Author: breakingranks

This weekend I’m attending the LaborTech conference in San Francisco. I’ve been excited about this all week. The goal of this conference is to put social media, video, web, and cellphone training into the hands of the people who most need it: the workers who are trying to contest the “key messages” put out by corporations and the mainstream media.
I can’t believe how much I’ve learned in just a few hours. LaborTech is an International conference, so there are workers and organizers from all over the world.

One of the things I learned about was how Samsung, the most powerful corporation in South Korea (and prominent on a world scale as well), has been spying on its workers and using unbelievable union-busting tactics. For instance, Samsung management used the “Friend-Finding” GPS service to track workers and pinpoint  where worker’s gathered to attempt to unionize. One of the first things I’m going to do when I get home this evening is write Engadget and other gadger review blogs to let them know how Samsung treats its workers: anyone who wants to put their consumer behavior behind upholding human rights should avoid buying anything from Samsung. I’m going to try to get a clip of the Samsung labor movement video to put on YouTube.

This conference is really focusing on video. There was an excellent video by Vivian Price on female construction workers in Japan. There was also a video on the months of labor revolution in Oaxaca, which includes the worker takeover of local radio and TV stations. There was a great sign that showed the LAW radio station being renamed LAW OF THE PEOPLE.

Mark Libkuman, an open source development planner who is speaking as I type this, lost a good friend in Oaxaca.

Here’s a pic of Steve Zeltzer, the Bay Area labor leader who was kind enough to invite me to LaborTech:

I have more pictures here.   In the ongoing adventure in irony that is my life, my camera batteries just died. :-p Hopefully I can pick up some batteries over lunch and there will be more pictures tonight.

There’s no question that labor is where the netroots will be happening next simply because of the sheer failure of the media to report their perspective or the facts they have to contest corporate propaganda.    

Last week I put in a request for someone at Kos Health Care to write something about the plight of Justen Deal. No one took me up on it. So while I’m not the best person to be covering this, I’ll give it a shot and request follow up diaries from people who focus on health care.  

Justen is a Kaiser Permanente HMO cheerleader. I’ve long regarded him as a stooge and a flak – someone who must be getting paid for constantly spewing Kaiser propaganda. Apparently, though, he’s willing to risk his job and put himself through a world of hurt to bring up a severe problem. Justen put his concerns in an email last Friday, and by Monday Kaiser’s CIO Cliff Dodd had resigned. At the same time Justen was placed on administrative leave while Kaiser HR schmucks comb through policies to try to find a rule he broke. There is no such rule. Kaiser is retaliating against Justen for putting his concerns in writing.
Kaiser has a long history of punishing dissent – but this is the first case with enough publicity to bring it to public attention. Justen only wrote his email after spending months trying to get his concerns heard through proper channels, and he genuinely trying to save the organization he loves working for from the fate of Enron. At the same time he sent his email, he posted a web site that documents all his efforts here. I can’t imagine how hard that was for him to do.

And Justen’s reward for whistleblowing is the usual: executive memos that smear and patronize him have been sent to all Kaiser employees, Kaiser PR weenies are discrediting him everywhere they can (and their smears will be on Google forever), and the MSM is trying to be “fair and balanced” about the whole thing (which always makes a whistleblower regret they said anything).

I can’t underscore enough how important it is for dissent to be protected in the health care system. Low ranking employees need to be able to point out problems in order to expose medical errors, treatment inadequacies, privacy issues, technology mistakes (which get more expensive the longer you wait on recognizing a problem), and financial corruption that gets passed on in the form of increased health care costs.

This diary isn’t enough. I hope more talented health care writers will pick up the slack. I ask you all to keep paying attention to what’s happening to Justen, because his fate will tell you whether truth can be spoken within one of the most powerful HMOs in the U.S.

Last night I attended a showing of the Motherhood Manifesto documentary. This documentary highlights the work of MomsRising.org, a growing movement with over 50,000 members – and particularly their effort to end employment discrimination against mothers.

