The Animals Blog

News Round-Up: The first few things to happen in 2012

Malova was a doctor in her homeland. She was named Miss Russia and finished in the top 10 in the Miss Universe pageant in 1998.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/01/03/national/a091453S85.DTL#ixzz1icJxTqsB

A spokesman for the radical art collective Voina on Monday announced that its members had broken into a St. Petersburg police station on New Year’s Eve and used gasoline bombs to incinerate a police vehicle used to transport prisoners ….
The St. Petersburg police responded skeptically to the Voina claims, releasing a statement that described the fire damage to the vehicle as “insignificant” …
Voina, which was founded by a Moscow philosophy student in 2005, won a contemporary art award sponsored by Russia’s Ministry of Culture for a 2010 work that consisted of a 210-foot penis painted on the roadway of a St. Petersburg drawbridge.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/02/MNGQ1MK0PB.DTL#ixzz1icG7OPD6

Their time cloak lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/04/MNB01ML0O6.DTL#ixzz1icLFD5Bm

Deep Fun.

“Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html

Everyone’s abuzz with the “nymwars,” mostly in response to Google Plus’ decision to enforce its “real names” policy. At first, Google Plus went on a deleting spree, killing off accounts that violated its policy. When the community reacted with outrage, Google Plus leaders tried to calm the anger by detailing their “new and improved” mechanism to enforce “real names” (without killing off accounts). This only sparked increased discussion about the value of pseudonymity. Dozens of blog posts have popped up with people expressing their support for pseudonymity and explaining their reasons.

And here’s another one!

In the original blog post, immediately following the above paragraph is a 12 item list of reasons people give for wanting to use pseudonyms on the internet. 8 cite fear of stalking or violence. 5 cite the desire to protect the author or the author’s family from repercussions related to the author expressing minority or eccentric positions on the internet. (I am aware that 8+5=13, one item had both reasons.) Following this list Diana Boyd writes:

One of the things that became patently clear to me in my fieldwork is that countless teens who signed up to Facebook late into the game chose to use pseudonyms or nicknames. What’s even more noticeable in my data is that an extremely high percentage of people of color used pseudonyms as compared to the white teens that I interviewed. Of course, this would make sense… The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power.

I love Boyd’s post, that is why I am writing about it. I also think it trivializes my reason for wanting to use pseudonyms. Later (my italics):

Personally, I’m ecstatic to see this much outrage. And I’m really really glad to see seriously privileged people take up the issue, because while they are the least likely to actually be harmed by “real names” policies, they have the authority to be able to speak truth to power. And across the web, I’m seeing people highlight that this issue has more depth to it than fun names…. What’s at stake is people’s right to protect themselves, their right to actually maintain a form of control that gives them safety.

Boyd’s argument is perfectly American. Her scenario has Real Names policies (1) potentially causing physical or financial harm (4 of the 5 items that cite the author’s desire to protect the himself or his family from repercussions related to his expressing minority or eccentric positions on the internet specifically mention that harm could come in the form of being fired from work); (2) suppressing free speech or, more broadly, promoting the tyranny-of-the-majority. The first item speaks to our civil law conventions. People and individuals who take actions known to possibly cause harm have to pay when that harm comes about! When some lady is killed by her ex-husband after he tracks her down on Google+, the newspaper and her heirs’ attorney are going to take this line of argument. The second item speaks to our political philosophical heritage: 

…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.  … We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

That’s from Chapter 2 of On Liberty by J.S. Mill. Let’s stop now and take a moment of silence to shed a little tear of joy at having had read Mill as an unhappy teenager. [______________] Ok, done. So Boyd’s argument is very wonderful, very airtight: ‘Dear Google+, your RN policy is tantamount to murdering one of your users, plus it is un-american, un-scientific, counter utopian, and ……. fascist. Yes, I did that, I called you a Fascist.’ But it’s dull and old fashioned and incomplete.

I’m going to talk about myself now. I’ve heard that young children are very literal. You shouldn’t tell them they can be ‘anything [they] want when they grow up.’ When adults asked 3 year old bjweedman about her career goals (a weird conversation in any case), they got answers like, “a man,” “a car,” “named william.” (I had heard of someone ‘being a dishwasher,’ and we had a dishwasher, so I thought people could grow up to be machines.) I also looked into becoming a half animal/ half person, a shapeshifter. There are people working on turning themselves into some of the things I wanted to be, but at some expense and risk. I generally settled on being different types of humans by often changing my clothes. In 1993 when my dad got us a computer, I naturally went nuts assuming different identities. Primarily I was free of the conceptual analogue of my physical body: my government name. Fastforward to now: I take a number of names on the internet and change them frequently. They are all my real name. They really title something I find meaningful. And by meaningful I usually mean hilarious. But my commitment to having avatars has nothing to do with either of Boyd’s arguments. I’m not in hiding and, in fact, I probably do myself professional harm by having nicknames on line. The only place Boyd’s essay allows me to fit my motivation is in the category of shallow fun. This seems quite wrong.

