Sapere Aude!

"Little Winstons" Trying to Edit Wikipedia Paul Revere Page

You've probably heard about Sarah Palin's family vacation.  She's riding around the country learning about American History.  Some of news coverage of the tour indicates she definately needs an educational vacation this summer.  She either doesn't quite understand what Paul Revere actually did or cannot communicate her understanding clearly.  In typical Palin fashion, she is refusing to admit any fault in either her understanding of US History or of her ability to communiate it clearly, she doubled-down on it.  The "great communicator" she is not.  Some of her supporters have taken things a little further.  From Little Green Footballs:

Man, you’ve gotta almost admire the sheer blind dedication of Sarah Palin’s wingnut acolytes.

Now they’re trying like crazy to edit the Wikipedia page for “Paul Revere” to make it match Palin’s botched version of history. Here’s the Revision history of Paul Revere; check out the edits that are being reversed.

Also see the discussion page for an entertaining exchange between Wikipedia editors and a would-be revisionist.

via littlegreenfootballs.com

In George Orwell's 1984  - which, I think, is a much better referrence our current economic predicament than Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - the main character, Winston, works in The Ministry of Truth.  His job is to go back and revise the content past documents that make up "the official record" so that it suits the political leadership's current political purposes.  But, in order for the machine to work, enough people have to be willing to do this kind of work.  Totalitarian regimes require a measure of popular support in order to carry out their plans.  It looks like some Palin supporters are willing to do this kind of work.  They're Palin's "little Winstons."  Thankfully, Wikipedia is not the official record.

Freedom, Offers, and Exploitation on The Real World

I don't really watch The Real World anymore, but I recently caught an episode of the latest season that raises a lot of interesting questions regarding the relationship between personal identity, sexual identity, and a person's actions and the ethics of disclosing information about yourself to friends and someone you are romantically involved with among a few other things.  One of the cast members who is outspoken about his negative judgments against homosexuality is adamant that he is not a homosexual even though he previously worked for homosexually themed webcam site and engaged in homosexual conduct.  Here's the episode.

Tags: Real World XXV: Vegas, MTV Shows

There's obviously a lot to talk about in there.  The rest of the cast reacts (understandably) harshly to learning about Dustin's past because he's so outspoken about his judgments against homosexuality. So, you know they needed to discuss it on the after show.

Tags: Real World XXV: Vegas, MTV Shows

One issue that I wish they would have talked about more is raises an interesting test case for autonomy and coercion.  Dustin refers to the guy running the website as a "father figure" that offered him an opportunity when he had few options.  He insists that he was free to accept or the original offer as well as the subsequent offers to do more sexually charged things as the show progressed.  But, everybody else (the after show host and the roommates) view the website operator as exploiting Dustin's vulnerable situation.  So, did the owner of the website simply make Dustin an offer or did he exploit him?  Given that doing more and more sexual things was a condition of remaining employed by the website and living in the home it provided Dustin it looks like the owner exploited Dustin's situation at the very least even though he remained free to stop at any time his social circumstances impose an unjust situation on him that is exploited by the website owner.  It looks like voluntary servitude.  But, regardless of whether Dustin is really free or whether he was exploited or coerced one thing seems pretty sure.  The guy that owns the website is not a father figure or at least not a good one.  Father figures, or at least good ones, do not ask their children to do sexual acts for money. Dustin is deluded to consider the website owner a father figure.

"Revolution 2.0"

The Free-Market, Morality, and the Housing Crisis

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Telecomix Message to Egypt and North Africa

Telecomix appears to be another collective of internet citizens like "Anonymous."

The "concerned citizens" at Americans Against Food Taxes claim that food taxes on products like soda constitute a form of government control and interfere with personal liberty.

 

I wonder if they think the prohibition on pot is an infringement on personal freedom too?

Here's a clip from an interesting segment on hazing and HBC bands from Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

Real Sports: Hazing

The most interesting part of the interviews to me were the comments about how the victims of hazing, in the midst of being hazed, imagined themselves as being in a position to do the same to others later on down the road.  If that's not a paradigmatic example of self-subjugation then I don't know what is.

I'm watching an MSNBC documentary called Hooked: Tattoos From Head to Toe.  Here's the teaser clip.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The full documentary includes segments with a psychologist who basically attributes any kind of body modification to psychological problems. At one point he argues that if he claims someone suffers from an unconscious psychological trauma or issue and the patient denies it that they "cannot win that argument" because he's "an expert." There'd better be more to back up his diagnosis than his appeal to his status as an expert.  Otherwise, it's a pretty good example of what Michel Foucault called disciplinary power and normalizing judgment in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. We could just as well claim that the psychologist suffers from unconscious psychological problems that lead him to project his own issues onto his patients.

