From "Brittney Cooper: How Has Time Been Stolen From People Of Color?" (NPR), which I'm reading — reading and following the the principle of charity — after seeing it mocked at "Rutgers professor: Even the concept of time is racist" (College Fix).
ADDED: Some cultures really are spoken of as "timeless" or "beyond time." And the statement "Time is money" is something you can agree with or reject. I sometimes say, "All I have is time." But what does that mean? I hear other people say, "I have no time." An apt riposte might be, "What? Are you dead?"
ALSO: I looked up the phrase "Time is money," and I see — in the Wikipedia article "Opportunity Cost":
[Benjamin] Franklin coined the phrase "Time is Money", and spelt out the associated opportunity cost reasoning in his “Advice to a Young Tradesman” (1748): “Remember that Time is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.”AND: Speaking of white men:
Posts
194 comments:
EVERYTHING is racist. Deconstruct everything.
My advice? Move to Uganda.
Living on Affirmative-Action time.
Apologies to J.J. Cale.....
"And so I wanted to think about, what does it mean if people are considered folks who, largely, are not impacting the flow of things, right? - which is often a racialized idea."
It is not "often a radicalized idea." Not impacting the flow of things applied to most people in most periods. And was recognized as such in western philosophy. Of course, "often" implies that it sometimes isn't--but when? The prof doesn't tell us.
"So when we think about black and brown peoples around the world in Western frameworks, there is a way that black and brown people are seen as a lag on social progress."
But this is a very different idea than having time "stolen." Guess the prof had logic stolen from her.
"And that becomes the pretext often to do all manner of violence..."
Huh? When and where?
Mother. Of. God.
Honey...just buy a one-way ticket to Gabon. For Pete's sake I'll pay (consider it 'reparations'). Go please and live the way you did before your brethren and sistren on that continent captured your ancestors and sold them to the evil white devils, out of time and out of mind in that idyllic and peaceful utopian paradise.
Just go. We'll pay to put you back in the stone age.
Dialogue at Meadhouse:
Me: Do you know who first said "Time is money"?
Meade: Archimedes?
Me: ??? Benjamin Franklin.
Meade: But Einstein proved it.
Me: ???
Meade: My favorite "Far Side."
colored peoples time.
Putting the Meade in Archimedes.
Ah, Time:
There's so much more to do
Only so much here for you
No way to slow it down
The world is turning 'round
It's somewhat like a sound
A thing that can't be found
Unless you stop to make it
Others always take it
Fragile yet unstoppable
Floating like a soap bubble
Always just out of reach
Only so much of it to each
To say it is to spend it
Approaching light upends it
Although you'll never catch it
Our best chance is to stretch it
"colored peoples time"
That's discussed at the NPR link. Check it out!
Give a charitable reading.
Needz moar "so."
Sounds like a deepity.
From the book I happen to be reading at the moment*:
"Time wasn’t the main issue for him. He didn’t even own a watch. Nakata operated on his own sense of time. In the morning it got light, in the evening the sun set and it got dark. Once it got dark he’d go to the nearby public bath, and after coming home from his bath he’d go to sleep. The public bath was closed on certain days of the week, and when that happened he’d just give up and go back home. His stomach told him when it was time to eat, and when the time came for him to go pick up his sub city (somebody was always nice enough to tell him when that day was near) he knew another month had passed. The next day he’d always go for a haircut at the local barber shop. Every summer someone from the ward office would treat him to eel, and every New Year they’d bring him rice cakes."
Murakami, Haruki. Kafka on the Shore (Vintage International) (p. 79). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
____________________
* A unit of time
Professors need larger teaching loads.
It's an interesting way to frame an absurd argument. You start with an interesting observation about time as a concept before delving into the racial nonsense.
It's certainly true that the generally human concept of time has changed a great deal since the industrial revolution. But it seems pretty racist to basically imply that "black and brown" people are effectively of a pre-industrial mindset with regards to time.
If you're determined that ALL people HAVE TO be put in categories--e.g. "black and brown people"--rather than treating people as individuals, and that the people in these categories HAVE TO act and think alike, it follows then that EVERYTHING ELSE has to be hammered into the aforementioned categories.
Some people seem determined to be living illustrations of the proverbial little boy with a hammer.
@Dave Begley:
EVERYTHING is racist. Deconstruct everything.
She's actually making a good argument; it's just a century out of date. Racism was indeed seen as valid justification for subjugation of people by foreign powers. Be it the European scramble for Africa or Japanese domination of East Asia and the creation of the "co-prosperity sphere." Racial domination always claims benign motives. But two huge wars smashed that system to pieces, and the era of the nation-state became dominant. The challenges for the last several decades have not been Western exploitation of black and brown people, but rather black and brown people believing that they have a right to move themselves and their whole villages into American and European nations. This is seen as just recompense for the previous exploitation. And most sickeningly, a lot of Americans and Europeans actually make this same, suicidal argument. Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, etc. never really got involved in Latin America or Africa and are thus unburdened with white guilt. Although pretty much the entire economics publishing industry seems hellbent on brow beating Japan into opening its borders to more foreign workers. Immigrants, what can't they fix?
Well....she isn't wrong in that time as a construct and the importance of time is viewed differently in different cultures. However she is wrong in that it has nothing to do with race. No one has STOLEN time from anyone. She is an idiot.
It is more of an urban/rural industrial/agricultural difference.
Time to white people who live/lived in rural agricultural areas has a completely different meaning to white people who live/lived in urban industrial areas. Not racial at all.
Rural cultures tend to view time as a more broad swath type of event. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. Time to plant. Feed the animals. Harvest the food. Eat at some broadly defined areas of the day. Break-fast. Midday meal. Evening meal. Bed"time" when it is dark. (This is all why I HATE the switching of clocks for DST)
As well as the urban/rural divide.....AGE is a big factor in viewing time. As a retired white former professional woman, time is completely different to me at this stage of my life. I don't pay attention to "THE time" because it doesn't matter, unless I have an appointment or must meet with other people. Then I am "on time".
