I’m not always convinced of the inherently democratic function of digital communication, but I think that the case of Michelle Bachmann in MN demonstrates some of the contours of how the internet and blogging influences democracy. Today the Congressperson fought back by saying that ‘the media’ (ie the blogs that latched on to her televised idiocy) don’t represent ‘the people’ – and she’s right. The ‘blog-o-shere-a-rama’ doesn’t in fact represent people.
What it does represent are members of movements, who can work for or against a candidate/proposition and act as force multipliers for candidates, leveraging money, time and intellectual energy to support a cause. Bachmann’s seat became contested because members of a national blogosphere caught on to her comments and made her a cause, pre-empting her media pushback by contextualizing her comments within a broader failing of the GOP message, as well as an old-school McCarthy red scare. They bested her by forming the message ahead of time, and forced the media into covering it. Even if they don’t represent her district in a representative democracy sense, they do have the power to control how members of her district view her – and that means something.
The NY Times reports that the economic downturn will probably prompt universities to raise tuition further on account of deteriorating endowments (looking at you NYU).
There needs to be an investment in higher education in the US that focuses on students. Relying on endowments and tuition rather than government support to sustain universities means that schools pit the the students they serve against the health of the educational institution. If schools could draw on steady governmental support, they could avoid forcing their students into ever higher financial sacrafices – a problem that becomes particularly pointed during an economic depression/recession like the one we’re entering now.
Asking students to pay more during a downturn assumes that universities are valuable independent of their students, when in fact the financial and intellectual wellbeing of students should be the only measure of a university’s value. Higher tuition forces students into debt, and railroads them into acquiescing to the economic/political status quo for the sake of higher paying jobs. I’d like to see a national education policy that focuses on eliminating student debt as an inherent bad, and prevents universities from pitting universities against students.
Hm, so all the sudden the NY Post and Daily News, followed by Gothamist got all worked up about animal cruelty – they all wrote about a case of a man who stabbed his wife’s beagle to death earlier this week. Interestingly, cruelty towards Beagles is a cornerstone of research at the terrific Huntingdon Life Sciences, which performs a variety of tests on animals for cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and other corporate entities. Huntingdon has been the target of a very successful campaign called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) that got the company delisted from several stock exchanges and nearly crippled its finances. In the US, the federal government targeted SHAC activists for persecution, imprisoning 6 for expressing free speech that happened to impact HLS’s bottom line – speech that is now a crime.
So, why this one? Why this story? There are so many more important ones out there. Keep yer eyes open.
Hm, I think we all sort of forgot that George Bush was still President. Well he is, and he’s trying to end his tenure with a bang, pushing through all sorts of deregulations before the door hits him on the way out. Most of the changes would be really really bad ones, by allowing more coal mining waste into streams and rivers, less reporting of fisheries depletion and lifting caps on power-plant emissions. Look for yet more when/if the election descends into a vote-fraud frenzy. The nice thing about bureaucracy is that it’s so boring that most people don’t even want to pay attention – but even if they do, folks on the street have next to no power to change the decisions made.
in Colombia. please stop. from vonbergren.net's flickr photostream.
Not enough people know about this (I know I didn’t until it was pointed out to me) – US funded paramilitary police have been killing just random folks and then posing their bodies in ways to suggest the dead were members of rebel/’terrorist’ groups. Of course, this is all part of a long and rich history of falsification of evidence on the part of police to justify shootings or beatings, particularly in the US.
Remember Rodney King? The defense strategy relied on manipulating videotape evidence to make it look like King was making threatening gestures to the 5 or so armed police surrounding him, a post-hoc revision of the truth to justify a brutal beating. Other examples abound – the police killing of a grandmother in Atlanta is the local side of the drug war – killings and arrests in the name of keeping pot and other sinister chemicals of the street.
The point is this is all bullshit, and needs to stop
Hi, no more of this, please. from The Flooz's flickr.
The Gotham Gazette reported on a plan to establish a Hudson River Park BID-style partnership that would be funded by taxes on property owners. Easy to say that this could become a significant force in shaping public open-space in New York City, in much the same way that the Times Square Partnership and other groups have shaped street-space.
Public-private financing schemes become self-fulfilling prophecies for less public control over public space. BIDs and kin allow property owners with an interest in rising rents to control space that should be available to everyone, a particularly perilous situation considering the importance of public parks in the big city. Property-owner funded quasi-government structures remake the city in the name of rising rents, but they also create another fee for owners to pass on to tenants, encouraging immediate rise in rents that push more people out of the city.
Once property-owners establish private financing schemes, it provides the city an excuse to rollback funding for park maintenance in the name of balancing the budget while keeping park services in place. The result are public-private schemes like the privatization of Union Square’s pavilion, and the Tisch-NYU-Village Alliance backed Washington Square Park renovation, which honestly sucks. That’s the real face of new BIDs for parks.
