Frogs and Ravens

Back on the Pseudonymity Rag

What is it this week?  Lately it feels like we're reprising a whole bunch of tired old blogging debates, with very little progress having been made since the last iteration.  (See.)

This time, I'm referrring to the rumblings that the Nasty, Rude Blogosphere Is Filled with Nasty, Rude People Who Would All Become Nice and Polite If They Were Required to Use Real Names, and the related belief that People Who Blog in the Nasty, Rude Blogosphere Are the Ones Who Need to Make the Nasty, Rude Masses Behave If They Don't Want to Be the Victims of Nasty, Rude Attacks.

(And not to mention the underlying belief that The Blogosphere Is a Nasty, Rude Place and Having People Be Nasty and Rude to You Is Inevitable.)

The More Things Change...

...the more things stay the same.  In the wake of the recent examples of male bloggers' condescension towards their female counterparts (and no, this is actually not another installment of Where Are the Female Bloggers), I appreciated reading this woman's scathing response to those who insult women as a whole by singling out one or two to praise her abilities as "exceptional."

Product and Process

I have come to the conclusion that I am a product person rather than a process one.  By this I mean that whenever I'm doing an activity that results in a finished object, I tend to be far more excited by the idea of the object, and its being finished, than I am by the steps needed to produce it. 

This is not to say that I do not respect or even enjoy process, particularly if it is process without an obvious end, such as yoga or hiking or puttering around the garden.  Knitting is a tactile pleasure, I find the sound and feel of my fingers on a keyboard rewarding, watching a plant grow is engaging, and so on. 

Yet even in those cases, I tend to find it hard to act without a goal of some sort.  It may be a vague goal, like hiking until I'm tired, or doing yoga for thirty minutes, or recording the day's plant development with my camera, but it's there, nonetheless.  Truely aimless activity is not something I do well.  I get fidgetty and find it hard to keep going except in very, very rare cases where the activity is so purely engaging that I don't think about doing it, I just do it.

Perhaps this is a longwinded way of saying that I find it hard to turn off the calculating part of my brain and just be.  It'd be tempting to blame my years of grad school for this, but I remember all too well being a kid who wanted to rush through projects in order to hold in my sweaty little fist the finished whatever as soon as I could.  I spoiled sewing projects by rushing through the steps.  I grew impatient with ambitious drawings that took forever to complete (your patience hasn't been taxed until you've tried to fill up a huge piece of white paper with tiny little drawings of coins for your illustrated dragon to lie on).  Even now I can't just walk out of the house and wander around; I feel a need to set a destination, or some other limit on the activity so that I know when I am "done."

Perhaps this is also a longwinded way of saying that I'm getting frustrated and tired with my current job.  It is almost entirely process-based, with the added torture of the few goals frequently being shifting ones, or, in the worst cases, meaningless ones (the kind where you spend hours working on a project, only to be told toward the end that the project has been cancelled or changed such that you need to toss all that work).  I need to see tangible evidence of my labors, and it is really hard to come by.  (Then I read this - heh.  Sounds all too familiar - read, especially, the related letters.)

Perhaps too I am rambling away in order to complain about blogging and my current paltry readership.  I know it's not fair to complain, as I'm the one who's been only sporadically committed to this blog of late - and it is my own blog - and I've had trouble figuring out what its current incarnation looks like.  But, for me, the point of blogging has always been to engage with people.  You, dear readers, are my "product" - you are for what I write in order to receive.  Without you, this blog literally has no purpose.  If I want to write for writing's sake, I have a laptop that I can pound on night and day until the cows come home.  What makes a blog different is the promise of interaction. 

So, perhaps, this is in the end a very longwinded way of saying, I miss my readers.  How can I get you back?