Time does seem to be passing much faster but probably because I'm not paying much attention to the minutia. What? It is Monday again? Wasn't it just Monday?
What really is a waste of time and money is anything related to these worthless "academics" who are parasites on society who suck limited financial resources and infect with their race baiting nonsense. This is full blown retarded.
She is an associate professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University.
She (...and my white patriarchy presumes her pronoun...oppressively) has hit the trifecta of social justice victimhood.
I've noticed that the Japanese have great difficulties grasping the concept.
My Doberman knows to the second when it's dinner time, that is to say when it's fruitful to bring up the topic and when it's not.
This seems to me to be an excuse for living as if the past is today. It's a way to discount any apparent progress. By acting as if the passage of time is a purely European phenomenon (which ignores African dating systems) you can conveniently sidestep the question of when enough time has passed to justify moving on.
If this were psychotherapy, this idea of the past would be treated with cognitive behavioral therapy.
Money is an entropy gradient.
Why does every single thing need to be analyzed through the lens of race? Plenty of white people have derided the modern cultural obsession with efficiency.
"White men are bad, Asians don't exist" said the black race hustler.
Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook.
The Japanese just started over at year 1 as of May 1.
An interesting story might be: How did this woman find herself on NPR's call list. Is it because she's a leading scholar in her field? I rather doubt that, but it could be true. Is it because she gives NPR outrageous quotes that are viral-y? More likely. Is it because she appeals to the racial guilt that affects the caucasians who work at NPR? Even more likely.
It would be very hard for me to pick a favorite Far Side, btw. Kudos to Meade for that ability.
Ms. Cooper wrote a Salon article a few years ago about a plane passenger next to her texting a friend that she was sitting next to a "fat N-word". Truly important stuff.
The basis for mockery is pretending that you don't that the topic is conceptions and values about time. Obviously, these vary by culture.
But the professor is criticizing other people as if they fail to understand what I'm saying is obvious. So I don't really feel sorry for her.
Putting the Meade in media
Human life arose and Africa and developed elsewhere.
Seen on a massive statue on the south side of Chicago:
Time goes you say? Ah, no.
Alas, time stays. We go.
"It would be very hard for me to pick a favorite Far Side, btw. Kudos to Meade for that ability."
Actually, he said it was one of his favorites.
Now, he's telling me his favorite is probably this.
Time has a history. . . . [b]ut we treat time as though it is timeless, as though it has always been this way . . . .
Double talk. Time has a history? Cite me the history book featuring only time. Time is timeless? Time is always a discernible measurement in science so timelessness can never be.
Should my white son-in-law identify as black because he has no concept of timeliness? This daft woman didn’t carry her absurdity far enough. She should categorize all races by their understanding of time and then encourage everybody to identify themselves by her categories. And don’t forget the sub-categorize by gender! And throw in age and whatever other kitchen sink items are ready to hand.
Everything must be racist for racism to endlessly continue.
If something isn't racist, it becomes a measuring stick for what is.
The race hustlers can't have anyone but themselves in that role.
A very smart guy at work said that he's never understood a single Far-Side cartoon.
Everybody else thought it was right down their alley.
Time was invented to explain motion.
From "Brittney Cooper: How Has Time Been Stolen From People Of Color?"
NPR has really got the whole "click-bait for the wanna-be illuminati" thing down pat.
Rutgers is about to throw down an extra $20 million for "diversity hiring" initiatives. They could use that money and hire people with useful skills to revitalize Trenton, the festering dump of a capital city to whom they'll go begging for more public money to hire more Africana Studies professors.
My favorite Far Side is the kangaroo in the city suspicious of the boomerang that just missed him. He couldn't help feeling it was aimed him even though it hit somebody else.
My favorite Far Side is the kid pushing with all his might on the "PULL" door at the School for the Gifted.
I like Western time, Western culture, Western everything.
Best Far Side Cartoon.
Applicable in so many situations.
My favorite Far Side is the one with the kid uselessly pushing on the door to the School for the Gifted, marked "PULL."
When I was younger and never wore a watch, I always knew to within 5 minutes what time it was. Today, when my watch is always on my wrist and my phone is always nearby, I might not be able to tell you what hour it is without looking.
Oh no Jack. Now I have to find it.
I noticed that NPR grafted a portion of Ms. Cooper's TEDTalks lecture into the interview. This is meant to lend an air of outside credibility. May I? Ok. TEDTalks is part of the problem, like, they're the SPLC of platforms.
I did a video about Ella Dawson, their queer director of social media. She's Jewish, and went on a rant about WASPs, and she's the gatekeeper to TEDTalks. The video intro is about Seth Mandel's smarmy, "Ashkenormativity," tweets, by way of contrast (he's an Orthodox Jew). Compare his attitude with the open hostility of Ella Dawson towards white people, which I believe is shared by a majority of secular Jews.
Check your premise. I have a feeling it was accepted too quickly, becuase you wanted it so bad.
Time keeps on slipping into the future
Tick Tock. Tick Tock
Timeless music.
Return to your regularly scheduled program ...........
Mike - great minds think alike! I also like the deer with the target birthmark.
Wake me when it's over. Three score and ten years ago went by fast up to July 4, 1863, and we've had it go by again twice more since then.
It says "PULL" on the door. Whew.
Jack that is my other favorite as well. And the bear with the "deer gut" is a close second.
My favorite Far Side is this one. Mostly because when it was published, I had a dog named Ginger and it rang completely true.
Eddington said people will accept that matter is really an interaction of electron orbits in stuff that's mostly empty space, but not that time is really an entropy gradient.
People feel they have direct access to what time is and it's not that.
It used to be a commonplace that "time" as we understand it in the West was a concept developed out of the Jewish understanding of meaning in History. For Jews, as later for Christians, History was not cyclical nor was it merely a meaningless revolution of eternal forms, like the Greeks believed. Rather it was the field of God's action in the world and our response to God's action as well as our expectation of God's future fulfillment of specific promises. Therefore time as something linear and non-repeating comes out of a certain cultural and religious worldview. There's no reason why everyone had or has to see it that way.