I’m all for ending that discrimination – my own mother was denied a job because she was asked a question to determine whether she had daughters or sons (one of the benefits the employer offered would have been considerably more expensive for daughters). Yet I was left with a subtle feeling of increased anomie after the show. 24 hours of thinky thoughts later, I think I know the source of my discomfort, and I also have a new outlook on business and labor law.
To provide some background, the big red hot button on my political activist agenda is dignity in the workplace, including improved support for job transitions. In the current (lack of) system, people spend far too much uncompensated time, effort, anxiety, and humiliation on job transition periods. When that transition goes on for longer than a few months, I think words like “slavery” should start to come into play – especially when there is ongoing free labor (to “prove yourself”) or free work product and/or consulting involved. I appreciate the risk of trivializing the word slavery, but given the physical suffering that can be involved with deprivation of health care and demeaning treatment by others, I think we’re getting closer to a slave system than most Neo-Con economists would care to admit.

I’m a proponent of “blind hiring” – a new hiring process that would take names off resumes, remove pictures and “first impression” personal interviews from the process, and do away with the crony-based recommendation system. I’d like to reduce the focus on networking. Instead, I’d like to see an increased focus on skills: not just more training, but more emphasis on making skills visible through free or cheap credentialing. I also think steps should be taken early to prevent temp agencies from being used as buffers that enable businesses to avoid anti-discrimination laws. I believe businesses that cling to more personal forms of hiring are really casting about for excuses to practice discrimination – unfortunately perceived as a “gut feeling”.

Given my intense interest in the subject of fair employment,  I should probably be the chief bullhorn wielder for MomsRising.org. Discrimination against mothers is a widespread, egregious, and stupid form of discrimination that has been leaving a trail of family wreckage for decades.

Today I realized the problem is that this is still just one form of discrimination – and when we finally do something to alleviate it, the suffering will just be transferred to some other group in a competitive economy. For instance, studies show overweight white women face  significant pay discrimination. If the overweight white Moms get a boost, will the overweight white single women be in even worse condition? While it’s true that the Mom’s have childcare responsibilities, what about the people with massive eldercare responsibilities?

In short, it seems like there are myriad forms of discrimination, and they all create human suffering and undermine families. And every time our political representatives get it together to finally pass a law against some form of discrimination, they just end up with yet one more layer of regulation – leaving businesses howling about the skyrocketing costs of compliance and fostering a cottage industry in loophole-lawyering.

One of the tenets of socially responsible entrepreneurship is to “leave no one behind and hold no one back.” It seems to me that the best way to follow through on this sentiment would be to eliminate all forms of discrimination from the hiring process in one fell swoop. This would decrease the costs of compliance and take a lot of the song and dance out of the hiring process, therefore greasing the wheels of the economy and pumping up productivity by capturing a lot of labor that’s just going to waste right now. (Really, how does the general economy benefit from 100 rewrites of one’s resume and a thousand personalized thank-you notes? It’s the social equivalent of busywork.)

Here’s my idea. Why don’t we regulate what can be asked during a job interview instead of what can’t be asked? In stead of having 2,376 obscure anti-discrimination laws on the books, why not simply write an interview guide that excludes all personal and family questions? If there were a standardized format for interviews (with a “fill in the appropriate skill set here” section), then it would also be easier for people to prepare for interviews. If “blind hiring” policies were also implemented, then we might make strides toward eliminating discrimination all together. And think of the compliance savings! This alone would be putting billions of dollars back into the actual businesses.

It seems to me that the only obstacle to such a policy is people are scared of the unknown: no matter what people profess their values to be, they secretly want to hold on to opportunities to discriminate because it helps them hold on to power over other people. While the unknown is scary, power feels like safety. I guess the only way to overcome this is to promise that by reducing discrimination, you make everyone safer, which thus reduces the desperation for power.

If there are any lawyers or policymakers in the house, I’d like to know if there’s any reason standardizing job interviews wouldn’t be less expensive than dealing with all the anti-discrimination laws. It seems obvious to me.

After reading the WaPo article on the YouTube Whistleblower, I hope this statement from the Project on Government Oversight gets the widest dissemination possible:

The formal systems that whistle-blowers are expected to use have failed. That’s why you’re seeing people be creative like this…This is a tremendous way for someone brave enough to do it to say something directly and not have to go through a filter.

In my humble opinion, “filter” is not a strong enough word: perhaps “impregnable barricade” would be more accurate.
If anyone hasn’t seen it, the whistleblower video is here.  He lays out his case very well, and he will probably be luckier than most whistleblowers in getting a hearing.

This is a Homeland Security whistleblower who is addressing problems with coastguard ships. Here’s a summary of the issues from Slashdot:

1. Not enough security cameras (big blind spots)
2. Bad (unshielded) communications cables
3. Equipment won’t survive the extreme temperatures
4. No one cares, billions of dollars and national security at risk.

