the MSM, but Rachel Maddow did a nice job last night of challenging the notion that “gay be gone” efforts are somehow benign and harmless. Kari does a nice job of unpacking this specious argument as well:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Homo-hatred in Uganda: a gift from US conservative evangelicals – Via Sexuality and Society.

Nothing beats a nice clean visual presentation to hammer home a point.

Point here…we are some energy hoggin’ you-know-whatters but we’re not alone.  To be fair, it would probably be more appropriate to collapse the global emissions of all the EU nations into one bubble rather than breaking it down by individual country.   Are you as surprised as I am to see how much China emits?  This probably helps explain why discussions about Co2 emissions revolved around rights based claims tied to development.  The “if you did it, so can we” logic is hard to combat as a moral argument.  Perhaps the solution is for the west to accept a rights based frame and work on politically feasible ways to compensate the developing world for ceding “development rights”?  Indeed African nations are seeking global warming reparations from the “developed” world.  This is obviously a non-starter in the U.S.  I’m sure the Obama administration would love that debate!

But there might be more benign ways to get at the same idea.  Instead of direct cash transfers, you could assist developing economies through low-interest “green loans,” rebates for purcahsing “green” US or European equipment, or technical support for greening African industry.  Regrettably, the framing might have to be paternalistic for it to “stick” with American and European electorates.  Aid to “developing” nations connotes a much different response than “reparations”…especially in the US.

via Chart Porn.

Update:
Regardless of your view on climate change, this is cool policy entrepreneurship. Or maybe I’m a sucker for digitized aging! Via Good blog

Please indulge my shameless self promotion, but his particular piece of academic hucksterism happens to dovetail well the mission of the blog. The inaugural edition of the Journal of Integrated Social Science, of which I am the Political Science editor and co-blogger Bryan Rasmussen is the Humanities editor, has just been published. In particular, I draw your attention to the editorial introduction which lays out the aims of the journal. Here’s an excerpt that captures the mission of the journal:

Today we find that scholars are becoming very specialized in one particular field of study thereby often under-emphasizing how their area of expertise relates to other fields of study. Having experts on given topics is, without doubt, absolutely essential in order to advance our understanding of human functioning. It is with this in mind that we are hereby launching the new Journal of Integrated Social Sciences (JISS) – a renewed collaborative effort, following the spirit of the intellectual pioneers from the 1860s, to bring together the rich and diverse set of disciplines through the new technology now available to us in the 21st century.

I encourage those of you with an interest in integrative, cross-disciplinary inquiry to submit their work and take advantage of a unique platform to engage in a broader scholarly conversations that those to which we are accustomed.

Not sure why I’m drawn to this visualization by Pedro Cruz, but I am:

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

It does highlight a few things. First, the visualization reveals the sheer speed with which post-colonialism moved in the 1950’s and 1960’s. From the perspective of the power elite, this must have been a chaotic and challenging time. You could also see where the romanticism of the 1960’s emerged. Such a significant paradigm shift from the hegemony of major colonial powers to the sudden fragmentation of that power into hopeful, independent nation states must have been thrilling to those supportive of post-colonial movements. The reality that “colonialisms” take multiple forms probably hadn’t fully set in yet.

HT: Chart Porn (my favorite blog name BTW)

I’ll admit that Web 2.0 advocates can be a bit too sanguine in their vision of a networked participatory future. But what makes the proliferation of information technology so exciting is the ability to easily capture and disseminate what James Scott calls the “hidden transcript” of marginalized people’s all over the world.

TechPresident reports on a project called Viva Favella, an effort by Brazilian journalists to document life in Brazil’s fabled low-income neigborhoods. The site is:

The first Internet portal in Brazil designed exclusively around the needs and interests of low-income communities, Viva Favela has a team made up of journalists and “community correspondents” – favela residents qualified to act as reporters and photographers.

With their “inside” perspective, they help expose all of the human, historical, cultural, economic, and social dimensions of these areas.

Sites like these empower communities to be able to structure the ways in which they present themselves to the world. However, making a hidden transcript visible doesn’t necessarily do much to alter power relations. The key question is how do Web 2.0 tools affect the ways in which marginalized peoples are socially constructed. There are strong power dynamics that support and reinforce specific stories of “favella as slum.” Of interest is how these local indigenous images merged with a rhetorical campaign to re-frame perceptions in ways that alter power relations?

I present you the 193% chart.