It's sad but not surprising that someone would argue that it's therefore racist. The game today is to find everything that has a contingent quality to it and label it racist. It's pathetic, really.
My favorite is the Crisis Clinic going over a waterfall while engulfed in flames.
Pretty much sums up human history.
Albert Einstein:
"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
We all make our choices based on what we value most. Time IS money. That is still a fact. Your time is exchanged for other things all the time. In a sense, your labor, whether physical or mental is a commodity that you exchange for other things and how much labor you can exchange is constrained by the about of time you have available.
Time is not a white man thing. The adherence to timeliness might more accurately describe western culture's influence on this matter. In our western culture, we place a great emphasis on the structure of time so that we can efficiently exchange our time/labor for other goods that we value. Other cultures might value the easiness of a non time-constrained existence where they value that lack of stress more than they value better food, fancier houses or financial security. They trade their time for something they value in the same way a hard-driving worker does. Each gets what he or she wants for their time.
It is not a moral issue and it can't be racist. If a culture does not value material goods (money is just a placeholder the material goods), then they should embrace that with pride and not be upset that another culture does value those things. However, if the more casual culture becomes envious of the more industrious culture, under what right do they have to be envious? They are making their choice to trade their time for one luxury verses another. They should not simultaneously demand relaxation while craving material goods. If you want material wealth, trade your labor/time for it. If you want leisure, trade your time for it.
J. Farmer: "Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, etc. never really got involved in Latin America or Africa and are thus unburdened with white guilt."
****************
More than a hundred thousand Japanese migrated to Brazil starting in the early 20th century. 1.5 million Japanese Brazilians live there today.
Guy named Fujimori was once the president of Peru.
I've never understood why Hispanics believe they have a right to come here because whites stole their land. Unless they are pure Indian, they are descended from Spaniards who came to colonize central/south America, right?
And according to scholarly estimates, 85% of the slaves sent to the New World went to Brazil. Yet Brazil likes to bill itself as the "least racist country in the world", and recoils from alleged American racism. Why is it different down there (if it is)?
Blogger tcrosse said...
Time was invented to explain motion.
Yes.
In Albion's Seed, D H Fischer includes concepts of time in his comparison of the 4 main British-to-American folkways. IIRC, the early (and lazy) Southern whites from the West Country spoke of "killing time", while the New Englanders from East Anglia said "wasting time."
A classic TED talk. Pretentious drivel sold by a huckster to an audience full of people hoping to restock their inventories of deep thoughts for their facebook pages.
I believe Hegel argued that "History" with a capital "h" had happened or developed mainly, although not exclusively, in Europe; Africa was unique in having no history at all. Obviously this didn't mean that stuff didn't happen there, nor that people had no sense of yesterday or last year as opposed to today. Rather: History is something like the development of human consciousness--the awareness of more things, including the potential of both science and morality. Ordinary people "gain" knowledge in societies that have History; leaders are important, but even they are probably learners as much as teachers. It might be an "accident" that it was the West that has had the most History, but Hegel thought the synthesis of the Bible and Greco/Roman thought was important. Racist? Try egoist: Hegel thought he was unique in having comprehensive knowledge of everything. He was of course very smart, and he lived and grew up and studied in the right time and place.
I believe Hegel argued that "History" with a capital "h" had happened or developed mainly, although not exclusively, in Europe; Africa was unique in having no history at all. Obviously this didn't mean that stuff didn't happen there, nor that people had no sense of yesterday or last year as opposed to today. Rather: History is something like the development of human consciousness--the awareness of more things, including the potential of both science and morality. Ordinary people "gain" knowledge in societies that have History; leaders are important, but even they are probably learners as much as teachers. It might be an "accident" that it was the West that has had the most History, but Hegel thought the synthesis of the Bible and Greco/Roman thought was important. Racist? Try egoist: Hegel thought he was unique in having comprehensive knowledge of everything. He was of course very smart, and he lived and grew up and studied in the right time and place.
And according to scholarly estimates, 85% of the slaves sent to the New World went to Brazil.
I heard a joke once, "60% of Brazilians will tell you that they have African ancestry. The other 40% are liars."
Although the experience of time passing is subjective, there is an aspect of time that is not subjective: a cause always precedes its effect. This is not a "racial construct," and it is the basis of physics and so the basis of all of the sciences.
So when we think about black and brown peoples around the world in Western frameworks, there is a way that black and brown people are seen as a lag on social progress. So they are seen as holding back the, you know, power of the West to modernize the world. And that becomes the pretext often to do all manner of violence...."
They key to understanding her position is above. She simply asserts the racial component as fact and then concludes everything that follows from that assumption. It's amazing how easy it is to prove anything if you just assume it.
there is an aspect of time that is not subjective:<
The arrow of time.
I nominate Gary Larson and Hank Williams Jr as purveyors of pure wisdom.
LOVE Gary Larson.
I meant Hank Williams Sr. Junior can't hold a candle to his father.
"colored peoples time"
That's discussed at the NPR link. Check it out!
Give a charitable reading.
Sorry, I don't have the time to do this.
The Chinese had clocks before Europeans did, and the Mayas had well-developed calendars. The ancient Egyptians timed things by the rising and falling of the Nile. So maybe time is not a product of European thought.
I have no time for this because I am doing that.
Ants and grasshoppers. Which puts a higher value on time?
Simon and Garfunkel
Time, time, time See what's become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
I was so hard to please...
Of course, my mind hears this as sung by The Bangles.
So, this frees me up to ignore pleas that we must bring the rest of the world up to our standard of living, and that shortened lifespan of those living in 3rd world countries is no concern of mine.
can't imagine why:
https://libertyunyielding.com/2019/04/08/kim-foxx-hits-on-reason-for-criticism-of-her-decision-to-drop-smollett-charges/
that's probably the first time I heard that song,
I have always admired Jefferson as he wrote about mans industry. As in, the govt has no right to mans industry. Production, wealth, time, income, VALUE etc, all in the same bucket
I see time defined as industry. Time is industry, I pay for someone else industry to clean my house , so I can capture time to do what I want. The
Agrarian revolution allowed craftsman time to practice their industry, because they no longer had to spend time gathering food.
