La courbe et la cloche

(Image via ManuMilitari)
Guy A. Lepage: Vous avez dit, et je vous cite: « Les Noirs vivant en Amérique étaient le résultat d'un processus de sélection artificielle, et par conséquent ils ont un léger désavantage sur le plan intellectuel. »

Docteur Mailloux: Oui, c'est vrai (...) il y a eu des études aussi, qui n'ont pas été publiées, qui m'ont été remises par l'Université de Montréal.

Dan Bigras: Quelles études? Quels auteurs?

Docteur Mailloux: Des études américaines, je ne les sais pas par coeur, mais je les ai dans mon sac, qui ont été faites sur des groupes. Et effectivement, ça a donné que le quotient intellectuel moyen des Noirs et des Amérindiens est nettement inférieur à 100.

Un test cognitif est bien plus qu'un paquet de feuilles:

So you get two groups of students, white, black, who are equally prepared. Equal skills, everything. You give them this very difficult test that is presented as diagnostic of ability. The black student has this extra pressure on performance. And that is in our research invariably reflected in lower performance.

Then you shift conditions just with the touch of a change of the instructions, you present the same test as a test that is something we use to study problem solving in the laboratory and is not diagnostic of ability. That turns the stereotype off for the black student. Now as the black student experiences frustration on this test, it has nothing to do with the prospect of confirming a stereotype or being seen from the standpoint of the stereotype. And if that pressure of being seen stereotypically is enough to depress their performance, then taking off that pressure should increase their performance. And that's what happens in this research. Presenting the same test as non-diagnostic of ability, black students perform just as well as equally prepared white students in that situation.

Claude Steele, Département de Psychologie, Stanford

Si vous voulez comprendre la controverse autour de The Bell Curve

• The Bell Curve
  

  sur le site Human Intelligence de l'Université de l'Indiana




• Very few of the reviews frame the book in the history of racist "science," or denounce it as another racist insult tending to the encourage negative stereotypes and political and social violence against black people. This is racism normalized, made acceptable to an important racist constituency and fitted to serve the political agenda of the powerful, setting the intellectual and moral stage for a new wave of harsh policies toward the heirs of the victims of the slave system. -Edward S. Herman

Iran, Iran pas?

The Iranian mullahs, meanwhile, are chuckling - literally. Some months ago, when the Iranian vice-president visited the United Arab Emirates for a regional summit, he was asked by the sheikhs whether he feared a US intervention in Iran. The Iranian leader roared with laughter: "Without us, the US could never have occupied Afghanistan or Iraq. They know that and we know that invading Iran would mean they would be driven out of those two countries."

The Logic Of Colonial Rule, Tariq Ali, 25 Septembre 2005

Un conseil: si ça concerne un sujet_x touché de près ou de loin par la politique de Washington, googlez "Chomsky, sujet_x" pour commencer.

Rattling Iran, Noam Chomsky, 05 Février 2005

Le service de la propagande

But if a group that had lied its way into an aggression-occupation subsequently shifted objectives, with the Leader now claiming a new vision and aim to democratize the world, minimal honesty and intelligence would seem to demand scepticism and a careful search for real motives and objectives. To a remarkable degree the mainstream media and intellectuals eschewed any such critical examination and took the new objectives at face value. If this is so, then “all the news fit to print” is not dictated by any quest for truth but by the demands of service to the state.

The Farce of the Bush Pursuit of Democracy Abroad--While Undermining It At Home, Edward Herman, 26 Août 2005


The people of Tal Afar, a northern Iraqi town now in the news as "an insurgent stronghold", refused to be expelled from their homes, and as you read this, are being bombed and shelled and strafed, just as the people of Fallujah were, and the people of Najaf, and the people of Hongai, a "stronghold" in Vietnam, once the most bombed place on earth, and the people of Neak Loeung in Cambodia, one of countless towns flattened by B-52s. The list of such places consigned to notoriety, then oblivion, is seemingly endless. Why?