Andrew Sullivan made a post comparing states leaning strongly McCain and states that seceded during the Civil War, there’s a lot of overlap between the two. This comparison was around for the 2004 and 2000 elections as well, with similar results, GOP red states often being the same states that chose slavery over the union in 1861.
With 4-5 days of waffling left, and an increasingly likely Obama presidency, the question becomes why the Southern Strategy that worked for Reagan and Bush began to fall apart for McCain. One explanation could be some kind of demographic shift over the last 4 years that saw key GOP constituencies becoming relatively smaller, or it could be a simple economic trend – “it’s the economy stupid” seems to be the winning theme of this election.
Or it could be a framing issue, where Obama successfully bucked the ‘egghead-elite-big-government liberal’ tag that made Democrats so unpopular in the South, partially by pinning McCain as a more extreme out-of-touch elitist (with 7 houses and 13 cars), and tying him back to Georgey. Either way, Obama may not have broken the solid-south, but he did enough of an end-run around it to take another path to the Presidency (we think).
McCain and the GOP have been rolling hard with their TV spots lately – the last few have been very effective, and if they started with this stuff earlier in the campaign, they had a chance. The last 3 or 4 have been focused on single messages, to the point, and way good
First: “I am Joe the Plumber” – nice everyman type ad, does a good job of subtly otherizing Obama
Second: ‘Storm’ – a good mobile metaphor for experience that gives off a lot of associated meanings, but remains focused clean and simple on the experience issue
Third – “Ladies and Gentleman” – Takes Joe Biden’s words and flips them against Obama – a good move when Biden was selected to bolster Obama’s foreign policy credentials. Also makes a pretty good visual argument about an externally dangerous world.
…at least in how the ‘opposition party’ treats them. The “epic frenzy of hate” digby describes resembles at least in passing the manic anti-Bush rhetoric of many folks on the left-of-center-but-still-center. (Just like Tom DeLay is anti-Socialist but ran a big-government GOP, these folks are anti-war but vote Democratic)
Just think of the fervor poured into Bush bashing for the past 8 years: making fun of his way of speak, his relationship to Dick Cheney, his intelligence, his cowboy persona, his weird interpersonal relationships with foreign leaders – all of it mirrors back the right’s escalating obsession with Obama.
Both sides of the Manichean two party system accuse the other of treason in different forms, both are probably wrong, or at least seriously misled into thinking that in a choice between the lesser of two evils, the other side really truly was evil. The crypto-racial dynamics of the current GOP backlash should not be ignored, but for the most part it follows the same script as the Democratic reaction to Bush, trying to pigeonhole the other side’s identity politics strategy.
If the liberal left’s experience the past four years is any guide, folks on the Right better find a new strategy quick if they want to get anywhere. For folks on the left, they need to find a new way to talk about change that doesn’t walk right into Obama’s half-hearted liberal trap for the optimistic.
There’s nothing left to say. McCain tried to co-opt Obama’s frame with the Palin pick, and it ended up sinking him. I think people will look back and say he had a fighting chance as the voice of reason and experience next to the up-and-comer with no real background (think Celeb ad), but as soon as he tried to change tack and go for the mantle of change, he lost momentum on both fronts. It seems like McCain never fully grappled with the fact that Obama’s narrative worked because of who he is, what he looks like, and his story. It wasn’t about reform policies – how many campaign reform bills you backed, times you took on your party – Obama doesn’t look like old politics, McCain does.
Which doesn’t mean he was doomed – or slated to be in a spot as bad as the one he’s in now. The tried and true, steady hand message like the one in McCain’s Storm ad, had a shot at effectiveness – even in 2004, in the middle of the worst part of the War in Iraq, after fucking Abu Ghraib, and people went for the fear and dread over a new face, and McCain had it. But he tried to have it both ways, and Obama out classed him – in all senses of the word.
A State Senate election in Queens shows how those all important wedge issues can be flipped around on the Right. Most people in America are more pro-choice than the GOP (though not totally pro-choice, most appreciate ‘advice’ to women and other stupid shit), and folks on the left can and should turn that against them. Same with immigration – total bans and walls are irrational, and simply pigeonholing the folks on the right as paramilitary zealots is a useful beginning to a left-response.
Obama seized on this as well – his last debate performance included a honest and full defense of choice, framing it as an issue of liberty, rather than adopting the ‘life’ frame of the crazy right, effectively shifting the debate back to a position where the Democrats can turn abortion into a wedge issue that splits moderates off from the radical right.
More guns than you. from mudpig's flickr photostream.
Serious dissonance in the NYC news today. Bloomberg just donated six figures to an independent campaign called Americans United for Safe Streets, who mailed out a flier that features police officers in their formal wear best under crosshairs.
Now, I can think of a number of cases of (black and latino) folks killed by police in the past year (NYPD killed 13 ppl in 2006 via gunfire), but very very few cops killed during the same time. The 758 NYPD officers have been killed since 1806, a rate of less than 4 a year, with only 321 of those the result of gunfire. The point being, that in the majority of violent interactions between police and citizens, the police do the shooting and killing. That means that maybe Mr. Mayor might do well to focus on reigning in police before ginning up fear to support move overzealous policing of city streets.