Great subject.
Is there some sort of rule that something obvious becomes deep when a black person says it?
Different cultures have different conceptions of time. The past isn't really past; it affects our lives in the present. History weighs on us. The future can be scary.
If a 18 year old white boy made such obvious statements while pretending like he's saying something deep, we would assume he's high and ridicule him. If a grown black woman says it, she gets a TED talk and interviewed by NPR. Low expectations, I guess.
Timekeeping, like precision, like merit, like proof, like accuracy, like rigor, is passé. We don’t need any of them. Just ask the 737 Max passengers.
wholelottasplainin' said...I've never understood why Hispanics believe they have a right to come here because whites stole their land
I used to have a Mexican neighbor who made a comment about how Europeans destroyed his heritage. He wasn't militant or anything, just one of those things that "everyone" believes. He was trying to make me feel guilty for what was done to him. But WTF?! He's got a lot more Spanish blood in him than I have in me.
The people of Mexico today who are demanding that Spain apologise for the conquest have far more conquistador blood in them than the average Spaniard does. Good for Spain for refusing.
The American Southwest was once controlled by a government that was located in Mexico City; however, it was no more stolen from today's Mexico than Taiwan was stolen from the Chinese. It couldn't have been stolen from them because it was never theirs.
I like the cows that are hanging around kibbitzing until a car comes by.
Giving weight for climate and available building materials, there's no significant difference between the traditional village cultures that the modern world wiped out in Europe and the ones that were wiped out elsewhere.
"Some ideas are so stupid that only an academic would believe them"
George Orwell
Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?
A favorite farside https://i.pinimg.com/236x/c0/35/d9/c035d992ffad42758edcf464fe7e702a.jpg
America moves faster than other parts of the world. In a New York Minute.
"And a lot of the way that we talk about time really finds its roots in the Industrial Revolution."
So, the "Industrial Revolution" is a "white thing"? You sure this "professor" isn't one of those "White supremacists" I keep reading about?
"And so I wanted to think about, what does it mean if people are considered folks who, largely, are not impacting the flow of things, right? - which is often a racialized idea."
WTF? Was she taking a bong hit either right before, or right after, writing that?
Even Ben Franklin's calculation minimizes the loss, since he didn't take into account the time needed to figure how much a shilling is in real money.
OTOH, time isn’t money to the author because of tenure.
Time progresses with divisions of diversity.
So Ann, reading that with charity, what conclusions do you come to?
It is quite hard for me to read this charitably. As hard as I try, here's the progression I work through:
"It is unfortunate that the poison of race-über-alles has infected this woman so much."
Well, that's not very charitable. How can I do better?
"It must be getting so difficult to add to the body of human knowledge that people are pretty much making things up for their dissertations now."
Again, not super charitable. Other ideas?
"If you find yourself in a society that at its core sees the world differently than you, maybe you should look around for a society that fits you better."
How about "It feels sad that someone could live in a society as wealthy, free and amazing as ours and come to believe the society is so antithetical to their existence that no matter what progress occurs it will never be enough for them. Maybe it could never be enough."?
I don't know - are these charitable? I don't really think so. What charitable take did you come up with?
There is truth in the idea that concepts of time and the appropriate use of time depend on culture. So what. Cultures evolve all the time and are subject to interbreeding and natural selection. Darwin rules.
Read the headline and stopped. Knew it was a “studies” professor. What an absolute and unmitigated crock of shit !!!
Life must really suck for people who see themselves as perpetually oppressed. She’s a professor. She’ll have a cushy life and a pension and won’t have to work very hard (apologies to our blog hostess). She’s not cleaning toilets or toiling in a factory, or mining coal.
Maybe the problem is she has too much time on her hands and therefore she can think up this garbage.
Btw, does NPR receive a lot of public funding? Should be ZERO in my humble opinion. Then again, my radio has a dial and I know how to use it. But it seems like itd be a waste of public funds.
Short translation: I wanted to throw shade on Western Culture and I got push back from real academics and people who called me on my shitty rationalizations.
Ann Althouse said...
The basis for mockery is pretending that you don't that the topic is conceptions and values about time. Obviously, these vary by culture.
What we are mocking is the belief that culture is determined by the color of your skin.
Because that actually IS racist.
I don't have a single WASP ancestor, going back so far as my family tree is known. But my culture is the one created by WASPs, because it's the best culture around.
Your culture is your choice. Anyone who claims that it is based on, forced by, or required by your skin color is A: A racist, and B: Wrong
And that's why we're attacking the bad SJW "professor"
I hope that in 100 years, academics will wonder why their counterparts in 2019 wasted so much time obsessing about racism.
Dear Fat Black Caricature,
If you didn't realize that your time, my time, everybody's time was valuable (if only to you/me/everybody),
Until a white person told you so,
...
You're welcome.
It's safe to say those "Our Differences are Only Skin Deep" posters have been tossed in the trash.
No love for thIs? I seriously thought everybody just conceded this was the best Far Side:
https://images.app.goo.gl/bzR54PZZ7VwChhjY8
Why does she deserve the benefit of the doubt again? She is insulting one group and bolstering another.
Okay. She likes people who are 'shiftless'. Ones who live in a constant 'now' where change is horrid...except the changes she hates were the ones which gave her affluence and status.
Self hatred is never attractive. Except she refuses to apply it to herself, applying it only to others.
I have better uses of my time than the ramblings of academics. If we don't mind, you don't matter.
"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
Feynman points out:
"You can't remember the future" and "you can't change the past", and
"If you watch too carefully, you can't understand it at all." (~0:10:00)
because everything ('cept maybe beta decay) is theoretically reversible, but it never happens (e.g. a solution separating itself into its components) because even the smallest reversal is so completely unlikely.
Without "time," early mariners were limited to sailing fairly near to shore, thus, no (or only accidental) discoveries by sailing across oceans or lesser but still very large bodies of water. You needed "time" to accurately calculate your location on an empty ocean: longitude, that being a measured distance sailed east or west from one fixed point. Note that longitude is calculated in degrees and MINUTES.