The answer largely is that so much of western scholarship has taken the humanity out of the study of nations, of people, congealing it with jargon and reducing it to an esotericism called "international relations", the grand chess game of western power that scores nations as useful or not, expendable or not. (Listen to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw talk about "failed nations": the pure invention of Anglo-American IR zealots.) It is this rampant orthodoxy that determines how power speaks and how its historians and reporters report.

Such orthodoxy, says Richard Falk, professor of International Relations at Princeton and a distinguished dissenter, "which is so widely accepted among political scientists as to be virtually unchallengeable in academic journals, regards law and morality as irrelevant to the identification of rational policy." Thus, western foreign policy is formulated "through a self-righteous, one-way, moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence..."

This is the filter through which most people get their serious news. It is the reason why the most obvious truths, such as the dominance of western state terrorism over the minuscule al-Qaeda variety, is never reported. It is the reason why America's destruction of 35 democracies in 30 countries (historian William Blum's latest count), is unknown to the American public.

News From Behind The Facade, John Pilger, 20 Septembre 2005

Le top 10 2006 de Project Censored:

#1 Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government
#2 Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Deathtoll
#3 Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage
#4 Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In
#5 U.S. Uses Tsunami to Military Advantage in Southeast Asia
#6 The Real Oil for Food Scam
#7 Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood
#8 Iraqi Farmers Threatened By Bremer’s Mandates
#9 Iran’s New Oil Trade System Challenges U.S. Currency
#10 Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy

Haïti

Annette Auguste, or So Ann, has also been imprisoned - since May 10, 2004, when US Marines kicked down her door, shot her dogs, handcuffed her 5-year old granddaughter, and took this 70-year old grandmother and singer away.

So Ann is locked in a police station, locked up with 147 other women. When we asked her, sitting in a corner in the open area between locked hallways of cells under the eyes of guards and young women prisoners, how many of these women were political prisoners, she told us - all of them. They were all rounded up from the poor neighbourhoods, and facing charges of 'associating' with malcontents - something out of the napoleonic legal code.

As for So Ann herself, she told us the bizarre twists and turns of the case against her. The first set of charges the Marines brought were that she was colluding with Muslims in a local mosque to attack the Marines. Given that this was May 10, 2004, we concluded there must have been a mixup in the American occupation filing system and they accidentally pulled out an accusation file for Iraq. When the absence of a mosque in So Ann's neighbourhood cast some doubt on this accusation, they tried to charge So Ann with attacking the anti-Aristide opposition in September 2003. She was in the hospital at the time. Next they produced an eyewitness stating that So Ann had ground a baby with a mortar and pestle in order that Aristide could drink the baby's blood. The eyewitness said So Ann called her for the ritual and even produced the phone number - for a number which So Ann did not acquire until months after the ritual supposedly took place. Now at least this last charge has a witness, even though that witness is apparently in France and has not been heard from in some time, and so that's the charge they are sticking with.

From the Embassy to the Prison, Justin Podur, 21 Septembre 2005

On a les Musil qu'on peut

BRAD PITT OU MOURIR roman, Sylvain d'Auteuil
Parution : 6 septembre 2005, Les Intouchables

Description : Stéphane se fait larguer par sa femme, avec qui il a eu un fils et dont il ignorait qu’elle était lesbienne. À peine remis de ses émotions, il se lance à la recherche d’une nouvelle copine, mais découvre bientôt que la femme québécoise a changé. Voici à quoi ressemble la drague au Québec en 2005.

Scène de bar. Deux gars abordent deux filles assises à une table.

Le premier gars : « Hé, les filles, on peut-y s’assœir avec vous ? »

La première fille : « On est entre amies, ça fait longtemps qu’on s’est pas [sic] vues. »

Le deuxième gars : « S’il vous plaît, on est gentils. »

La deuxième fille : « Gentils ? » (Gentils ! ! ! Ça n’a aucune importance. Vous n’avez rien de Brad Pitt. Allez ouste, fichez le camp !)