(The video especially points out how the unshielded communications cables leads to all sorts of eavesdropping.)

As many have pointed out, whistleblowers ruin their career when they speak out, and this has consequences for their friends and family. Corporations are increasingly resorting to preemptory retaliation on people who just have the potential to become whistleblowers (i.e. by raising a complaint) – just so they will be able to call the whistleblower “disgruntled” and distract the public from corporate misconduct.

Our current civic infrastructure is unfortunately tilting toward enabling corporations to hide the evidence. Employees have every incentive to look the other way – to leave security flaws in place, to leave safety problems for post-disaster investigation, to let fraudsters confiscate the retirement savings of thousands of people, and to let the “next poor slob” suffer by abandoning a bad situation instead of addressing it. Subordinate employees are pressured to be bystanders and to enable the worst behavior through lies of omission. Sure there are people willing to be martyrs…but are their enough?

It’s not enough to refrain from abetting the corporate PR machine and refusing to attack the whistleblower. There need to be positive, concrete measures to protect whistleblowers: advocacy and active legal reinforcement, employment assistance, and community support.  

I’ve seen some mockery of the poor guy’s plea for a lawyer at the end of the video. The people who think this is lame probably don’t understand just how difficult it is to get a lawyer in these situations. Moreover, government enforcement agencies are no help at all in arranging for legal protection even when their are whistleblower provisions in place. The whistleblower has probably been looking for many months.

Even if you can’t hook the whistleblower up with a lawyer or a potential employer, the least people can do is to let the guy know you understand and support what he’s doing – that you know how corporations block and tackle, that you know government agencies are ineffective, that you know lawyers are scarce and he will have to bare the burden of mounting legal costs, and that you know the media is plagued by corporate PR and shady “experts” determined to malign the character of whistleblowers. This guy is being besieged by “balanced” media coverage right now, which will eternally question his motives and approach. He would probably welcome the opportunity to address any questions raised by the media coverage, especially if there’s no lawyer involved yet. You can send him a comment via his YouTube profile or his slashdot account, and if I find a better means of contacting him, I’ll put the information here.

Note: I have not mentioned the whistleblower’s name, which is now all over the media, because he’s going to be haunted for the rest of his life about what people will turn up when they Google him. I don’t want to add to his problems, and I hope other people will keep this in mind for their comments here and elsewhere.

This diary was written expressly for Daily Kos, but I thought other progressive bloggers might find it interesting.

Yesterday I was devastated. A friend told me my favorite TV show Stargate, had been cancelled. This was actually announced last week, but I’m not involved in online fandom, so I had to get the 411 the old fashioned way. My friend is entrenched in online fandom, so I guess I’m in the second tier for info propagation from Stargate fandom ground zero. This is approximately where I would put myself in the progressive politics information stream, as well. Not in the room, but an interested party with my nose stuck to the window.

The word “devastated” might strike some as grotesque hyperbole in the context of a cheesy sci fi show. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for me to be devastated over Darfur or the warehousing of the poor in the U.S.? I’ve been pondering this for the last 24 hours, and I believe I’ve come up with some insights that may be of use to Kossacks and other people involved in political campaigns.
First, why would Stargate (or any TV show) loom so large in my attention economy? The simple answer is that the TV is inside my house: while progressives tend to associate gated communities with the rich and powerful, the reality is everyone lives in virtual gated communities these days. Everyone is networking and filtering, and trying to work out the optimal amount of human contact while fending off a tsunami of demands on our attention. Bombs fall on people somewhere outside my house: TV shows that I watch on a regular basis are like surrogate family (please, no Fahrenheit 451 jokes).

I’ve been watching Stargate for around 10 years, and it serves as an anchor in my life. It’s a ritual habit of Friday nights, marking off time in the way Sunday church services did when I was very young. When you watch a TV show regularly, the actors  become more familiar than your own family. I see my Mom during a short visit once every three years. I see my trusty favorite TV show every week. During the Immigration debates earlier this year, Progressives saw how people are motivated to take to the streets when their family is threatened.

When my friend told me Stargate had been cancelled, the first thing I did was look online for information. I found Stargate fans had organized several “save the show” web sites in less than 24 hours (see here, here, and here). There were online petitions: I signed. Campaign coordinators suggested that fans fax, write, email, and call: I responded with action on all of the above. I followed the trail of social media from Digg to LiveJournal to Fark to SlashDot to register my virtual vote. There’s a call for Stargate fans to send in tissue boxes to the Sci Fi channel (don’t ask): Kleenex is on my grocery list.