Boyd apparently has data supporting her assertion that people most likely to use pseudonyms are also those “most marginalized by systems of power.” Power is a relative of violence, but it’s not the same kind of violence Boyd references in other parts of the essay. Two thirds of the reasons in her itemized list were about fear of physical, personal violence from individuals, not the diffuse power-violence from the system. The remaining third did cite fear of the system, but they explicitly claim to author controversial writing. But Boyd’s data are from black teenagers on facebook. The audience for your facebook page are people you already know. For the most part these are not women running from stalkers or ex-husbands. They are male and female teenagers flirting and generally being awesome. In addition, they are not for the most part posting controversial political tracts, they are posting about parties they have been to, or are going to, or lyrics from rap songs, or taunts about how slutty your sister is. So neither of the all-american arguments from above seem relevant to this data.

A glorious detail of the blog-o-sphere conversation on RN policies is the occasional use of the term “government name,” which is a slightly less inflammatory version of “slave name.” A commenter uses it in Boyd’s blog, and it turns up in maybe one of twenty (total guess) posts on the advocacy site Boyd links to: http://my.nameis.me/ The first time I heard these terms was from my casual, sometime foster older brother Eugene/ Saleem. When he was in his 20s, and I was nearly ten, he converted to Islam and rejected his slave name. I encountered it again when I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X: “The Muslim’s ‘X’ symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my ‘X’ replaced the white slavemaster name of ‘Little’ which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears.”. How can this history, combined with the “extremely high percentage of people of color us[ing] pseudonyms as compared to the white teens that [Boyd] interviewed,” land in the miscellaneous category of ‘shallow fun’? This is deep fun. 

Clearly, using pseudonyms is part of an effort to take control of one’s identity. Therefore I would expect to see more pseudonyms amongst people whose assigned identity is poorly received by society. These could be members of the classic minorities: blacks, transsexuals, or they could be individuals of any type who are unhappy with the reality they were born into, for any reason. Or they could be individuals who happen to be inspired by the radical promise of the internet. Presumably this explains the commitment of early adopters to their handles, which Boyd notes.  I don’t think I should have to claim I fear physical or financial harm to justify my dedication to fake names. Letting that be the argument in favor of anonymity strikes me as unambitious, and believing it is the better argument makes me think Boyd doesn’t understand that the internet can be the wonderland where participants leave behind everything they don’t love about their physical worlds. In short, what I hate about Real Names policies is that they are anti-utopian, not in the old fashioned Millian sense, but that they turn a potentially new world into a replication of the old world (yes I called Google+ Fascist, I did do that). 

I just remembered what this reminds me of: Walking from Egypt to Cannan should not have taken 40 years. It’s not that far, but God led the Israelites through the desert for that amount of time. Why? The answer I got was that the generation born slaves had to die before the jews could rule themselves. Slaves don’t know how to be free. 

Keep using your slave names on the internet. Suckers.

Bin Laden Killing Does Not Vindicate Afghanistan and Iraq Wars

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Liberals are all choked up over seeing frat boys chanting U-S-A in front of Obama’s White House. We’ve made it. Our guy is one tough mother, too. There is also something intoxicating about the warm embrace of mass patriotism, even if it has the spirit of a game of Sunday night beer pong. This is a nation on the lookout for good news, ever eager for that 9/12-like moment of post-partisan ecstasy.

Such a time is never ripe for productive analysis. But I’ll give it a try.

What I found most troubling about Obama’s speech was the way he framed the killing of Bin Laden as the fruit of a decade-long War on Terror:

We went to war against al Qaeda to protect our citizens, our friends, and our allies. Over the last 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we’ve made great strides in that effort. We’ve disrupted terrorist attacks and strengthened our homeland defense. In Afghanistan, we removed the Taliban government, which had given bin Laden and al Qaeda safe haven and support. And around the globe, we worked with our friends and allies to capture or kill scores of al Qaeda terrorists, including several who were a part of the 9/11 plot…

Over the last 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we’ve made great strides in that effort…The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.

But (as Obama would say) let me be clear: this is not a capstone. The United States could have launched a special or covert operation to kill Bin Laden without invading three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq. (Iraq, it goes without saying, went unmentioned in last night’s address.)

These conflicts have made us less safe, killed hundreds of thousands (if not more than a million) of civilians and combatants worldwide, and raised the siren song of jihad to a fever pitch.

Bin Laden’s killing does not in any concrete way vindicate deaths in Anbar or Helmand provinces. These deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are still and forever in vain.