And no one could do that until someone invented a machine (a clock) that could maintain accuracy on a moving/rolling ship, in a maritime environment.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4806.Longitude
Further, without "time" as measured by longitude, you could not have real property measured by section, township, and range, since those are all dependent on meridians aka known longitudinal lines.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/498350.Measuring_America
Another time waster...
NEW RECORD: OBAMA MENTIONS HIMSELF 392 TIMES DURING BERLIN TOWNHALL [MONTAGE]
'I worked out every morning; I mean, I was pretty religious about it, I was in the gym'
'President Obama was in Germany on Saturday, ostensibly to speak about “community leadership and civic engagement” on behalf of his eponymous Obama Foundation, but Berliners soon discovered his main topic of interest was ... Barack Obama.
Obama talking about himself in an almost obsessive manner is no new phenomenon, but today he shattered his own records. Over the course of a 90 minute townhall with "emerging leaders," Obama mentioned himself an eye-popping 392 times.'
'...The former president's comments began on his favorite topic: himself.
"It’s been over ten years since I spoke to a slightly larger crowd in front of the Victory Column when I was running for president," Obama said to a notably quiet crowd. "I had a little less gray hair then. And since then I’ve been back to Germany I think at least ten times. I’ve been to Europe countless times. But I’m as excited to be here with you as I have been ever when I’ve come to Europe."
'...“When I left office, or maybe a few months before I left office, I had to make some decisions about what I would do after the end of my presidency and I knew that I wanted to catch up on my sleep — I had to take Michelle on vacation. She deserved it, putting up with me for that long. But we also knew that our service wasn’t yet done. I was one of the youngest presidents to be elected, which meant I was one of the youngest ex-presidents.'
'...In another impressively self-referential section about his days as a community organizer, Obama used the "I" word six times in a single sentence: "One of the challenges that I had when I was a young organizer was I wanted change now and I wanted 100 percent of what I wanted and then I suddenly confront some politician" who would disagree.
At another point, Obama talked about meditation, and that led to a riff about ... Obama.
"I mean, I will tell you that I don’t have a regular meditation practice. But I have my own tools I guess to take me to a certain place. For example, you know, particularly when I was your age I did a lot of writing and that would serve as a similar process for me where I would still myself and if I was writing well, it would take me out of myself, right?"
Obama soon segued to his affinity for working out: “You know, I was — I was a pretty busy guy. I’ve got to say. But I worked out every morning. I mean, I was pretty religious about it. I was in the gym. And people knew, unless there was an actual literal emergency, that you had to block out that time in the morning when I was going to be working out. And if I did not have a workout, I was going to be cranky. But I knew that if I was going to be able to sustain the pace I was sustaining over the course of eight years, I needed to have at least that.”'
And on and on and on it went. For more, check out the montage above.
https://preview.tinyurl.com/y2ctvq76
In a certain way, evoking the movie, "Being There".
From Wikipedia:
'...[Ben] Rand is also a confidant and adviser to the President of the United States, whom he introduces to "Chauncey" [the Gardener]. In a discussion about the economy, Chance takes his cue from the words "stimulate growth" and talks about the changing seasons of the garden. The President misinterprets this as optimistic political advice and quotes “Chauncey Gardiner” in a speech. Chance now rises to national public prominence, attends important dinners, develops a close connection with the Soviet ambassador and appears on a television talk show. During the latter, Chance goes into detail about what a serious gardener should do and is misunderstood as giving his opinion about what would be his presidential policy, given the chance.'
I guess I can spare a minute or two for time reparations.
Has anyone every seen evidence of all the writing Obama claims he does?
Race has more then one meaning.
Time has a race can mean more then one thing.
If time had a race, who would it race? Us? Do you want to win the race against time or do you want time to win?
Western time-keeping is not only racist but sexist, and I'm surprised that the professor didn't make that point (maybe she has elsewhere). The Roman->Julian->Gregorian calendars supplanted lunar calendars, which coincide with menstrual cycles. As more and more women liberate themselves from the patriarchy, it will be time's up for "30 days hath September..."
Sarah Dash sings with Keith Richards.
Time is on My Side
One of the great, unmistakable opening guitar riffs.
"I have wasted time and now time doth waste me.".......Time is ageist. Young people have vast quantities of unexpended time. Old people not so much, but what are you going to do. Anyway, people in western cultures get more time to contemplate the futility of their lives.
I got more time than I got money.
The first mechanical clock was invented by the Chinese. The Emperor had it installed in his garden. The Mandarins admired its intricacy and cleverness. That was the end of the development of the mechanical clock in China.....,A mechanical clock was installed in a town square in Germany. The neighboring town saw that mechanical clock and tried to top it. And so on with their neighboring town......Development in the west is based on competition not fulfillment.
Actually, the concept of time was recognized many many thousands of years ago. Probably 50,000 years or longer ago.
Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon humans kept "time" by making marks on bones. The phases of the Moon were important in religious thoughts and in just knowing when that big freaking light in the sky at night was going to come back.
Lunar calendars were likely the first time keeping. The lunar cycles are VERY important to women :-) Then recognizing that the seasons, if you lived in areas like Europe where seasons are pronounced are cyclical and important to keep track of prehistoric people began to keep track of events like the solstices that marked the obvious turning of the seasons.
Agriculture required a more precise ballparking of the seasons. In order to know when to plant. When the rivers were most likely to flood. When the winter solstice was coming in order to appease the Gods and make Damned sure that Spring would come again.
Most religions were based on "time" and honoring the Gods so that "time" would continue.
The heaven's above were used to even further calculate and observe time.
None of this is racial in any shape or form. It is just life, being observant of nature and needing to have some way to predict future events.
"I got more time than I got money."
You get a better exchange rate if you show your race card to the clerk.
The idea of valuing time goes back millennia. Psalm 90:12 says
> So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
Perceptions of time are culturally bounded. Who knew?