While, as mentioned above, I’m on the second tier of info propagation from Stargate fandom, there’s already been some mainstream media coverage: the Stargate fandom campaign may end up with dissemination venues that many political campaigns would envy.

Now that’s a lot of energy and motivation that I put into declaring my allegiance to a TV show. I do vote, volunteer, and participate in a fax campaign for political issues, but I never pursued any political cause with this burst of energy. It’s not that I’m apathetic: I have many social justice concerns, and I have something like 50 RSS feeds, news alerts, and a 400k bookmarks file that would seem to make these issues my priority. But the cancellation of my favorite TV show got my attention and provoked a pavlovian reaction to campaign and get in the streets.

That’s just wrong.

If there’s one thing that’s endemic to progressive politics, it’s handwringing over how to drive the constituency to action: Why aren’t they voting? Why aren’t they donating money? Why are they just grumbling about Bush, all the boneheaded thing the NeoCons have done to this country, and not doing anything about it?

For me, it really comes down to one thing. Progressive campaigns alienate, and outright mistreat, the people who could be voting, donating, and using their communications networks to galvanize campaigns.

Different constituents have different hot buttons, but in general terms, here are some of the biggies: lying/hypocrisy, cronyism, invasion of privacy, financial plunder, and just being treated like dirt. Progressive campaign coordinators and activists seem to realize these are matters close to the voting heart: every other blog post and campaign quote seems to be about how BushCo’s kleptocracy is infested with lying cronies who are invading our privacy. The idea seems to be to assert the moral superiority of progressives and offer the Democratic slate as an alternative.

On the other hand, progressives are also out to win. And despite all their moralizing, they seem to be convinced that the Bush way actually works. They are eternally spawning progressive cabals ostensibly to “focus” their energies, which just arouses the suspicion and resentment of the people they exclude. They court influence and cultivate the media, seemingly oblivious about all the ways this looks like crony-mongering. They extract personal information of people who participate in fax campaigns (PFAW – I’m looking at you here) to flood people’s email and disrupt their evenings with solicitation phone calls. Progressives seem manipulative: they are messaging, messaging, messaging instead of listening, listening, listening.

Furthermore, when people pop up on the fringes of the progressive movement who might have useful technical skills, a whole new realm of contacts to offer, and new venues to feed progressive information into, they are rebuffed for not being on the wonk track – networking and tips are only for the pros. (What a way for progressives to sabotage their diversity message, too). As Crashing the Gate predicted, narrow wonkish agendas, pet issues, and local politics have been clashing over eyeballs, leading to what I’ve dubbed as the Tragedy of the Kossack Commons: just three weeks ago some jostling activist handed me a paper sign up list to form a Rec gang to get a particular candidate into the Daily Kos rec box. Good f’ing grief. What about the good causes without those sorts of organizational resources who are being relentlessly crowded out?

And, worst of all, these days when a normal constituent (as opposed to a Very Influentual Constituent) needs help from their political representatives to deal with erroneous actions of the State or intransigient government agencies and the crappy court system, most of the time the ostensible representatives don’t bother to respond.

When progressive actions don’t match their words, they come across as hypocrites and liars…and for people outside the hyper-connected world of the progressive blogosphere, it can be hard to tell the difference. Instead of Good Democrats and Bad Republicans, people just see Self-Serving Politicians.

What do activists and campaign staff honestly think will happen when they mistreat a constituent and then ask for their money, their vote, their volunteer energies?

Jacksquat will happen. That’s what.      

When I’ve tried to express this problem to people involved in political campaigns, they usually assume I’m trying to repair some personal issue (and thus I’m selfish or have some character problem), or I don’t understand how their candidates will support legislation and programs that will somehow help me. What they don’t get is I no longer trust the candidate.

Why should I make a leap of faith in the direction of someone who just spit on me? How do I even know their voting record in the past will hold up under the political expediencies and money games of the future? I actually have more faith that a decent person on the other side of the party divide could change than a mean-spirited, crony-mongering person is promoting the “general good” (the argument being that my specific experience is the exception, and good luck finding the information to prove the rule).