Not too long ago I wrote a post about whether Lady Gaga is an example of sexual liberation or the epitome of capitalist consumerism, which I take to be a prominent form of self-subjugation.  Today, over at the NYT's philosophy blog, Nancy Bauer writes the following about Lady Gaga: 

The tension in Gaga’s self-presentation, far from being idiosyncratic or self-contradictory, epitomizes the situation of a certain class of comfortably affluent young women today.  There’s a reason they love Gaga.  On the one hand, they have been raised to understand themselves according to the old American dream, one that used to be beyond women’s grasp:  the world is basically your oyster, and if you just believe in yourself, stay faithful to who you are, and work hard and cannily enough, you’ll get the pearl.  On the other hand, there is more pressure on them than ever to care about being sexually attractive according to the reigning norms.  The genius of Gaga is to make it seem obvious — more so than even Madonna once did — that feminine sexuality is the perfect shucking knife.  And Gaga is explicit in her insistence that, since feminine sexuality is a social construct, anyone, even a man who’s willing to buck gender norms, can wield it.

Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity.  As she told Ann Powers, “Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.”  Of course, the more successful the embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is.  And since Gaga herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting pressure on (she’s pretty, she’s thin, she’s well-proportioned), the message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable.  It’s easy to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form of real power.

The rest of the post goes on to discuss the legacy of feminism with a generation of Gaga-aware young women.  She concludes that it's not so easy to tell the difference between practices of freedom and self-expression and practices of self-objectification or self-instrumentalization.

Today in Bio-Power: Food Taxes, Incentive or Government Control (or Both)?

The "concerned citizens" at Americans Against Food Taxes claim that food taxes on products like soda constitute a form of government control and interfere with personal liberty.

 

I wonder if they think the prohibition on pot is an infringement on personal freedom too?

Hazing and Self-Subjugation

Here's a clip from an interesting segment on hazing and HBC bands from Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

Real Sports: Hazing

The most interesting part of the interviews to me were the comments about how the victims of hazing, in the midst of being hazed, imagined themselves as being in a position to do the same to others later on down the road.  If that's not a paradigmatic example of self-subjugation then I don't know what is.

Disciplinary Power and Psychological Expertise

I'm watching an MSNBC documentary called Hooked: Tattoos From Head to Toe.  Here's the teaser clip.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The full documentary includes segments with a psychologist who basically attributes any kind of body modification to psychological problems. At one point he argues that if he claims someone suffers from an unconscious psychological trauma or issue and the patient denies it that they "cannot win that argument" because he's "an expert." There'd better be more to back up his diagnosis than his appeal to his status as an expert.  Otherwise, it's a pretty good example of what Michel Foucault called disciplinary power and normalizing judgment in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. We could just as well claim that the psychologist suffers from unconscious psychological problems that lead him to project his own issues onto his patients.

More on the Philosophy of Lady Gaga

Not too long ago I wrote a post about whether Lady Gaga is an example of sexual liberation or the epitome of capitalist consumerism, which I take to be a prominent form of self-subjugation.  Today, over at the NYT's philosophy blog, Nancy Bauer writes the following about Lady Gaga: 

The tension in Gaga’s self-presentation, far from being idiosyncratic or self-contradictory, epitomizes the situation of a certain class of comfortably affluent young women today.  There’s a reason they love Gaga.  On the one hand, they have been raised to understand themselves according to the old American dream, one that used to be beyond women’s grasp:  the world is basically your oyster, and if you just believe in yourself, stay faithful to who you are, and work hard and cannily enough, you’ll get the pearl.  On the other hand, there is more pressure on them than ever to care about being sexually attractive according to the reigning norms.  The genius of Gaga is to make it seem obvious — more so than even Madonna once did — that feminine sexuality is the perfect shucking knife.  And Gaga is explicit in her insistence that, since feminine sexuality is a social construct, anyone, even a man who’s willing to buck gender norms, can wield it.

Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity.  As she told Ann Powers, “Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.”  Of course, the more successful the embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is.  And since Gaga herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting pressure on (she’s pretty, she’s thin, she’s well-proportioned), the message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable.  It’s easy to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form of real power.

The rest of the post goes on to discuss the legacy of feminism with a generation of Gaga-aware young women.  She concludes that it's not so easy to tell the difference between practices of freedom and self-expression and practices of self-objectification or self-instrumentalization.

Lady Gaga: Transgressive Art or Epitome of Consumer Capitalism?