Cuban Youth Movement

Every so often you read something that you hope and pray is fake. I read a BBC article entitled "Meeting Cuba's youngest politician" and did just that. It profiles 18-year-old Liaena Hernandez, one of the few outliers in a government that is growing increasingly older.

I couldn't quite tell if it was an attempt at humor or stone-cold serious British journalism, but since its the BBC it couldn't be anything but the latter, but when you juxtapose this...

"History has taught us that the Communist Party is the road that Cuba needs to follow.

"We don't need to copy other countries' systems. We are satisfied with our own and we are going to keep perfecting it."

...with this...

"Better roads and housing are amongst their [the people of Manuel Tames] concerns, but food appears the number one priority."

...you either laugh, lament a young girl's indoctrination into a system that doesn't work, or both. Who am I to judge, but when two of your three main concerns revolve around basic human needs you know you have a system that doesn't work.

Project Censored

I'm studying to be a journalist, so a book like Project Censored's Censored 2009 is indispensable to me as a learning tool. In addition to shedding light on 25 of the most underreported news stories of the last two years (the '09 edition covers stories from '07 and '08) they also have 14 other chapters dedicated to more specific studies of censorship in the mass media.

To someone who is both a) interested in media criticism and theory and b) gigantically skeptical of conventional wisdom this should be an enthralling trip into what information society misses, right?

I'm not so sure. I got through the introduction, preface, and a few of the Project's top 25, but the fight was just in getting to the top 25. The roadblock being that right off the bat the group makes their politics known. Then the introduction, written by Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, is written astoundingly poorly for a former Congresswoman. Not to mention the Green Party is off-the-deep-end left wing.

Furthermore "to censor" is traditionally defined as "removing objectionable content". The people at Project Censored don't see it that way, and they fail make that clear in the beginning of the book. At all. I had to go to their website to figure that one out. What they consider censored, I (and the dictionary) would consider underreported.

My point is that media watchdog organizations should be as unbiased as possible. Regardless of what your personal opinions are they should not take shape in any means in your work (unless, of course, that work calls for it).

I can't make any final decisions on the book quite yet (it's 300+ pages, I'm on page 20 and from what I've read once it gets going it gets a whole lot better) but my point still stands. Putting bias and media (even if that "media" is followed up by criticism) together only leads to problems.

The Oddity of the Che T-Shirt

Killer Chic: Hollywood's Sick Love Affair with Che Guevara
Video courtesy of reason.tv, runs about 8 minutes 30 seconds

So why is it that we fear Facist dictators and not Communist tyrants?

Probably, as my Sociology teacher put it last semester, "You're going to continue to hear about three people over the course of your college career." One of them is Karl Marx, the second being Sigmund Freud, and the last escapes me right now.

Pretty much, as long as The Communist Manifesto continues to be scrutinized in academia and Marx's work is held in as high regard as it is, Stalin will always be portrayed in a better light than Hitler, despite that Hitler's death toll is only marginally larger (depending on who you talk to)* than that of Stalin's (it also helps that the U.S.S.R. was fighting the Germans during World War II, too).

Marx's work also appeals to a specific brand of altruism - the desire to end the suffering of others. Why else do parents spend so much time teaching their children the value in sharing and charity?

It's also helped along by the fact that Russia and China are still shrouded in mystery, even after all these years of "reform".

*Do yourself a favor and just Ctrl+F for "Hitler" and "Stalin" - that page is pretty huge.

Freakonomics

I got it for Christmas and just finished it today. The way Levitt debunked the conventional wisdom and the manner in which Dubner presented it was well worth the accolades the critics (and just about anyone I've ever had a conversation about the book with) have lavished it with.

There's no shortage on praise for the book so I'll suffice it to say that I give major credit to anyone willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, especially those able to do it with the grace Dubner and Levitt do.

It does, however, have its problems.

While the numbers rarely lie, they can be skewed or, in this case, overlooked, and as I read the book I couldn't help but wonder what, if any, statistics were passed over. The cost of abortions don't seem to play much of a role in "Where Have All the Criminals Gone?". The tandem seems to overlook that white people outnumber black people nationwide in "What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?" They seem to hold the internet on a pedestal in "How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?" yet fail to reason why the "Information Superhighway" is only so when you can make some extra cash.

But that's what the book was designed to do now wasn't it? Challenge the information spoon-fed to you, ask questions, look at things differently, and find answers.