Now let’s compare this with the online fandom experience, and all the energy that’s being funneled there. Fandom communities are all about welcoming new people, expanding the conversation, and sharing the fruits of creative endeavors. Sure there’s some newbie hazing and “cronyism” issues around Big Name Fans, but by and large there’s not many cabals formed to limit/enhance access to real world resources.  

Fandom campaigns don’t seem to be using me, shaking me down financially, or spitting on me personally. Yet, like a political campaign, a fandom campaign asks for money, votes, and volunteer energies. In the end, I think the difference is that I feel good about doing my bit to pitch in for Stargate: I associate the Stargate fandom with good things and I know what a successful result will look like (some form of continuation of my favorite TV show). When I do anything for progressives, I have mixed feelings: am I alleviating poverty or being manipulated by a bunch of weenies who only care about exchanging business cards at the next Sac insider bash?

What can the typical, non-VIP constituent do? Pointing out the flaws in the system doesn’t work. If you try to explain this to campaigners, you just get booted out of their presence because you’re not “on board” with their strategy (which usually includes an implied “no badmouthing the campaign” clause). Saying the candidate has lost your vote doesn’t do anything, because politicians and their campaign staff have made it clear that they don’t care about isolated individuals. In fact, campaigners seem to perceive people who aren’t aligned with their strategy as a disruptive cost rather than necessary constituents. Withdrawing your vote in some loud and dramatic way doesn’t work: on top of making you look like a drama-seeking nut, this threat can only be made once: campaigners will shrug and move on to a prospect that seems more amenable to candidate/issue messaging. Basically, it’s impossible to get the people who need to understand how their campaigns and tenures in office are being perceived to hear the people that are being repelled. The voter reaction should be just to vote against the politically obtuse. However, in a two party system, it’s easy to get to a place where all options look just as bad. If you don’t want to vote for the person who’s a jerk that treats you badly, and you don’t want to vote for the person who is gung ho for war in Iraq, then the only option left is not to vote.

I hope Kossacks will read this diary carefully and not just go into “don’t want to hear it” mode. I’m not trying to tick people off. I’m giving people with an interest in progressive campaigning my authentic, true view on the matter: this is real info on how the relatively disconnected voter thinks. This is useful info to have, and it may help campaigners think about ways to come across in a less abrasive and manipulative way. Take this info or leave it, but please don’t pile on me for trying to get you to look at the view from outside the progressive blogosphere box. I do feel guilty that a TV show pushed my activism button more than, say, universal health care. I was crying as I wrote this.  

I just read the NYT article about the stained glass ceiling for women in the church, and I was especially struck by this comment:

…in the marketplace of ideas and values, men matter most and…by definition, women have to take a back seat…

Why do men matter most in the marketplace of ideas?
To offer some background on how I think about this question – my Dad was an ordained minister, and my Mom worked for the church for most of her working career. I know first hand what a thankless struggle it can be to dedicate your life to serving the church.

One of my strongest memories of my father relates to how proud he was to serve as a substitute minister for the “black church” in town. Now that I’m older and the post-civil-rights era has grown with me, I find myself  wondering why there wasn’t a black minister available. And for that matter, I don’t recall ever seeing a black minister substitute at any of the “white” churches in town.

The older I get, the more I’m amazed by my father’s accomplishments. He was the son of a North Carolina farmer, but to study theology he learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, and a little French. He had a second degree in music and later in life he taught computer science at a local community college.

My own interests are just as wide-ranging. I’m incurably addicted to ancient history and culture, particularly religion and philosophy. I don’t even consider money when it comes to making life decisions, and I care deeply about social justice. It seems like I was cut out to follow in my father’s footsteps.

However, I never considered studying theology or pursuing a career in the church. Why not?

I think, like many women, I weeded myself out early because I couldn’t envision myself in the role, and therefore I couldn’t imagine anyone else casting me in that role either. On the stage of cultural stereotypes, I was not a “good fit.”

What is that role that so many men strive for, and so many women dismiss for themselves? It’s the role of the spiritual authority.

One of the dominant themes of world history is the perpetual effort of ambitious empires to convert their neighbors. Why was conversion so important? Shared criteria for truth and justice fostered cultural stability and a sense of common interest. But, more importantly, empire was the center of spiritual authority. The agent’s of official religion were not only the “thought leaders” of their time, they had the right of reprimand. They rode in judgment over the spiritual outlook and behavior of others. The great religions of the Book were also the great religions of the Bureaucracy. The primary instrument of spiritual authority is rankism, which is why the history of all churches is rife with every kind of corruption.