Le premier gars : « Si vous preniez la peine de nous connaître, vous verriez qu’on est indispensables… »

La première fille : « Machos, vous voulez dire ! » (Indispensables ? Moi, je préfère le chocolat au sexe. Je peux m’abstenir des mois si je veux. Quand l’envie me prend, il y a toujours ma copine Julie ou Geneviève ou encore mon godemiché.)

Culturalisme

J'aime à me me définir comme patriote, le contrastant à nationaliste, qui évoque le grand chef qui règne, le pyramidal, le... fasciste, et au final, une belle façon n'est-ce pas, me dis-je comme en arrière pensée, de culturaliser notre contradiction fondamentale, la dévier de la lutte de libération? C'est bien entendu une idée ridicule puisque le mouvement ne m'appartient pas, m'échappe pour une grande part... un vote de gauche qui mène la droite au pouvoir anyone? Ici, en ce moment, l'inspiration impose une impression comme explication, peut-être, qui sait, une salve salvatrice de mon gros bon sens cartésien, m'exhortant à désaccepter des constats, et les Idées (I pour Interne) sont des structures complexes dont la nature même est la ramificativité, peu malléables au phare de la conscience, rebooter donc, un moment, pour poser des questions:

Les deux vedettes à avoir pété les plombs sur une chaine nationale U.S. au sujet du scandale que représente la réaction de Washington à Katrina sont:

• #1 Kanye West



• #2 Céline Dion

Bon, on connait pour sûr les liens que certains on voulu établir:

nègres noirs et nègres blancs

et les liens plus précis dans la révolution même.


Je n'ai pas d'opinion particulière (je suis en reboot là), mais deux questions.

• Les noirs des U.S. forment-ils une nation?

• Le cas échéant, quelle forme leur lutte politique doit-elle prendre?

Ça ne pourra pas toujours ne pas arriver

The Chicago City Council Wednesday passed a resolution demanding the removal of US troops from Iraq. Passing by a Council vote of 29 to 9, with 12 abstaining or not voting, the resolution urges 'the United States government to immediately commence an orderly and rapid withdrawal' from Iraq.

(Via ZMag via Chicago Indymedia)

Pour mémoire:

New York City Council approves resolution opposing Iraq war On March 12, New York City joined some 125 other cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Kalamazoo in passing a resolution urging restraint in a possible war with Iraq.
cities for peace

Course à la direction du PQ

Imaginons que René Levesque ait accusé Jacques Parizeau de prendre de la coke, se saoûler raide et avoir de jolies partouzes. En combien de nano- secondes est-ce que La Presse reprend le tout en première page?

Gesca et ses amis ne veulent surtout pas d'un autre "leader" au PQ que leur petit Boisclair. Preuve par quatre : la chronique de David de samedi. PAS UNE SEULE REPRISE dans la presse francophone ou anglophone. (...)

Pas étonnant que Charest s'accroche. J'imagine la belle campagne électorale avec un adversaire gai, accusé d'avoir pris de la coke, de ne plus se rappeler où était son char et j'en passe... À moins de vivre sa vie sur une terrasse de la rue Saint-Denis, disons que ce n'est pas tellement gagnant pour le Québécois moyen. Jean-Yves Durocher, TRIBUNE LIBRE 12.9.2005

Bon..euhhh..ben le billet de M. Durocher est pas sous tribune libre sur le site de Vigile, peut importe, ce même Vigile nous enligne sur un jouissif blog anti-Boisclair

l'auteur de ce blogue s'explique:

Moi je suis un vrai souverainiste et je veux un chef qui veut la souveraineté. Le Québec est menacé d'une décote de crédit alors que le fédéral nage dans nos surplus. C'est une partie de notre argent, il faut la reprendre. Considérant cela, c'est hier qu'il fallait la souveraineté, pas quand le membership du P.Q. aura doublé.

