inkbluesky

There has been some commentary recently to the effect that Dubya’s political power has been diminished by various scandals. The administrations response to Katrina, that the administration exaggerated the probability that Saddam possessed WMD and the threat that Saddam posed in general, the administrations claim that it could ignore Congressional and Constitutional restrictions in spying on Americans, and the administration’s attempt to distance itself from long time supporters like Jack Abramoff and Ken Lay among many other suspect actions and policies.Perhaps there has been some damage, Bush is afterall a lame duck president. Still its important to remember how successful the Bush-Conservative political machine has been at enforcing party discipline. To date, with the exception of Scooter Libby’s indictment, no one in the administration has really been called to account in any concrete way.As liberals and progressive have been want to do, they have often times been been very critical of Democrats for not being more vociferous. Well, when you’re the minority party, you don’t control the agenda, you don’t determine the course which any committee takes. As we all saw in the initial hearings on the NSA controversy even a moderate Republican like Spector tends to bend his judgement toward that of the Whitehouse - when there is any doubt, the Whitehouse is to get the benefit of that doubt. The only immediate hope of getting the Bushies to start acting like responsible leaders instead of zealots drunk on power is to get a majority in the House or Senate ( or at minimum an even split in the Senate).
The acts that are being committed in our name, our country will haunt us for years. There is no reason for this or any administration to be running “black sites”. The CIA’s ‘Black Sites’

This February, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, Human Rights First, and Amnesty International urged the House International Relations Committee to support three new resolutions of inquiry into American use of torture, citing the fact that “there is still a strong perception in many parts of the world that the United States continues to facilitate or willfully ignore torture by rendering individuals to countries where they are likely to be tortured, and by holding detainees in secret locations closed to the International Committee of the Red Cross.” (Emphasis added.)

But on February 10, in a party line vote, the House International Relations Committee defeated all three resolutions.

There has been hardly any notice in the press or anywhere else about these congressional setbacks as part of the Bush administration’s continued success in suppressing news of what actually goes on in those “black sites” in the name of the United States and its citizens.

Poll: Bush Ratings At All-Time Low 

The latest CBS News poll finds President Bush’s approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, while pessimism about the Iraq war has risen to a new high.

Americans are also overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush-backed deal giving a Dubai-owned company operational control over six major U.S. ports. Seven in 10 Americans, including 58 percent of Republicans, say they’re opposed to the agreement.

CBS News senior White House correspondent Jim Axelrod reports that now it turns out the Coast Guard had concerns about the ports deal, a disclosure that is no doubt troubling to a president who assured Americans there was no security risk from the deal.

What would be a big mistake here is for Democrats to try to ride this poll. They should not be thinking, we’ll just play it safe and ride into office on Bush’s negatives or Republican corruption. They should be acting like Bush’s numbers are in the seventies and take every opportunity to sell the American people what they’re already willing to buy, that we can do better.

“Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace”

I want to talk with you today about how teenagers are using a website called MySpace.com. I will briefly describe the site and then discuss how youth use it for identity production and socialization in contemporary American society.

I have been following MySpace since its launch in 2003. Initially, it was the home to 20-somethings interested in indie music in Los Angeles. Today, you will be hard pressed to find an American teenager who does not know about the site, regardless of whether or not they participate. Over 50 million accounts have been created and the majority of participants are what would be labeled youth - ages 14-24. MySpace has more pageviews per day than any site on the web except Yahoo! (yes, more than Google or MSN).

Many of you may have heard about MySpace, most likely due to moral panic brought on by the media’s coverage of the potential predators and bullying. There is no doubt that the potential is there, but there are more articles on predators on MySpace than there have been reported predators online. Furthermore, bullying is a practice that capitalizes on any available medium. Moral panics are a common reaction to teenagers when they engage in practices not understood by adult culture. There were moral panics over rock&roll, television, jazz and even reading novels in the early 1800s [1]. The media, typically run by the parent generation, capitalizes on and spreads the fear with little regard for data or actual implications. Examples are made out of delinquent youth, showing how the object of fear ruined them in some way or other. The message is clear - if you don’t protect your kids from this evil, they too will suffer great harm to their minds, bodies or morals.