No matter how ridiculous your thesis, no matter how crazy your conclusions, you will always find succor within the University! (No conservatives need apply)
Time used to vary with time. Day and night each had twelve hours, so in the summer an hour of daylight was objectively longer than an hour of night. The reason so many origin myths specify who begat whom (even among the gods) was because it was a means of arranging sequences of time by illiterate people. Zeus was the son of Cronos. Athena was born of Zeus, etc., so you had a one-way arrow Cronos->Zeus->Athena.
We're going to have to update the Uncertainty Principle.
We can only precisely know a particle's position, momentum, or race.
If you want to have some fun thinking about time as a concept, read up on the so called "B-theory of time".
How does she know what people used to talk about? A very small number may have written something down but its a bad use of a figure of speech.
If we're sharing favorite Far Sides, this one laeft me gasping for air for twenty minutes.
"It is quite hard for me to read this charitably."
I agree, and I think its because the uber-narrative that it advances is White Man Bad, White Man Source of All Black Problems.
The most charitable reading I can give is that it is based on a recognition (after 50 years of futile efforts to "close the gap") that there are profound differences in racial groups that do not yield to education or mere cultural adaptation (e.g., learning a different language). Understandably, the face-saving response is to demonize the "White" way of relating to time/work (conveniently ignoring that South and East Asians may have an even more relentless relationship to time/work).
Is it so hard to acknowledge that hunter-gatherers and agrarian populations evolving in the precarious climate of the Northern temperate zone evolved a different set of genes adapted to "make hay while the moon shines" compared to humans that evolved around the equatorial zone? Rationally, no. But, of course, humans have needs that go deeper than pure reason. Perhaps the Black Nationalists were wiser than I imagined in my (blank slate) idealistic youth.
If I had to recommend one book it would be Robert Grudin’s Time and the Art of Living.
“This is a book about time -- about one's own journey through it and, more important, about enlarging the pleasure one takes in that journey. It's about memory of the past, hope and fear for the future, and how they color, for better and for worse, one's experience of the present. Ultimately, it's a book about freedom -- freedom from despair of the clock, of the aging body, of the seeming waste of one's daily routine, the freedom that comes with acceptance and appreciation of the human dimensions of time and of the place of each passing moment on life's bounteous continuum. For Robert Grudin, living is an art, and cultivating a creative partnership with time is one of the keys to mastering it. In a series of wise, witty, and playful meditations, he suggests that happiness lies not in the effort to conquer time but rather in learning ‘to bend to its curve,’ in hearing its music and learning to dance to it. Grudin offers practical advice and mental exercises designed to help the reader use time more effectively, but this is no ordinary self-help book. It is instead a kind of wisdom literature, a guide to life, a feast for the mind and for the spirit.”
O/T: The most American photo ever taken?
Can I get angry with people who misappropriate the word 'racist'? What she is describing is the difference between an agrarian society and an industrialized society. The old timers in northern Quebec talk about how when the industries were started they had trouble convincing the french canadians to show up every day on time. And yes it caused problems, because the industrial firms recruited english canadians who were used to these ideas as workers. Which caused some friction with the locals.
But it isn't racism.
It is a specific problem with cultural and economic change. A real problem.
Calling it racism is a problem.
"Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so." - Ford Prefect
My favorite Far Side is the one with the spiders - "Hey, Bob...did I scare you or what?"
One of my favs - and there are many.
The "Rex Maneuver"
As with every one of these race-based issues, I want to know how all of this applies to mixed-race individuals. Are they stuck in some netherworld where they have no idea what applies or what doesn't, or, for example, does Barack Obama have to take everything that is "white" or "black" and divide it by two to make it apply to him, and if he does that, which half of the divided whole is the one applicable to him - or does he have the choice which one applies?
Nobody ever answers this for me. It's frustrating.
Bullshit. Women of colour invented time based on their moon cycles
The Elegant Defense: The Immune System by Matt Richtel is a new book worth reading . It is a good explanation of what we know about human survival from pathogens. The Immune system is all we have, but it's reaction timing can be slower than a new pathogen, so we die.
Vaccines are a way to pre-program the immune system reactions so they have time to defeat the new pathogens. Without them the pathogens take over in 4 days and win.
Defense depends on reaction time to attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
Barack Obama is not half-white. He's half-black.
Re: William
The first mechanical clock was invented by the Chinese. The Emperor had it installed in his garden. The Mandarins admired its intricacy and cleverness. That was the end of the development of the mechanical clock in China.....,
Not sure what you mean by "first" -- the main line of Chinese horological development seems to have been water-based mechanical clocks (tracking time by dripping or flowing water), and that continued improving for at least a thousand years, culminating in the gigantic medieval clock and armillary sphere developed by Su Song. These types of clocks were mostly used by the scholars and astronomers of the court, and were necessarily huge on account of the water-powered mechanism, so unlike Western spring-driven clocks, they didn't really lead anywhere. In the Su Song article, Wikipedia references some kind of rotating snapping clock with a footnote to Needham, so perhaps there were purely mechanical clocks developed in China later, but if so, they haven't attracted the sort of attention the water clocks have.
Time is of the essence.
I'm guessing if a Caucasian boss point to the office clock and tell a Black employee, "You're late," the boss will be charged with racism and hauled off to one of those godawful "diversity" re-education classes.
Apes don't have a concept of time, either.
Skynet smiled.
I always liked the Far Side with the fish playing baseball inside the fish bowl. Or the one with the lady calling her neighbor to asks her to describe what's in her front yard, and all you see at her window is a huge eye.
Maybe this exercise in belaboring the obvious is just another academic mediocrity's way of saying "it's racist to expect 'people of color' to show up for work on time". (Iirc, saying that explicitly the last time 'round didn't elicit the rapturous support for the assertion expected by its promoters.)
The people of technologically advanced cultures have always had an ambiguous relation to "industrial" and "high-tech" time. Who hasn't complained about the clock-work life?
It's true that modernization "imposes" alien time constructs on people unused to that way of life. To the extent that the industrial and high-tech revolutions were European in origin, then, yeah, it's "white man's time". Don't want to jump to the white (or Japanese, or now Chinese) man's clock chimes? Every way of life has its advantages and disadvantages. (And it's not that there aren't "white" sub-cultures with "high time preference".)
