“It’s Just Like the Flu”

Oct 4, 1918, news story on the flu from the Dayton Daily News

Ever since the COVID-19 virus hit the news there’s been debates over what to call it. (COVID-19 just means Coronavirus Disease 2019, by the way.) We don’t have to go so far as to cite the current US administration’s habit of sometimes naming it as “the Chinese virus” (see this commentary or maybe this post on our site) but can simply focus on what’s at stake in calling it “the flu.”

For, depending on what one means by this, the designation “flu” can convey dramatically different implications — making all too apparent something investigated regularly on this blog: classification matters. Continue reading ““It’s Just Like the Flu””

The Utility of the Familiar and the Strange

An image of the aftermath of a bad storm

I assume you’ve heard the news of the two major hurricanes (and the damage they caused) that recently came ashore in the US — the first hitting the shores of southern Texas and then the other (this past weekend, just over a week after Texas was hit), going up the full length of Florida.

During the commentaries on these two events — whether by the media, politicians, or people who lived through them — I found it interesting how comparative analysis was deployed to make sense of the events.

Or, better put, to figure out what to do in the face of them. Continue reading “The Utility of the Familiar and the Strange”

Innumerable Shades of Grey

Planned Parenthood shooter getting arrestedYes — about a week ago there was yet another mass shooting in the US, this time at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, CO. (I won’t go into the even more recent mass shootings in Georgia or California yesterday.)

There’s not too many details in the public domain yet (at least when I wrote this post), but we know that a middle-aged, white male suspect was apprehended after a stand-off with police (pictured above), that three people (including a cop) were killed, and that several more wounded. Continue reading “Innumerable Shades of Grey”

Identifying Threats of Violence

Guns hanging on a wall in a storeWith discourses surrounding terrorism and gun violence, which have become prominent again in the wake of Charleston and Chattanooga, people want to find patterns that illustrate the source of the threats of violence. Looking for these patterns, people engage in an act of comparison, which, as we have discussed on this blog previously, is more about the person constructing the comparison than some reality outside of him/her. For example, I have seen various social media posts recently that include lists of acts of violence, ranging from 9/11 and the storming of the US Embassy in Iran to the Chattanooga shootings, all attributed to people who identified as Muslims. While these posts appear to be direct descriptions of reality, they reflect the choices of the creator of the list as to which acts of violence to include and which identifications to include. Continue reading “Identifying Threats of Violence”

Denaturalizing the Natural

a purple cartoon dinosaurAs a little kid in the early 1960s, I guess I decided that the hooded sweaters I sometimes wore made me look like Dino the dinosaur — you know, from “The Flintstones”? I don’t think we had a specific name for them yet — at least we didn’t call them “hoodies,” as people do now. Instead, opting for brutal descriptivism (which sounds like a 1960s architectural movement), I’m guessing that we just uncreatively called them “hooded sweaters.” Continue reading “Denaturalizing the Natural”

Expanding A Woman’s Touch

a woman's touchRussell McCutcheon’s blogpost yesterday analyzed the viewer’s role in reading this image (above) juxtaposing the current leaders of Chile, Argentina and Brazil to the past dictators of those three nations three of the first members of the Chilean Junta: Leigh (Air Force), Pinochet (Army) and Merino (Navy), emphasizing the conservative notion of gender that appears to inform the reading of the image in ways that people often identify as progressive. That reading of the image that McCutcheon analyzed also overlooks the strategic production of such an image. Continue reading “Expanding A Woman’s Touch”