The political fallout of Bin Laden’s killing is impossible to predict, though it will almost certainly have a greater effect on the coming elections than on the general dynamics of U.S. foreign policy or the energies of Islamist fundamentalism. But don’t let the euphoric and bated-breath newscasters get the better of you: these wars were a big fucking mistake. And really, they were just plain wrong.

- Daniel Denvir

The Republican “Path to Prosperity” for America’s Changing Population

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s long-term budget proposal, titled “A Path to Prosperity”, released Tuesday, provides a clear picture of the Republican Party’s idea of prosperity. By substantially lowering the federal government’s expenditures on several programs, Medicare being the most important amongst them, Ryan’s plan would decrease spending over the next ten years by as much as 4.3 trillion dollars. Of course, the plan would not eliminate the necessity of the things - health care, education, environmental and financial regulation, law enforcement - that money would otherwise be spent on; it will simply shift the burden of paying for them onto state and local governments and individuals. Ryan contends, undoubtedly correctly, that forcing people to pay more directly for their own health care, for example, will decrease consumption and thereby slow growth in health care costs. But the people that will be making this trade off most often will be the people with the least disposable income, who in the United States already suffer from a substantial and growing gap in life expectancy, vis-a-vis their better-off counterparts. Under Ryan’s plan, the wealthy would also benefit from a series of tax-cuts, lowering rates in the highest brackets for income, estate, and corporate taxes. Together, these tax cuts very nearly “pay” for the lowered expenditures, resulting in as much as 4.2 trillion dollars in lost revenues over the next ten years.

Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” would not only leave the poor by the wayside, but also the young. As David Leonhardt points out in today’s New York Times, the proposal’s changes to medicare would only affect Americans younger than 55, leaving older Americans with the same coverage they would otherwise enjoy. Of course, the proposal’s cuts in federal funding for education will also be borne by the young, compounding these health care effects. Leonhardt argues that the reasons Republicans adopted this approach are “partly political. Older people vote in larger numbers than younger adults. Children, of course, can’t vote at all.” He also suggests that there is a basic misconception, “namely, that older people have already paid for their Medicare benefits” which leads politicians to think that cutting coverage for older Americans would be fundamentally unfair.

However, there is another, more subtle factor contributing to Republicans’ willingness to deprive young Americans of federal support for their education and health care, which has to do with the changing racial composition of the United States population. As William Frey of the Brookings Institution has shown, racial minorities, especially Hispanics, account for all of the growth in the U.S. population of under-18-year-olds. Indeed, Frey estimates that whites will constitute a minority of the U.S.’s under-18 population before 2020, and shows that they already are a minority in 10 states and 35 cities. Thus, by cutting federal spending on young Americans, Republicans are effectively cutting spending on non-white Americans, especially Hispanics, a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down with its anti-immigrant base.

Relative to whites, black and Hispanic Americans are much more likely to rely on public schools for their children’s education. Further cuts to funding of public schooling will only widen an already shameful racial gap in education achievement. For Republicans, apparently “prosperity” is when the white rich get richer and the minority poor get poorer, sicker, and less well-educated.

- Josh Simon, El Despertador Americano

Domicile and the Anchor Baby Red Herring

In a striking article in yesterday’s New York Times, Jennifer Medina described a bust of a ‘maternity tourism’ operation in Southern California. In exchange for compensation on the order of tens of thousand of dollars, a business provided lodging and medical care to pregnant Chinese women wishing to deliver their babies in the United States. Medina speculates that these women hoped to acquire U.S. Citizenship for their children, thereby providing themselves with a future route out of China: “The children, once they turn 21, would also be able to petition for their parents to get United States citizenship.” The case seems to provide clear proof that the spectre of ‘anchor babies’ described by anti-immigration activists truly haunts the United States, lending support to efforts by some state lawmakers to end or modify ‘birthright citizenship’: the automatic granting of U.S. citizenship to children born in the United States, regardless of the citizenship status of their parents.

However, the case actually provides an excellent opportunity to clarify an ambiguity about birthright citizenship, which anti-immigration activists have attempted to take advantage of in debates with those who would protect this fundamental tenet of American democracy. There is an important legal distinction to be drawn between the ‘anchor babies’ delivered by wealthy Chinese women in the United States legally on tourist visas and those delivered by the largely Latin American laborers in the United States illegally after having entered without a visa or overstayed a visa. This is the concept of ‘domicile’: the intention of making a place one’s permanent residence. As an excellent recent comment in the Yale Law Journal shows, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, the constitutional basis for birthright citizenship, understood its provisions to extend to “all persons born of parents domiciled in the United States” with the single exception of Native Americans, bearers of a distinctive status under citizenship law since before the founding. Undocumented Latin American immigrants are much more likely to be ‘domiciled’ in the United States than are Chinese tourists: they seek out employment, housing, and eventually, schooling for their children within the United States, clearly intending to make the U.S. their permanent residence until they are forcibly removed by la migra. Their children would, then, have a much clearer claim to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, than would the children of Chinese tourists, who take up temporary residence to deliver a child and then return to China. Thus, the ‘anchor baby’ phenomenon proves to be a red herring: a sensational story having little to do with the main issues in the current debate on immigration and citizenship.