While I didn’t study theology, I did get a taste of spiritual authority as a form of masculinity while I was in graduate school. While I try not to make too many generalizations about gender, it did seem to me that men were attracted to forms of analysis that enabled them to transcend all arguments and particularist “trivia.” They equated transcendant rhetoric with spiritual authority (which seems to be for men an adequate substitute for physical/material power). In some classes, I could swear I could hear the clash as the male students projected frenetic transcend, transcend, transcend mindwaves at each other.

This is the secret driving force behind a lot of the petty politics of academia. In the battle for spiritual authority, There Can Be Only One. No matter how many theories academics spout about race, sex, age, and disability – any divergence from the (white male) stereotype of spiritual authority means that in the end you will be defering to those transcend guys.

The rankism that occurs in the workplace is crude in comparison, but it seems more important because people’s livelihoods are at stake. To an unemployed single mother, academic wars seem as irrelevant and stupid as a virtual melee in World of Warcraft or a wheel war on Wikipedia. However, that’s where the all important positions of spiritual authority are decided. The people with spiritual authority require deference, tell everyone else what to do, and command astronomical consulting fees.

Lately, PR folk have been fond of the idea that markets are conversations. This implies a level playing field where people negotiate as equals and make fair exchanges. However, the spiritual authority hijacks the market. The spiritual authority stands on a platform and preaches to the masses. Spiritual authority is one (man’s) vision imposed on all others, winning pre-eminence through guile, mass mobilization. and acts of verbal violence. The spiritual authority dictates reality, recording their vision on the world as if people were blank tapes. Perhaps spiritual authority does win in the marketplace of ideas and values, but perhaps we should ask ourselves why there should be a marketplace at all. And if there is a market, doesn’t a diverse world imply niche markets of ideas instead of some beady-eyed guy shouting transcend, transcend, transcend!

My new favorite quote is by Blake:

…he would do good to others must do it in Minute Particulars; General Good is the plea of the Hypocrite and the Scoundrel.

I know it’s a cliche to say that women a more immanent and relational than men – and I’m the first one to chalk this up to nurture rather than nature. However, I think this is, for the time being, the  basic truth of the Stained Glass Ceiling. Women don’t want to be spiritual authorities. They don’t see themselves as spiritual authorities. Women want to help people, and it doesn’t really help people to transcend over them or subject them to your vision. At some point we, as a community of citizens, have to decide whether we want to devote our resources to promoting a few spiritual authorities or cultivating every member of the human community as a worthwhile individual, each with the potential for boundless contribution.

There’s something about Bush declaring a smackdown of Hezbollah that reminds me of the Pharoah Ramses II and his truthiness version of the battle of Qadesh. In 1273, Ramses declared victory over the Hittites despite massive Egyptian casualties and the loss of Syria. Lo and behold, as Bush does his hamster dance of hegemony, here comes Hezbollah’s announcement of historic, strategic victory.
It’s exceedingly difficult for the average person to draw rational conclusions about what’s going on between Israel and Lebanon. The pundits have placed almost as much emphasis on the meta-analysis of the media war as the actual, physical, bullet-wound-causing conflict.

In the Israeli corner, we have doctored photos and cries of Hezbollywood.   In the Hezbollah corner, we have Israel’s obsession with getting out the message and Israeli propaganda pamphlets raining from the sky (I saw this on the news last night – sorry, no link).

Israel’s “right to defend itself” is countered by the bodies of civilian martyrs. The reluctance of Lebanon to recast their freedom fighters as terrorists is countered by the tarring of all Islamic countries as tribal throwbacks that condone such hideous practices as honor killing.    

As I watched the news last night, it was clear that the terms of the cease-fire were dictated by Israel. They issued the demands, and they were keeping all the Lebanese prisoners. Was my first thought “Israel won!” No, my first thought was “this will never be over”, because the focus is on defining the winner instead of solving the problems. Anyone who has been watching the news from the Middle East for the last couple of weeks knows that it’s highly unlikely that Hezbollah will allow Israel just to count coup. Egregiously inaccurate spin is just likely to crank up passions-of-no-return on both sides.  

It’s time for someone to say it: framing is the same thing as spin – in fact it’s spin on the word spin that helps the people working on your campaign to see their efforts to manipulate the media as somehow more morally righteous than the “smears” and “swiftboating” coming from the other side. Framing is about positive partisanship, the alternative to wishy-washy compromises of civility – but it also enables way too much asshattery.