Google-Bombing for Jill

From tigtog: This is a crosspost to effect a Googlebomb, correcting an injustice against a fellow feminist blogger. Jill Filipovic, who blogs at Feministe and Ms. JD, is a NYU law student who has been the subject of cyber-obsession on a discussion board allegedly populated by law students. The discussions regarding Jill Filipovic (and many other female law students) are sexist and sexual in nature, rating the women’s physical attractiveness and fantasising about sexual contact, both consensual and non-consensual. Neither Jill Filipovic or any other of these women contributed, or gave their permission to be discussed, to the discussion board in question. Jill Filopovic’s name and class routines etc have been regularly posted to this board, and at least one of the pseudonymous board-members claims to be Jill Filipovic’s classmate. Photos that Jill Filipovic posted (with full rights reserved) to an internet photo-storing and sharing site have also been posted to the sleazy discussion board without her permission. This is a horrendous invasion of Jill Filipovic’s privacy, a violation of copyright law, and calls the ethics and character of the alleged law-students participating in these discussions on the discussion board into question. A major side-effect of an already nasty situation is that the sexist, objectifying cyber-obsession threads come up on the first page of internet search results on Jill Filipovic’s name. To an inexperienced user of the internet, it may even look as if Jill Filipovic and other female law students chose to compete in these Hot or Not rating competitions, instead of having their pictures posted without permission.

This post is an attempt to balance those internet results to point to the significant writings of Jill Filipovic instead, using the Googlebomb tactic and also linking this post to social networking sites (eg. del.ici.ous, Stumbleupon). Please feel free to copy any or all of what I’ve written here to your own blog in order to help change the top-ranked search engine results for Jill Filipovic. If you don’t have your own blog then please at least link to one of Jill’s this post[s] listed below at your preferred social networking site and give it the tag “Filipovic" (as well as any others you think appropriate). I have linked to these sites in this post:
Jill Filipovic’s bio page at Feministe
Jill Filipovic’s blog posts at the Ms. JD blog
Jill Filipovic’s article about these scummy lawschool sleazebags at Feministe
Jill Filipovic’s article at Ms. JD: When Law Students Attack If any of the other female law students stalked by the same sleazy site wish to copy this text with names altered, you hereby have my full permission to do so. All other rights reserved. (C) 2007 tigtog

See Chris Clarke in his comments for the html for this post.

Whatever Nation

Over the last few days I've been noting a groundswell of blog posts about American apathy, banality and greed.* I don't know if I understand what triggered it (reaction to Katrina? 9/11?) but it is striking to me that the same notes are being sounded again and again.

Politics vs. politics

Once again, there's a dust-up in the political blogosphere in which the specter of the sexist / racist / homophobic / ist-ist "progressive" blogger raises an ugly head. I'm not going to talk about this incident, because it's one of many and it's been well-handled by people who were on the scene over the weekend, unlike myself.

What I am going to talk about is something that I see underlying this recurrent dynamic: the tension between Politics and politics, and the people who rally to those respective flags.

Same Song, Same Dance

Let's see.

Synopsis:

We're facing a potential, yet real threat that has global scope. Check.

One crucial point relative to this threat is our ports, border crossings, and national transportation network. Check.

International cooperation is needed to deal with the threat effectively. Check.

Should the threat manifest in the United States, it will require effective and timely federal intervention to minimize damage. Check.

We have received warning ahead of time about the probability and scope of this problem, and can deal with it effectively if we put our minds to it. Check.

The Bush Administration's response to this problem:

Downplay the seriousness of the threat inasmuch as dealing with it will get in the way of business of usual. Check.

Ignore the transportation aspect of the problem. Check.

Assume an us-first, go-it-alone attitude to the problem. Check.

Defund the agencies capable of handling the repercussions domestically, use them as rewards for supportive but incompetent cronies, and place an emphasis on local management -- even though it is a large-scale problem that needs to be handled on the large scale as well as small. Check.

Pretend that the repercussions will be minor at best, or that the problem can be dealt with by superficial, short-term individual lifestyle choices. Check.

Distract Americans and gin up political support by saber-rattling at an unrelated group of people or an unrelated problem (Iraq, Iran, North Korea, steroids in baseball, Mexican immigration...). Check.

Divert needed national resources and manpower to handle the aftermath of the saber-rattling, short-changing the agencies and groups needed to handle the actual threat. Check.

Spend all available press and air time dwelling on the unrelated problem, while saying little to nothing about the actual threat. Check.

The mainstream media's response to the problem:

Run a short piece about the problem deep inside the paper. Check.

Isolate the few aspects of the problem that make people feel worried, helpless, angry or afraid, and dwell on them at sensationalized length. Check.