This brief foray into legislative history cues up a more general issue as well: the Fourteenth Amendment’s included a citizenship clause in order to assure that the children of slaves would not be born free but denied citizenship and the basic rights and protections guaranteed to citizens under federal and state constitutions. Before the Civil War, black slavery performed a function in the southern United States akin to the one that immigration law performs throughout the United States today, providing a source of labor at a cost below what would be required to employ full rights-bearing citizens. In this sense, the extension of citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrant laborers conforms not only to the letter of the law, as we saw above, but the spirit, guaranteeing that the stain of an unjust system would not pass from parent to child.

- Josh Simon, El Despertador Americano

Right-wing double-speak: love public transit, hate public spending

I’m in my hometown of Washington, DC this weekend and was shocked to see this ad on the Metro: it calls for cutting public spending while simultaneously hoping for better public transit.

“Cutting your commute time is wishful thinking. Cutting government spending shouldn’t be.”

Right there in the subway station. Metro is often covered with strangely inside-the-Beltway ads, perhaps most bizarrely manifest in military industry pitches for specific weapons systems and fighter jets. “The F16 rocks—We should buy more F16s!” or something to that effect. No joke.

This particular ad, however, represents a potent form of conservative hypocrisy: the idea that we can have nice things like public transit without paying for them.

The ad, which instructs Congress to “keep its promise,” is by some group called BANKRUPTINGAMERICA.org. I’m just going to assume it is some front group funded by the Koch brothers. Okay, okay…I’ll check to make sure. The website says it is a project of something called “Public Notice.” Okay…search engine….

Let’s see, a website with no actual information about who they are, save for the fact that the organization “grew out of Americans’ increasing concern about the nation’s fiscal and economic situation, and need for the straight facts on what Washington is doing to address it.” That sounds reasonable enough: straight facts. It grew from the American people: organic and grassroots.

Hmm…staff? The executive director’s name is Gretchen Hamel and….she attended the June 2010 Meeting of the Koch Network in Aspen, Colorado!! This is easier than with Kevin Bacon folks: just try it yourself at home. And since they will not be disclosing their donors, let’s just go ahead and assume the very worst.

According to Source Watch, Hamel previously worked as a press assistant to Republican congressman J.C. Watts, which the Public Notice website fails to mention—because it doesn’t mention Republicans at all. The group is, of course, non-partisan!

It does, however, note that Hamel was a “lead player in crafting and conducting the longest-running White House public relations campaign promoting pending free trade agreements” and was the “founder and partner of Endeavour Global Strategies, where she managed the press for Colombia’s first international brand image campaign and worked with multiple other organizations in need of strategic global communications plans.”

At least this person is consistently supportive of awful causes: death squads good, death panels bad.

As TPM points out, Public Notice launched with a “column on the website of US News and World Report.” The website, of course, because the magazine is defunct and the company solely exists to shill misleading college rankings: bankrupt publication, but kindred spirits.

- Daniel Denvir

A calculated hypocrisy?

One strange (and strangely undiscussed) disconnect in the current Libya impasse is the fact that the U.N. resolution against Qaddafi came about only with the support of the same Gulf countries that continue to brutally crackdown on their own democracy movements.

It certainly makes for bizarre news coverage. Earlier today one could open the newspaper and see a headline announcing the U.N. military resolution to protect civilians (made more or less at the behest of the Arab League) right next to photos of civilians being shot by security forces in Yemen and Bahrain.

While some Western hawks have been calling for military action against Qaddafi for weeks, the U.N. and the Obama administration had made clear this would only happen with the support of the Arab League. That body eventually voted in favor of a no-fly zone six days ago.  The vote was opposed only by Syria and Algeria.

Now, even as Tripoli’s coordinates are programmed into the humanitarian cruise missiles, government crackdowns against protesters in Bahrain (with Qatari and Saudi troops), Saudi Arabia, and Yemen have continued to spill civilian blood indiscriminately. Of course the scale of casualties in these countries pales in comparison to Libya, but one still has to wonder to what extent this is a calculated hypocrisy. Is the tacit approval from the Gulf States for military action against Qaddafi meant in part to create distance between Libya and themselves? By aligning themselves with the West and concentrating the world’s moral condescension upon their North African colleague, leaders in the Gulf States may see an opportunity to have their cake and eat it too: kill the democracy movements in their countries and still avoid the worst opprobrium of their Western sponsors. 

-Adam Goldstein