So this one’s easy to mock. But I’m often frustrated by my inability to get my students in political science to recognize how important statistics and data presentation are to politics and power…and this is coming from a qualitatively inclined scholar. I think part of it is because we fail to treat statistics as a discourse. I may have enchantment on the brain (see Brian Rasmussen’s and Don Waisenan’s posts), but it seems like we either imbue statistics with an mystical, impenetrable quality above everyday conversation or we treat is as an illegitimate discourse easily manipulable by elites. This makes them either reject it or embrace it Kool-aid style. There needs to be a sweet spot in our public life between viewing statistics as somehow separate from everyday discourse and viewing as an illegitimate discourse (i.e. the language of Sarah Palin’s famous New York elites).

Here’s the video. Isn’t there a WTF moment as this guy is reading the prompter?

HT: Flowing Data

Thierry Henry’s no look pass to William Gallas in injury time (extra time) against the Republic of Ireland at the Stade du France last Wednesday sent Les Bleus to the 2010 World Cup. One problem: Henry used his hands, which even those most ignorant of the world’s game know is a no-no.

This has created outrage in most of the soccer/football/futbol loving world, with most of the ire being foisted upon Henry, a soccer superstar in the early part of the decade. Our American readers might recognize him as the “unknown foreign guy” in that Gillette razor commercial along side Roger Federer and Tiger Woods. The former Arsenal great and current Barcelona striker has been accused of being a “cheat” – mostly by English and Irish commentators.

The controversy has also reignited a movement to bring instant replay into the world’s game. FIFA, the global governing body for the game has staunchly resisted adding video replay to ensure the validity of on-field decisions. Contrast this to the popular sports in the United States (Football, Basketball and Baseball), all of which have adopted some form of instant replay. Why are American sports willing to adopt new technology while the world’s most watched sport reject’s its use?

America’s soccer exceptionalism might provide some answers. America’s pragmatic, individualist, consumerist, innovation-centric culture might provide a more welcome environment for technological intrusion into sport. The U.S. is a political culture that presumes people rise and fall based on merit rather social/structural conditions. Inasmuch as sporting culture can be viewed as a mirror reflection of a culture’s myths, a culture of individualistic merit demands that its sports give the impression of merit. This I think explains American’s general displeasure at diving in soccer (although they seem to have no problem with faking fouls in basketball). Any effort to use guile to affect the outcome of a game is seen as offensive to American sensibilities.

In the main, the rest of the world might look doesn’t share this individualistic/pragmatist/consumerist view of the world. Thus they don’t demand the precision and constant dynamism that U.S. culture and sport demands – there must be a winner and scoring must be profligate. Soccer, by contrast, can be inherently unfair and cruel. Because scoring a goal is so difficult, a team can dominate possession of the ball but fail to score while another team can be completely outclassed but still score a goal off of a deflection or a moment of individual brilliance. Not very meritocratic.

I love soccer partly because it is absurd. It is existential. It is more like a novel than a technical manual. It doesn’t always provide clear meaning. Hence the oft scorned 0-0 draw. No one scored. No one won. It’s the sport equivalent of Waiting for Godot. This confounds tons of American sports writers and fans to no end. But to me and to most of the rest of the world, it more closely mirrors reality.

The rest of the world is not as wedded to an strict individualist-merit based view of the world but instead see the world as it is messy, unfair, bound up in social relations, etc. As an example, South Americans use terminology that likens soccer to a novel. A goal scorer is often referred as el autor del gol or un protagonista a protagonist. A dynamic play-maker is often called (my personal favorite) un desequilibrante a destabilizer/mischief maker. This language suggests a world that is hermeneutic rather than positivistic, constructivist rather than explanatory. The rest of the world might not demand that their sporting culture produce absolute certainty and meaning. Instead, much of the world sees human error and failing is part of the story of soccer.

However, as the United States slowly embraces the world’s game, it might stand to borrow a page from the U.S.’ steely eyed pragmatism in its professional sports. The world has rightly eschewed calls to Americanize the game by making the goalposts bigger, getting rid of offsides or having penalty “shootouts” to decide winners. These are artificial mechanisms to alter the life of the game for no other reason than to “make it more exciting” by introducing a rapid-fire consumerist ethic to the sport. This need to extract constant feedback from sport is what makes basketball tediously unwatchable until the last 2 minutes of the game.

These approaches would change the essential character of the game. Instant replay is different. Rather than change the rules to create some banal sensation of constant scoring or false decisiveness, it change soccer by setting up rules that encourage fairness. A quick review of a handball or ball crossing the goal line does not detract from the game’s chimerical quality.

Currently the global game is dealing with a corruption scandal. As the sport enters a World Cup year, it must consider how it evolves. Emerging soccer nations like Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the United States bring their own aesthetic to the game. The sport should borrow what it can from the “developing soccer world” so it can remain the world’s game.