Ce n'est pas vrai que Boisclair est souverainiste. Il fait semblant parce que c'est payant, point. Boisclair, c'est la continuité de Landry, c'est la droite. Les conditions gagnantes qu'il préconise, c'est la farce de la dernière décennie.

Foglia en plein dans le mille:

Si c'est pour reprendre le pouvoir et en faire à peu près ce que M.Charest en fait, M. André Boisclair est la meilleure chose qui pouvait arriver au PQ. Charest-Boisclair même dogme néo-libéral, même conviction de porter le modernisme, même conviction (presque divine) qu'ils ont été appelés pour la réaliser au Québec, et même confiance en la science économique pour l'imposer.

De tous c'est M. Boisclair que j'aime le moins.

Rien qu'à le voir nous regarder sans nous voir parce que son regard embrasse déja le Québec dans son entier, je peux vous dire à quoi il se shoote en ce moment, je peux vous dire qu'il est passé à une drogue beaucoup plus dure: le pouvoir.
(via le blogue en question)

Pierre Dubuc, secrétaire de SPQLibre, éditeur et rédacteur en chef de l’aut’journal, et auteur de L'autre histoire de l'indépendance est dans la course; Son blogue est ici

Il écrivait en février 2001:

L’affaire Michaud sert de prétexte, sous le couvert d’un débat entre « nationalisme ethnique » et « nationalisme civique », d’une offensive néolibérale qui s’attaque aux fondements de l’existence même de la nation québécoise. Le texte le plus percutant à cet égard est celui paru dans Le Devoir du 9 janvier signé par 15 personnes se présentant comme des jeunes de moins de 35 ans – dont on a su qu’ils gravitaient autour du ministre André Boisclair – et endossé une semaine plus tard par plus de mille personnes.

Dershowitz

“I am proud of my book,” Dershowitz concludes. Indeed, what Harvard professor wouldn’t be proud of a book that cites a Sony movie and a chronology appended to a high school syllabus to document casualty figures from a major conflict, and an editorial in The Orlando Sentinel to resolve the controversies regarding a crucial United Nations resolution that has been the subject of numerous scholarly studies?

• Norman Finkelstein
  
• La preuve

Un peu d'histoire ?
Noam Chomsky: Here's a story which is really tragic. How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan Peters—called From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants [i.e. to the Jewish-settled areas of the former Palestine, during the British mandate years of 1920 to 1948]. And it was very popular—it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there's no moral issue, because they're just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. And there was all kinds of demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the University of Chicago [Philip M. Hauser] authenticated it. That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake. Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He's a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: "Here's what I've found in this book, do you think it's worth pursuing?"

Well, he got back one answer, from me. I told him, yeah, I think it's an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you're going to get in trouble—because you're going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they're going to destroy you.

Kanye West, Katrina

(Myers throws to West, who looked extremely nervous in his super-preppy designer rugby shirt and white pants, which is not like the arrogant West and which, in retrospect, should have been a tip-off.)

West: I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, "They're looting." You see a white family, it says, "They're looking for food." And, you know, it's been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I've tried to turn away from the TV because it's too hard to watch. I've even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I'm calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help -- with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way -- and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us!

(West throws back to Myers, who is looking like a guy who stopped on the tarmac to tie his shoe and got hit in the back with the 8:30 to La Guardia.)

Myers: And subtle, but in many ways even more profoundly devastating, is the lasting damage to the survivors' will to rebuild and remain in the area. The destruction of the spirit of the people of southern Louisiana and Mississippi may end up being the most tragic loss of all.

(And, because Myers is apparently as dumb as his Alfalfa hair, he throws it back to West.)

West: George Bush doesn't care about black people!

(Back to Myers, now looking like the 8:30 to La Guardia turned around and caught him square between the eyes.)