I have my problems with Obama, but I also have things I like. For one, I’m impressed with the level of political activation he creates among folks I know – for better or worse, we at least have something to talk about, someone to believe in, and someone to disappoint us.
Massive turnout is a codeword for an Obama landslide – since 2000 the GOP has relied on voter suppression as a path to electoral victory, both in its campaign talking points and efforts to purge felons and likely Democratic demographics from the voter rolls. In the Democratic primary, Clinton relied on lower voter turnout as a path to victory, and we all know how that turned out for her.
Higher turnout also suggests that machine politics has turned a corner with the first truly post-boomer, post Cold War president – Clinton was a boomer, Bush the son of the Reaganite political machine borne from Cold War conservatism. Obama has skirted the cultural wars of the 60s and 70s, and dodged the cryptoracist attacks on Patriotism that drove the last few election cycles, and he’s setting up the new terms for debate that will shape how people respond to mainstream electoral politics.
Because he’s been so effective in preaching transcendence, the task of those further to his left is re-purposing his rhetoric to radicalize the huge mass of people currently at his side – and this requires similarly transcending the terms used to respond to both the New World order of the 90s, and the Bush-centric totalitarianism of the last 8 years.
a paper for a class. Published here for the sake of making my education feel like it matters.
” Internet communications technology represents the most highly developed process of what Walter Ong calls “Technologizing the Word” in his book Orality and Literacy.According to Ong, communication technologies break ‘the word’ from the context of the world in oral communication and give it an independent life in space and time via print and electronic media, a process that renders unique attitudes towards the word and the psychological concepts that surround it.Internet-based communication creates a new stage in the long process of technologizing the word, transcending ‘secondary orality’ by abstracting the word into a flexible visual space united by hyperlinks and criss-crossed by search technologies that give new life to words as independent entities.
Peta delivers!?! from rscottjones' flickr photostream
I love Peta because they just don’t give a fuck what people think of them. They are a small-ish group of very emphatic people that don’t have to represent any other groups or interests – they merely agitate folks; logic, coherence and reasonability be damned.
For instance: hounding the Olsen twins about fur today, calling them ‘hags from hell.’ It’s very unlikely that anyone (despite empty threats) will actually buy more fur because of a protest like this, it’s a guaranteed media spot, usually with pictures, and the message reaches most everyone who takes more than a passing interest in Mary-Kate and Ashley. It doesn’t matter that you end up hating the people behind the mask, the message is delivered and a discourse about fur is re-introduced to the public in a busy media environment.
who is giving what in this picture? from wallyg's flickr photostream
The problem with McCain-style spending freezes is that some things really truly should be fully funded by the government. Privatizing or relying on user fees for essential transportation infrastructure amounts to a flat/regressive tax on the poor – be it roads and cars, which force folks to pay for gas to get to work, or MTA’s latest attempt to raise fares yet again. Yes, they can, and probably will.
Space should not be a commodity sold off to the rich who can afford the convenience of proximity, nor should money determine access to urban space. More MTA fare hikes amounts to a further privatization of urban space, part of the process of wholesale gentrification and up-scaling of the City that Bloomberg et al promote. There’s a reason folks advocate against progressive taxes and for budget cuts – because it runs parallel with a larger project of upper class warfare against the poor.
It keeps coming, and it keeps coming. from bluegoa's flickr.
As the economy sours, expect to read more stories like thisone on meth and cocaine in New York City. Not only will increasingly time-strapped reporter types resort to pre-packaged stories like this, but police departments will be struggling to justify high spending on law enforcement as civic budgets tighten. The solution?
Pump news about crime waves and developing drug epidemics to whip up some fear and indignation on the part of decent citizenry, and keep plowing money into police and prisons. Reports on drug busts are simple stories that echo dramatic narratives people see dramatized on TV all the time, plus busts happen all the time, leading to the fear of a ‘crime wave’ – the neat connection to an economic downturn brought out in the Post article no doubt makes things worse as well.
It seems like the McCain campaign is burning through a book of epithets working backwards from now (Celeb ads) to the 80s/90s (Big Government), to the 60s (Bill Ayers) all the way back to the good ol’ Red Scare 50s (this bullshit). I’m kinda digging the old school flavor.
Anyways – the argument against Obama from the right apparently peaked when they went after Bill Ayers. Now, folks are going after a radio interview from 2001 of Obama talking about how to interpret the Constitution. (Srsly, as if the Constitution still mattered) This is really the end of the line – picking through old radio clips about Constitutional Law in the hopes that it proves something about Obama’s un-Americanness.
It seems petty, but I guess the only really appeal of the clip is the tone, with Obama sounding like the elitist college professor type that folks pigeonhole him for – it might be dangerous to his campaign because it keeps him from sounding like the ‘common man’. I suspect his is an ‘above the fray’ moment for the campaign and you’ll hear nothing more of it from Obama.
