Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Obama's speech text

I read the Obama "race speech" transcript and I only found one section to be good - the part in the middle that dealt with his personal experiences. Most of the rest, I thought, was boring and uninteresting. I couldn't quite articulate exactly what was wrong with it, but here is the best description of what was wrong with the whole thing...

Yesterday he was not postracial. My generation has little idea what the fuss was all about, and that’s a good thing. It’s not black-white for us. It’s multiracial, and Asian, and desi, and Hasidim, and Poles, and Pakistani Subway shops, and Brazilians in Cambridge, and your Japanese and Indian friend who’s not the Other, she’s just Jasmine. It’s not zero-sum, it’s not a locked-in war, it’s your IM list. It just is.

Obama’s speech yesterday was not real life. It was almost as simplified as Hollywood casting. Real life is far more interesting than the simplistic narrative of most national political oratory. Any resident of a diverse city is already far beyond it.


I guess the sad thing about the speech was that it was rather out-of-date. I guess it was targeted at Baby Boomers, not the younger folks who are anyways going to vote for Obama.

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Sanskrit webzine: Vishvavani

Blog/webzine in Sanskrit: http://vishvavani.blogspot.com

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Monday, March 17, 2008

The best blog post on the Bear Sterns mess

The best blog post I've read on the Bear Sterns mess is a comparison with -- of all places -- Zimbabwe...
“A natural bottom”???

Are you crazy?!?

Think about a real crash, a real war and the real humanitarian hell it produces.

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