So, go ahead, reject that "racist" relation to time. But if you choose not to submit to "Western" time than you don't end up with "Western" goodies. All that stuff is created by people who work loooooong hours, and can only be maintained by people who acquire knowledge and competence by submitting themselves to "Western" time habits, and who then continue adhering to those same habits when they enter the workforce.
And for chrissakes don't bitch about it when living in a society where your food supply, electricity, potable tap-water, transportation, communication networks, medical emergency services, etc., etc., etc., are provided to you by all those schmucks who allow themselves to be oppressed by "racist time". *Especially* if you've got a sweet bullshit gig where your relative freedom from such constraints results in no negative consequences to anybody.
If I recall correctly from basic training, if you weren't ten minutes early to formation, you were late. The mostly black drill sgts never told us how this concept could be applied differently according to our skin colors.
I've got some bad news for black and brown peoples in America. If you don't aggressively try to stop this uncontrolled immigration invasion to this country, you people are fucked.
But what they are saying is that the feeling that, at any moment, we could elect a white supremacist to the presidency again in 2016 - as we did - or that the police could do harm to African-American citizens and do so with impunity reminds us and recalls for us histories that we have been told that we are past but which we are still living.
Trump is a white supremacist? Every Trump voter voted for white supremacy? More charitably, she's saying Trump and his supporters are subconsciously white supremacist? Is there a more charitable reading than that?
so, is it time to consider that fact that:
Many more people think Roundup causes cancer than do those that think windmill noise does?
No person with a working sense of humor can possibly have just one favorite Far Side cartoon! That being said, here's one of the large group that form my favorites.
Disclaimers:
1. I actually was an anthropologist/linguist in a former professional life.
2. I actually own Gary Larson's childhood home (we bought it in 1988.) No longer any monsters in the basement, nor ducks in the back yard, though there might have been during his tenure.
Apes don't have a concept of time, either.
Of course they do. I've heard dogs don't know time. Ours does.
Even plants measure time. Lots of plants bloom by measuring the length of sunlight in a day.
I've read this argument before, in Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms. In his case, Clark is the one accused of racism (see the 1 star reviews). The reason why is pretty obvious, once you think about it.
TLDR -- here's a short review in Reason
Did Human Genetic Changes Produce the Industrial Revolution?
Interesting, isn't it, that MAN's oldest monuments are clocks/calendars?
I think, as others noted, the attitude towards time is more about latitude. Although peoples along the Nile must have been very industrious to take advantage of the yearly flooding.
The blaming attitude of the Studies Professor offends me. Makes me angry and childish and drives me to point out therefore that we needn't be in such a hurry to find a cure for the AIDS problem in Africa, that her babies' illnesses must not be time critical to treat, that public assistance checks to people of color don't need to be sent out a given time every month....
One thing I learned from NPR in the 90s, although I suspect they would deny it now, is that when colleges needed to increase the percentages of minorities in the faculty, they couldn't find qualified candidates in the traditional programs. So they created special studies to allow them to hire POC.
Dumb fucking slut.
Does anybody really know what time it is?
This stuff is exhausting, if you pay it any attention.
Does anybody really know what time it is
Does anybody really care
If so I can't imagine why
We've all got time enough to cry
Chicago
Time is too slow for those who wait
And time is too swift for those who fear
Time is too long for those who grieve
And time is too short for those who laugh
http://www.songlyrics.com/it-s-a-beautiful-day/time-is-lyrics/
And for chrissakes don't bitch about it when living in a society where your food supply, electricity, potable tap-water, transportation, communication networks, medical emergency services, etc., etc., etc., are provided to you by all those schmucks who allow themselves to be oppressed by "racist time". *Especially* if you've got a sweet bullshit gig where your relative freedom from such constraints results in no negative consequences to anybody.
Very well said, Angle-Dyne!
Well, I've had my fun, Time!
Well, I've been loved and put aside, Time!
And I've been crushed by tumblin' tide, Time!
And my soul's be psychedelicized, Time!
Now the time has come, Time!
There are things to realize, Time!
Time has come today, Time!
Chamber Brothers
Is Time magazine racist?
so, is it time to consider that fact that:
Many more people think Roundup causes cancer than do those that think windmill noise does?
There is an equal amount of science to support both hypothesis
I've heard dogs don't know time. Ours does.
Mine certainly did! On the dot! When we lived in WA I had to incrementally ease him into the biannual time change. One we moved to AZ is was no longer an issue.
are we all better now?
Human life arose and Africa and developed elsewhere.
No longer sure about that. We are wise enough to know that science can be corrupt (Global Warming) and that historians can give minorities undue weight in the name of political correctness (Black History Month). So, taking that perspective, how valid is the "out of Africa" theory? Was it just a bone thrown to prop up their self-esteem?
I'll never forget the look on my african-american Platoon Sgt's face when we rolled up from Mogadishu to Bardera, Somolia. Imagine taking your family and friends to visit ancestral England, driving though mile after mile of huts made of mud and straw, occupied by naked barbarians trying to remember what hand to wipe with. This is the cradle of evolution?
I don't think the theory will stand. It will become one of those silly ideas we once all believed without question because the "experts" said to.
I think simultaneous evolution is more likely. Other species evolved simultaneously and independently of each other all over the globe. Why not us?
I tried to find logical connections between Ms. Cooper's different assertions/ideas, as a Professor would in reading a grad students introduction to a dissertation. There were none.
She seems to use phrases to signal meaning to the "woke", but makes little effort to connect those phrases in any logical manner. Maybe logic is what White Supremacists use to burden non-Whites, but when you lack logical connections, you are just making word salad.
Larson...one of my favorites. Guy invents a decoder to hear what dogs are actually saying
HEY!!
I don't have time for stupid.
"I've heard dogs don't know time. Ours does. "
I had a Lab once who woke me up promptly every morning at 6:30 am so she could be walked and fed. And she'd bark at 6 pm if she didn't have dinner by then.
Her stomach was her clock.
