nyt: wtf?

file under: the liberal bastion that wasn't...

the 6.22.08 issue of the new york times magazine was full of carefully worded, thoroughly researched, non-hegemonic gems. here are a few for your enjoyment:

-in his article, "the new pariahs? sixty years after the holocaust, europe still may not have learned to accept outsiders", noah feldman (a 38 year old harvard, oxford, and yale educated white man living in cambridge, ma) accuses europe of being racist, basically. he says that in western europe, old school anti-immigration sentiment is morphing into an anti-islamic bias. he cites supporting examples before offering up that, "the u.s. had its own terrible legacy of legalized racism in the form of jim crow laws, which hitler imitated for his own purposes. in the aftermath of world war II, however, we began slowly and agonizingly to come to terms with this past. racial bias is still with us, but so is self-consciousness about our problems and how they must be overcome."

hooray, the white man from cambridge says racism is over! hey cell block 4, did you hear that? racism is over so quit complaining about the higher incarceration rates of black men, the difference in length of time it takes one to reach for their gun when faced with black vs. white perpetrators in simulation exercises, and the like...

-in a featurette on male floral designer daniel ost, ost shares with readers how his father was "less enthusiastic" about his young son's early predilection for flowers. he says, "'when i was young, many people thought floral design was gay so to "cure" me, he sent me for a while to military school.' (ost is happily married and the father of two.)"

thank you, new york times, for establishing that ost is... happily married and the father of two.

oh, wait, did you mean to establish that he's not gay? 'cause that isn't necessarily mutually exclusive with this whole "married father" thing. crazy, i know...

-in a article praising jim rogers for being such an environmentally-friendly big energy (coal) company baron, the nyt paraphrases his prediction that, "coal will never go away, because it's cheap and more accessible than any other energy source."

pop quiz, mine workers (those that aren't dead already or currently trapped in a mine, that is): raise your hand if you think there's a more accessible form of energy. no? no hands? well great then, it's settled, coal is the most accessible form of energy.

(or the mine workers' arms were all too tired to raise their hands since they'd just come off their 4,680th 12-hour shift digging coal out of a mine hundreds of feet below the ground. we don't really want to press this though, lest we give the impression that we care about the value of a human life. after all, if we did that, we might find out more about these workers, like how they'd been stealing coal dust by putting it in their lungs and then we'd have to fire the whole lot of them and then where would we be? awfully cold in our mcmansion, that's where! no, no, we can't have that. this little democratic exercise is over, back underground you go!)