Sapere Aude!

Sarah Palin's Next Reality TV Series: Running for President

As a journalist, watching the flailing press coverage of Sarah Palin's bus tour has been the most sobering experience since Donald Trump helicoptered into New Hampshire masquerading as a presidential candidate and a horde of reporters hung on his every word.

Most observers acknowledge that Palin's so-called "One Nation" tour doesn't have a coherent point, and even that Palin would be a weak presidential candidate. And yet, literally scores of reporters -- as many as 200 -- are following Palin around as she busily fails to say anything meaningful. Reporters unlucky enough to be assigned to cover Palin on Memorial Day created a #wheressarah Twitter hashtag as they raced around trying to guess where she would land next.

via www.salon.com

I guess running for President is Sarah Palin's next reality TV series.  Unlike "Sarah Palin's Alaska," this one isn't on TLC or network television.  Like Donald Trump's short lived reality show about his decision whether or not to run for President, Palin's show airs on cable news channels and is shot in a documentary/reality-show style.  It follows follows reporters 'tracking down the hard news' about whether Palin is going to run in 2012.  Be sure and check your favorite cable news channel for more information.  Or, just turn on Fox News.

Identity Politics: From the Founders to Malcolm X and Obama

It's been an interesting couple of weeks in identity politics.  David Barton and Prof. Richard Beeman were each on The Daily Show discussing religion, the Founders, and the Constitution. Some basic Dead White Male stuff regarding what the Founders intended regarding the sepeartion of church and state.   Cornell West made some, er, suprising, criticisms of Obama.  And, a Black Studies Professor and a Harlem activist debate black history and black consciousness on Democracy Now.  Check out some highlights below the fold.

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.

CBS Cares. Too Much?

Am I missing something or is this CBS campaign on testicular cancer down right creepy?

 

Symptoms of the End of Empire

Exclusive: The Situation's New Book Is The Literary Equivalent Of An Ed Hardy Tee.

The Ethics of Entertainment on South Park: Is It Ethical To Laugh At That?

South Park not only satirizes the popular debates over ethical issues like performance enhancement, abortion, stem cell research, and euthanasia it raises the question of whether it's ethical to laugh at or find entertainment in certain things.  South Park itself is the object of a lot of critical moralizing about the decline of values.  The show is seen by many to promote or encourage unethical behavior.  So, is it morally alright to laugh at South Park?

The End of Higher Education?

We live in a world where a cash strapped university raises money by bringing an anti-intellectual speaker.

TURLOCK, Calif. — Sarah Palin leveled criticism at California's attorney general and others raising questions about her visit to a cash-strapped university, telling supporters that students had better things to do than dive through Dumpsters to find out how much she earns speaking. The former Alaska governor's headline address Friday night at the 50th anniversary celebration at California State University, Stanislaus has drawn criticism and scrutiny since it was first announced. It also attracted sizable donations for the public school.

Officials have refused to divulge the terms of her contract or her speaking fee, and some details only came to light after students fished part of what appeared to be Palin's contract from a rubbish bin.

That looks like a pretty bad sign for higher education.  The logic professors would have some good material to use for fallacy identification exercises if the student paper wasn't banned from the event.

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.