Timeless stupidity.
robother @ 1:16pm,
What you're saying makes logical sense, but it falters on the reality of climate. In East Africa, there are very definite wet and dry seasons, and no you aren't going to grow anything during dry season.
On the other hand, saying "make hay" vs "whatever" makes a lot more sense when comparing Northern Europe to the South Pacific Islands.
I work with microseconds. I must be oppressed.
Me: "mrsizer, have you got a moment?"
mrsizer: "Sure; talk fast."
Eugen Rosenstock-Hussey had a similar understanding of how time changed in the modern era. That the issue of capitalist exploitation wasn't wages but the time-relation.
Your employer owns your hours now, but not your whole day (like a servant might who works in feudalism).
"Time is as much an obsession for Rosenstock-Huessy as speech. He challenges the modern tendency to flatten time into a mechanical “ticking of the clock,” urging instead that time is multi-dimensional. The regimented time of a factory and its shifts is not the same as the lyrical time of contemplating a sunset or the play-time of sports. Nor is time merely a uniform passage of moments. Time is articulated into units, what Rosenstock-Huessy calls “bodies of time,” by human action and speech. This is an important aspect of the temporal axis of the Cross of Reality. Living wisely in time means knowing when a trend or habit of the past has become decadent and needs to be buried so that a new thing can begin. We create the fissure between past and future by declaring that something is over and done. Peace treaties put war into the past and initiate a future of peace, while fashion designers, moviemakers, and marketers increase sales by dividing the time of style into “old-fashioned” and “fresh.” At a broader level, history has seams, moments when one epoch is brought to a close and a new epoch initiated."
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2015/10/the-soul-of-rosenstock-huessy/
I reccomend the book, "Longitude".
All I can say is ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaj1wVNvSqk
"After the Industrial Revolution, suddenly, we begin to talk about time as spending time. It becomes something that is tethered to monetary value."
Well yes, labor is usually paid by the hour. Unless it's salaried labor.
An alternative is to pay piecework. Which (especially if it's done at home) eliminates the element of time. But, unions hated piecework, and asserted that paying people this way was far more oppressive than paying for their time.
In any case, the connection with the industrial revolution isn't so much about paying for labor by the hour, but about the need to coordinate work that requires many workers working together. Thus, alarm clocks and time clocks and the need to show up at work on time.
Besides, if we're talking about the invention of clocks, well, Stonehedge may not be accurate enough to get you to work on time, but maybe accurate enough to show the equinox, which presumably is somewhat useful when deciding when to plant crops.
Damn racist alarm clocks anyway.
Our dogs hate coming off of daylight savings time. It’s a miserable week in the fall while they adapt certain that this is the time we have decided to never feed them again.
They also know my son’s name. If I call (ok holler) his name they look in his direction or run into the other room to get him.
Kirk: "...In East Africa, there are very definite wet and dry seasons..."
And if my hypothesis is correct, we might expect endemic populations there to have a different orientation toward time than what the descendants of West African slaves that the author is describing. More "White," as Ms Cooper would have it. (Barack Obama might be less exceptional in Kenya than among American blacks.)
I've been told by my African American friends that I'm on "Island Time," which I think is a cute term for their Caribbean sisters' being a few minutes either early or late.
Australian Aborigines have an interesting, non-linear concept of time: all in the present, and set out around you, if I understand it correctly.
Ultimately, since Time is a Human Construct, that someone's going to call Racism isn't surprising.
Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society, lady.
I also liked Herman comics.
Read James Gleick's brilliant "Time Travel: A History."
I clicked through and read it. It's not she has no points worth discussing, it's that she ties them together indiscriminately. She has a mind like an unmade bed.
robother,
Well, if in your original comment you meant 'evolved' more or less literally, it turns out that rainy/dry season is a common pattern in West Africa too--I was speaking only of the part of the continent that I know.
If, on the other hand, you're talking culturally, then sure--I can hardly imagine a scenario more conducive to inculcating lack of personal initiative than being a chattel/hereditary slave.
Uhh oh, hope no one's talking about CPT around here.
She is essentially saying brown people are lazy, but putting a positive spin on it. There is nothing that says one must work hard or be on time but then don't expect to get paid well. Timeliness is what enables a modern civilization to function and that is what enables our high standard of living. Do we think that the japanese don't know about time?
If you want to see primitive peoples with a very acute sense of time, visit a rice farming region. Rice farming is very regimented and if you screw it up you die.
There is a misconception about South Americans having roots in Spain.
Relatively few Spaniards went to South America. Lots of Irish did in the 1600s
The biggest country was colonized by Portuguese and Africans. Argentina and Chile had hundreds of thousands of Italians and Germans. Buenos Aires had 6 German language daily news papers as late as 1940.
Argentine Spanish sounds more like italian. It is clearly Spanish but cadence and pronunciation is very Italian.
Then there was also a big indigenous population.
To call South Americans hispanic is bull shit in most cases.
John Henry
At least on any entomological level.
Henry,
What produced the industrial revolution was two men the scot James watt and Matthew Boulton of Birmingham. Watt for inventing the workable steam engine and his partner Boulton for making it commercially viable.
It was only by making power available on and at demand that the industrial revolution was possible. All the dna in the universe could have sparked the industrial revolution without a reliable and (relatively) portable source. Lots of great books on the subject but I think the very best is Andrew Carnegie's bio of Watt.
I've read it several times and it keeps getting better.
Available free for Kindle and librivox has an excellent free audible version
Andrew Carnegie's autobiography is great too. I downloaded it last night too listen to again.
Carnegie is one Hell of a writer for someone with 6 weeks of schooling.
John Henry
I've always thought it a shame that we have no unit of measurement called the Boulton.
Watts name is rightfully enshrined.
Boulton is as much responsible as watt and I'll bet 9 people out of 10 have any idea of his importance.
John Henry
Capitol,
Gleicks book on information theory and the history of information is also great.
John Henry
"Then there was also a big indigenous population."
In some places. But not in Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. And if there's was a big Indian population in Brazil it got completely swamped by African Slaves and White Immigrants.
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