Myers: Please call . . .

Kanye West's Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC, Lisa de Moraes, 3 septembre 2005

Kanye West vs Mike Myers - vidéo

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

(Via Eyeteeth via Kos via TPM)

Autres videos à voir absolument!

• Une grande leçon de journalisme (ou: objectivité n'est pas sténographie)



• Aaron Broussard

Et l'action maintenant?
Please join us in this fight. This is not just about New Orleans. This is about community and collaboration versus corporate profiteering. The struggle for New Orleans lives on.

Back Inside New Orleans, Jordan Flaherty, 14 Septembre 2005

Palestine et Haïti

International Solidarity Movement

Le 17 juin 2005 à Montréal, lors de la Conférence internationale de Montréal sur Haïti, Yves Engler, un militant pro-démocratie, a renversé de la gouache rouge sur les mains du ministre des Affaires internationales Pierre Pettigrew en lui assénant cette vérité bien sentie : « Vous mentez, le peuple haïtien se meurt et vous avez du sang sur les mains!». Un incident similaire est survenu le 1er juillet alors que le même ministre tentait de parader dans les rues du parc Extension. Sa sortie fut quelque peu gâchée par un comité d’accueil composé d’Haïtiens, d’Haïtiennes et autres personnes solidaires qui l’apostrophèrent ainsi « Canada, hors d'Haïti! Haïti aux Haïtiens! ».

Canada, hors d'Haïti!

Geldof, Bono et autres moisissures

And so it has been with Blair's Africa initiatives, heralded by the establishment of the African Commission in February 2004, a year after millions protested against the invasion of Iraq. In March 2005, the commission put out a report entitled Our Common Interest: an Argument (Penguin) while Blair's crusading humanitarianism has been endorsed by the likes of Bono and Bob Geldof. At the same time, the Make Poverty History campaign—a coalition of several non-profit organisations and charities such as Oxfam and Christian Aid—stepped on to a high-profile stage with Nelson Mandela addressing a huge rally in Trafalgar Square. He urged leaders of the G8 to recognise that the ‘world is hungry for action, not words’. All then proceeded to congregate at Edinburgh at the beginning of July this year, the leaders and their sanctioned ‘protestors’, to enact a choreographed set of protests and equally ritualistic responses. A host of celebrities in designer clothing and expensive sunglasses, sporting white Make Poverty History wristbands, the accessory du jour, proceeded to exhort the crowd to demand that poverty in Africa and elsewhere be made to magically vanish.

The Moral Empire: The Politics of Conscience, Priyamvada Gopal, 05 Septembre 2005

I have heard similar sentiments from every African campaigner I have spoken to. Bob Geldof is beginning to look like Mother Teresa or Joy Adamson. To the corporate press, and therefore to most of the public, he is a saint. Among those who know something about the issues, he is detested. Those other tabloid saints appeared to recognise that if they rattled the cages of the powerful, the newspapers upon which their public regard depended would turn against them. When there was a conflict between their public image and their cause, the image won. It seems to me that Geldof has played the same game.


He seized a campaign which commanded great public enthusiasm, which had the potential gravely to embarrass Tony Blair and George Bush. He asked us to focus not on the harm the G8 leaders were doing, but on the help they might give. When they failed to deliver, he praised them anyway. His endorsement and the public forgetfulness it prompted helped license them to start reversing their commitments. When they did so, he said nothing. This looks to me like more than just political naivity. It looks as if he is working for the other side.

The Man Who Betrayed the Poor, George Monbiot, 06 Septembre 2005

Lire ou relire

501, the conquest continues

Tout Hofstadter

Analyse mathématique I; II; III, Roger Godement

How the mind works....nan, faut pas pousser la paresse quand même

Du Alexandre Dumas!

La Civilisation de la Nouvelle-France 1713-1744, Guy Frégault

La mort en été, Yukio Mishima

Al-Shifa?