The "White" Crisis

A few days ago the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said at a news conference during a visit by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, that white, blue-eye people are responsible for the financial and economic crisis at this moment (2009). This type of thinking has a long history in America (as in the Western Hemisphere) with is clearest manifestation in the Manifest Destiny that racialized the actions of white people as superior to black/brown people. Lula, I think, is making a comment about that way of thinking. Somehow the Manifest Destiny still operates at some level in the US international relations as well as in the way, perhaps I am mistaken, we (here in the US) think about the people of the countries south of the Rio Grande. In profound, subtle, and hidden (but not so hidden) ways the economic and social model of the US and Europe is racialized and has become the standard to measure the advances of Latin American peoples (who are considered non-white). Lula’s comment goes to the center of this problem. He is mistaken, of course, in making the cause of the economic crisis white, blue-eye people but he has inverted the terms of a (common and mistaken) way of thinking that still operates today.

Twitter: I do not know

I keep coming back to Twitter. After less than a year using it, I am still wondering about it. It is just random no-sense; it is the broadcasting of trivial information; it is a place for quick conversations; it is a news center; it is becoming a PR tool for companies; and so on. It is many things and navigating all of them can be difficult. In my case, I am following more than 250 people: many news organizations and journalists; some people in Bogotá (Medellín and other parts of Colombia); some people in London connected to the Guardian (or it seems); entrepreneurs with interest in social network tools; and random people here and there who broadcast little pieces of their lives. In some cases, I reply to some of them and they reply back——in one case, we started a conversation and it suddenly came to a stop: this follower never replied back yet did not block me; we are still following each other but do not participate in conversations. I do not have a clue about what happened. In another case, I replied back and to this day we engaged in little conversations. I really do not know where Twitter is going (it does not matter) and do not know where I am going paying attention to it. I like how I get informed about things not just about news but about websites, recipes, ideas, ways of saying things, and so on. Yet I am not sure about it. I am not sure.

Racist Incidents After Obama's Victory

This comes in the news: "From California to Maine, police have documented a range of [racist] incidents, including vandalism, threats and at least one physical attack. There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes." These are worrisome signs. We are in this together and Obama's election speaks about a better place----for everybody.

Science/Social Science Thinking

Feynman, 1962: "The purpose of scientific thought is to predict what will happen in given experimental circumstances. All the philosophical discussion is an evasion of the point. The mesons do not go at the speed of light." (Note: "In particle physics, a meson is a strongly interacting boson—that is, a hadron with integer spin."——wikipedia, "Mason") I discussed the difference between scientific thought and social-scientific thought in my history of class a few meetings ago. My students were right in pointing out that there are different types of sciences (biology and physics, for instance) and different types of social sciences (history and economics, for instance) and that scientific thought is one things for physics and another for geology. At the end, I mentioned that ways of thinking were connected to communities that pose and resolve problems in particular ways and that our respective training consist in learning/becoming a member of a particular community. Feynman's community understands things that I do not know: speed of light and mesons (and hadrod, integer spin, and boson).

Twitter and Academics

I have been using twitter (a micro-blogging tool) for almost six months or so. I am following a number of people connected to particular areas of interest: a group of journalists, a group of Colombians (in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali), a group of newspapers, a group of social-network entrepreneurs (or whatever they call themselves), a group of postgraduate students; a group of moms working from home, a group of people connected to NASA and other space programs (in Europe), and one or two singers and actors. I have learned to enjoy the conversations that take place on twitter: I get information (from newspapers and journalists) and I get to hear conversations about politics, cooking, teenagers, lack of inspiration for this or that, and about working projects in Bogotá.

I wonder why there are not more people from the academic world using it. It could be that I have not looked well in twitterland but so far I have only found a couple of people in journalism schools not body in history (my area). When I first began interested in twitter, I sent an email to a group of colleagues in history: two of them opened accounts but they stopped using it few days later. I could not convince my colleagues to use it (not that I tried hard: I myself did not know how to use it) but my sense is that very few people in the academy is using it. I think it could be a great tool to connect people in our areas of expertise to twitte about the books we are reading, the problems we are having with our writing, or just about our lives in the classroom, and outside. Perhaps in a year or so the circle will start to include those in the academic world.

Blogging

Blogging has been more difficult for me than I expected because, first, I have not been able to find my voice for this kind of writing and the topics/themes I would like to cover. On the themes/topics, I keep moving the "field": is it about themes related to my teaching? Yes. Is it about every day frames----risotto, geese flying, the snow? Um, yes but not really. The other difficulty is discipline to write here with consistency. My sense is that the two issues are related: since I am not sure about the themes, I do not find the time to write here. To address these problems, I will be blogging my conversations with the letters of Mr. Richard Feynman edited by his daughter in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. I like them for three reasons: they are funny, they are honest, and they are about interesting things. By the way, I am reading them now because I am teaching my history of science class and I am trying to understand how scientist think----I am guessing, Feynman would say, "I do not know how scientists think, this is how I think." Fair enough.

Reality

The basis of reality is memory (short-term/long-term memory): without memory there is no way of establishing your own reality, our own reality. If I can not remember the wall behind me, I can not establish the reality of this room.

Risotto and life

Yesterday I made risotto with shrimps and cilantro. The key for cooking rice is the broth, so I had made a chicken broth in the morning. I had high expectations because I had not made rissoto in a long time. In my risottos I use wine and garlic (nothing especial about that the recipe calls for them) and chicken broth, the rest is whatever I want to put on it. When I finished pouring the broth and adding the shrimps, green onions, celery, and cilantro I tested it and I did not like it. It lacked flavor. Cooking, I tell my children, is about being patient, about mixing flavors, about caring for the ingredients, about joy: I put all of those in this risotto and it did not work out. I think I missed the salt when I made the chicken broth: life is in the details.

Dolls and the Iraq War

Yesterday, my daughter and her friend were playing dolls; they were pretending that one of the dolls was at the hospital. My daughter said, "There is a war in Iraq, let's pretend she is at the hospital in Iraq." After a short silence, her friend responded, "No, let's pretend they belong to a different time." They continued with their conversation. They sounded striking similar to us, adults, in our conversations about this war of choice——if we talk about it.

#Suspending all Activites

McCain is suspending the debate with Obama, he explains that this is because he is going to Washington to discuss the financial crisis. Um. Is he trying to play the heroe? Did he panic? In either case, he has made a mistake: the debates are important and the country needs to hear the candidates, face to face, and make a decision as to whom would be our best leader. I do not have a doubt about it, and I am suspending all activities till the crisis is over.