TheAgitator.com
24 Responses to “Morning Links/Open Thread”
Leave a Reply
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Site Features
- Home
- About Radley Balko
- Publications
- Speaking Info
- Multimedia
- Resume
- Picasa Photos
- Recommendations
- RSS Feed
- Buy Agitator Gear
-
-
$12/month Recurring Donation
$6/month Recurring Donation
- My Amazon wishlist
-
Site Credits
Uh Oh, I can actually speak a couple of versions of “non-English”. Guess I better be more careful with the “no hablo ingles” jokes.
On a more serious note, wasn’t this law actually written for commercial drivers? Still seems stupid, there are tons of people who speak Spanish in TX, even white guys like me. I bet about half the TX cops speak at least passable Spanish.
Seems like just another idiot cop that doesn’t know the law to me.
The Kansas thing made me think of this scene from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUslGSoEH8I
Once again cops show that they don’t care what the law is. They don’t need a law to ticket you or arrest you if they want. The whole damn foundation of our law is thrown out because we have allowed this crap to come in and by subtle degrees, replace the rule of law with a police state. Yea I know it ain’t the Soviet Union or Mao’s China yet but the groundwork has been laid. We really are no longer under the rule of law.
I’m not at all surprised about the Dallas police issuing tickets to non-english speakers. I recall a couple of years ago when some Dallas area stores starting accepting pesos, the language/culture/border nutjobs started crawling out of the woodwork.
Some thoughts for the day:
Have a good weekend. Try not to do anything foolish or break any laws!
Dallas is sure were i want to live. they have busted people for being drunk when they’re not drunk. and i quote: “It is a common complaint in Dallas that police sometimes arrest those people who aren’t even tipsy. It isn’t part of the current policy to give public intoxication suspects a breathalizer or field sobriety test.”
see the video…………http://www.the33tv.com/news/kdaf-public-intoxication-dallas-story,0,6652987.story
So…did you just call Mavis Staples a racist in the previous post?
Inadvertently, I mean…
Regarding the use of force item, I would be a lot more tolerant of the cops’ use of force for arrests if cops faced any kind of discipline or penalty for false arrest, but they don’t.
Most people understand that cops have to have some authority to use force in making an arrest if they are to be effective, but the fact is that they are immune from any kind of punishment for misbehavior (a term that doesn’t begin to do justice to what they do) unless they are caught on camera, which escapes illegal confiscation, and that video manages to become public, causing a shit storm complete with mainstream media coverage big enough to embarrass the city to actually do something to the cop.
Racist? Where do you see that?
Covers – interesting, but I’d say Mr. Don is overreacting on the present-use angle (“The use of this term gives them a bit of authority since it makes them sound like they are in the music business. They are in fact ignorant of what a cover version of a song really is.” = puh-lease). Anyway, words “morph” all the time (note, not an endoresement of non-objective language). Interesting (and sad) that that’s where the term originated, though.
Ah. Got it. I’m a half step slower on the weekends.
The whole “cover song” issue deserves a William Safire column. The Wikipedia article on the topic lists several different (mostly unobjectionable) origins for the idea of a cover song – but neither the Wikipedia contributors nor Don McLean have offered any evidence to show “cover song” being used in its supposed original context(s).
Not that I think it really matters. Language evolves, and the lodestar for when a prior objectionable use should trump a current use involves things like: the strength of the objectionable association, the extent to which ignorant current use continues to victimize people, etc. In this case, the case against the word seems pretty weak.
In my neck of the woods:
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/10/syracuse_police_searching_for.html
@13 -
Safire did write an “On Language” column about the term a couple of years ago. It’s probably in the NY Times magazine archives.
He was kind enough to quote an email I sent him in which I recalled some years ago reviewing a band I said “covered these songs the way a stud horse is said to ‘cover’ a brood mare”.
Has anybody checked on the Dallas cops’ ability to read English?
Radley,
I think B was making a joke about Mavis Staples choosing to cover a Stephen Foster song…since a lot of his work is tied with blackface performance.
He probably should have added a smiley face on the end of that to indicate he was joking, if that was the case.
Duly noted :)
That story on the the origin of covers sounds like another of these things written by people looking for a reason to be offended. Like “Picnic” actually being a gathering of white folks to watch a lynching. Or “Rule of Thumb” about the size of a stick a man can use to beat his wife. Etc.
I call “nonsense”.
The Safire column is here, though to be fair it’s more explication than etymology:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE5DE103EF933A15752C1A9639C8B63
(And who are you, Mack? Where/what do you review?)
As for McLean, well, the activity he describes was certainly shifty — if not exactly “racist” — but I’m not sure why we should believe it was the lone source of the word “cover.” Especially given that the word apparently emerged either much earlier (“early 20th century,” says Wikipedia) or a bit later (1966, says another) than the phenomenon he’s indicting.
Aresen,
The Dallas cops don’t speak and read English, they speak and read American!
Don McLean is an asshole. At least, according to Andy Breckman (creator of Monk, former SNL writer, host of 7 Second Delay): http://www.wfmu.org/LCD/andy/americanpie.html
For some reason Clerks2 popped into my head. “Takin it back….”
/was going to post the youtube clip but decided maybe I better not. I’m teaching myself restraint.
“Back in the days of black radio stations and white radio stations (i.e. segregation), if a black act had a hot record the white kids would find out and want to hear it on “their” radio station. This would prompt the record company to bring a white act into the recording studio and cut an exact, but white, version of the song to give to the white radio stations to play and thus keep the black act where it belonged, on black radio. A “cover” version of a song is a racist tool.”
And thus is encapsulated the recording career of Pat Boone.