Downplay coverage of practical options for dealing with the problem. When covering them, emphasize those that involve individual lifestyle choices, particularly choices that are available only to wealthy or middle-class, dual-income households. Check.

Provide extensive, "objective" coverage of superficial promises by the Adminstration that something will be done, without further analysis of promises' feasibility or cost. Check.

Disparge critics of the Administration or the press by casting them as alarmist, "angry," incapable of seeing the larger picture, doing this for "political reasons," or even anti-American. Check.

Provide extensive coverage of Democrats waffling in public, tepidly protesting in a feeble way, or assertively backing up the Administration's talking points. Check.

The Democrats' response:

Waffle in public. Check.

Self-flagellate while making calls for "civility," "cooperation," and "unity." Check.

Talk about how they should talk about the issue. Check.

Support and reinforce the Administration's talking points. Check.

Undercut and disparage members of the party who offer criticism of the Administration. If said criticism is delivered in a passionate manner, or includes criticism of the party leadership, cast critic as "angry" or "radical." Check.

Froth at mouth about "leftists," "radicals," and/or bloggers. Refuse to say anything negative about the mainstream press, right-wingers, or coporations. Check.

Invoke Nader when the chatter about third parties gets too loud for comfort. Check.

It doesn't matter whether we are talking about terrorism, global warming, or bird flu. It works out the same every. damn. time.

I don't know about you, but I'm really, really tired of this.

Cross-posted at Shakespeare's Sister.

Can I Go Now?

I'm ignorant and stupid; you know everything. Can I go now?

This is the feeling I get whenever I get involved in a particular sort of "intellectual" argument/discussion, and I'm trying to figure out whether it's that I'm too touchy, there really is some sort of pissing battle going on, or what. Or maybe it's karmic payback for some sort of intellectual snobbery on my part? In any case, it drives me bats.

Here's how it goes: Somehow Person A and I get to talking about some subject. Usually it's something that she or he knows more about than me, and I just idly raised it out of curiosity, or I was just wanting a brief answer to what I thought was a fairly straightforward question, or I needed a simple yes or no in order to complete some task I'm doing.

What I assume will happen is that I'll get a short, basic response; my curiosity will be satisfied; I will go back to what I was doing.

What happens instead is that my intended-to-be-close-ended query turns into a launching pad for a prolonged "discussion" of the topic at hand.

El Fuego

These parts of the country were difficult ones to settle, being arid and remote. But even from the beginning they were an essential part of the ecoscape.

They were vital parts of the local community, encouraging the growth of plants and seeds, clearing the land, warming cold hands in winter, cooking beloved meals, forging weapons.

The land needed them, and they needed the land.

As the years rolled on, they became less welcome, constrained into increasingly small zones, controlled. They were bad for the economy, it was said. They took away homes and food from children. They damaged the environment when they passed through. They brought ruin to small businesses and homeowners, while large developers and agribusiness used them to consolidate political and economic power.

They were demonized in the press. Cartoon animals, including one sponsored by the government, taught children to shun and fear them. Politicians rose and fell depending on how they responded to the threats they posed -- or were perceived to pose.

The fuel built up.

They did not go away. They lingered furtively in the homes of others, offering warmth and food to the sick and the young, as they had always done. They were vital to the local economy, though feared and constrained. They were part of religious rituals, essential to church functions. They showed up at children's birthday parties, stood in the background as couples courted in dim, romantic restaurants, were part of the celebrations on the Fourth of July. They were there in wars fought on foreign soil.

Demonized, ignored, essential, persistent... all around them the fuel built up.

Wildfire was, perhaps, inevitable. Too many years had passed. Or have they?

I'm not talking about immigrants, illegal or otherwise. I am talking about the history of fire in the Southwest.

Or am I?

Amy Sullivan Does Not Speak for Me

We need to be more tolerant of religion. Religion is under attack. American is a Christian nation, and needs politicians who understand that.

I hear a lot of this lately, from both the right and the left. The most vocal advocate for this concept from the left (or, more accurately, from the center) is a woman named Amy Sullivan. (For a good series of posts on the topic, with links to her arguments, I recommend Hullabaloo.)

I am finding the voices from the center and the left more annoying than those from the right lately, and I think the reason is this:

They are both arguing from the same flawed set of root assumptions, while acting as if they are profoundly different.