There _are_ potential risks on MySpace but it is important not to exaggerate them. The risks are not why youth are flocking to the site. To them, the benefits for socialization outweigh the potential harm. For this reason, i want to ask you to put your fears aside for the duration of this presentation and try to see the values of MySpace for youth. What they are doing is really fascinating.

This is a problem that faces every generation. Where can I go, where can I hang out with my friends with the shadow of parental or institutional authority. Where can I both be myself and explore who I am is the question every generation asks at a certain age. Forbidden places have their lure, hanging out down at a lake at night, a basement club in the city, a suburban pool hall. All of which pose certain dangers, yet the fact that they are forbidden is part of the allure. They’re places where if one goes you’ve challenged the powers that be. That rebellion differs a little in detail from generation to generation, but dispite the fact that some parents did otherwise, they had their rebellious moments too. Kinda unreasonable to expect your kids would be the exception. Myspace is less dangerous then a family mountain hike, if precautions are taken. Things done or said on-line can be disturbing, but there is definitely a difference between being assaulted in a cyber world and being so in the real world.

Because the teenage years are a liminal period between childhood and adulthood, teens are often waffling between those identities, misbehaving like kids while trying to show their maturity in order to gain rights. Participating in distinctly adult practices is part of exploring growing up. Both adults and the media remind us that vices like sexual interactions, smoking and drinking are meant for adults only, only making them more appealing. More importantly, through age restrictions, our culture signals that being associated with these vices is equal to maturity.

The dynamics of identity production play out visibly on MySpace. Profiles are digital bodies, public displays of identity where people can explore impression management [2]. Because the digital world requires people to write themselves into being [3], profiles provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language, imagery and media. Explicit reactions to their online presence offers valuable feedback. The goal is to look cool and receive peer validation. Of course, because imagery can be staged, it is often difficult to tell if photos are a representation of behaviors or a re-presentation of them.

On MySpace, comments provide a channel for feedback and not surprisingly, teens relish comments. Of course, getting a comment is not such a haphazard affair. Friends are _expected_ to comment as a sign of their affection. Furthermore, a comment to a friend’s profile or photo is intended to be reciprocated. It is also not uncommon to hear teens request comments from each other in other social settings or on the bulletin boards. In MySpace, comments are a form of cultural currency.

keira and scarlett

Nude awakening

The words reclining nude conjure up a vision of voluptuous femininity, a bed with crumpled sheets, and a painter, mind focused, brush alert, making his mark on the canvas. All very sexual, really. Which has always been the problem.

Fine art, as we know, is respectable. Sex is not. The reclining nude is where they meet. One of the most fascinating of fine art’s spectator sports is watching the rude removed from the nude.

…Kenneth Clark, in his book The Nude, published in 1956, puts it with perfection: “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body re-formed.”

 Against “Us” and “Them”

The cartoon controversy that recently engulfed Europe and the Middle East has left a smattering of inflammatory yet predictable images in its wake: calls to action from Muslim leaders, burning buildings, and an indignantly free press out to lunch with the First Amendment. It seems that the script was written well before the cartoons were drawn.

To blame, argues S. Brent Plate in The Revealer, is the boilerplate concept of the “clash of civilizations” — a ubiquitous phrase among journalists and politicians since Samuel P. Huntington resurrected it in the 1990s. Plate argues that the phrase is so often repeated that we as a culture tend to believe it. Then, whenever anything seems to provide evidence of this clash (preferably in sound-bite-friendly format) the media is quick to pounce.

This has become the trend regardless, Plate argues, of historical precedent that suggests the opposite. “These seemingly separate civilizations have been dependent upon and exerted strong influence over each other for over a thousand years,” he writes. Recent scholarly work has rooted the West’s modern university system in the great learning centers of Islam, elucidated a flurry of exchange between Christians and Muslims in sixteenth to eighteenth century Europe, and revealed a thriving culture of tolerance between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain.

The rest of the article is at the link.