In the political realm there’s a very thin line between spin and an outright lie. There’s nothing so disheartening to the voting public as an opportunistic lie (except maybe a nest of cronies dedicated to propping up an obvious lie). Standing on a lie is a standing invitation to merciless mockery.

PR spending DOUBLED under the Bush regime. Honestly, there’s a point where all the words and images don’t even have any meaning anymore. I swear every time I turn on the news now, all I hear is “blah, blah, blah…” I’m suffering from spin-exhaustion.

Israel is currently in a conflict with neighboring states. There is a complex history behind this conflict that involves numerous wrongs by all parties. Israel is now making hard decisions about when to attack and when parry: whether these decisions are righteous, necessary, or Machiavellian is not for the American TV audience to decide. The only thing the “media war” can achieve is public pressure for the U.S. to throw its weight around on one side or the other. It seems to me the U.S. shouldn’t be throwing its weight around at all here. This is something that needs to be worked out between the parties involved, and with all the media manipulation at hand, U.S. intervention on behalf of the side with the best “message” is likely to a) make the situation worse by inflaming passions over media misrepresentation, and b) encourage even more manipulation of the media now that the media has proclaimed itself a crucial arena for “warfare”.

If Israel runs roughshod over Lebanon with their superior armed forces, then they may have to deal with strained relations with their other neighbors. Or maybe those neighbors will prefer to make nice with Israel, downplaying Islamic ties in favor of practical statecraft. This is Israel’s call to make. Turning this into a “media war” in the U.S. is just another way to make global affairs all about “us” (and our Media Power) and not “them”.

Over the last couple of weeks, if you listened through the sound of artillery bombardment and screams, you could hear one word being repeated over and over again: dignity. My ears first perked up when Link TV aired former President Carter’s rebuke of the Bush Administration for insisting that Lebanon assume a posture of subservience. This morning (I believe it was on International Dateline), I heard an impassioned Dr. Amaal Saad-Ghorayeb demand dignity for the Lebonese people. A quick sprint through the blogosphere reveals dignity-based activism here and here and here and here.  

There seems to be a certain Machiavellian maliciousness in the way the Bush administration has ignored Lebanon’s repeated assertions of dignity. BushCo practices the all the techniques of Corporate-Fu, which measures power in terms of dignity withheld from others. In the U.S., rankism continues to be rewarded with praise and cold hard cash. Is it any wonder that a President with a CEO background would project our most pernicious habit of thought on the world?

Despite splendid cross-cultural efforts like Mosaic, we tend to think about the problems of Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, etc. as being “over there”. The violence of war is something that happens on the other side of the TV screen. However, the issue of “dignity” is universal.

This is the key to getting past the “happening somewhere out there” mentality. The deprivation of dignity is happening right here in the U.S. The deliberate deprivation of dignity might be most prevalent in the “bad neighborhoods”, but rest assure, rankist tactics are working their way up the social scale. When you see the Lebonese woman pleading for her dignity, imagine yourself making a similar plea to your boss. What would you do if your plea was ignored or met only with laughter? How far back do you draw the dignity line? I’m willing to bet that for most of us dignity is more important than any amount of pay, and people take their biggest risks in life to try to defend it.

The national toll of indignity was recently covered by NYT’s article Men Not Working. Yesterday I discovered that this was the source David Brook’s pwning all the dignity for the Puritan Elite (my sentiments were echoed by intrepidliberal). The article about Men Not Working is astoundingly sexist. It  ignores dignity as an issue for the vast number of women who are viewed as “not actively looking for work”. The suppression of the numbers of unemployed women are just as important as the numbers of men when it comes to analyzing the distortions and lies behind the U.S. “full employment” statistics. Unless we all really do assume that women’s economic problems are solved when they are “married off”, then the concern over Men Not Working is just another way of wheedling for a return to male entitlement.

The salient point here is that as long as dignity is not held to be a universal right, more powerful parties will use it as a bargaining chip. If dignity is only offered as a matter of noblesse oblige, then it’s tempting to make your rival or opponent plead for it – and pleading is itself indignifying. Subordinates plead to superiors. Dignitarians start from the premise that every human being has value and worth, and disagreements must be resolved instead of quashed.

After I posted my review of Second Life as community building tool, a member of ACORN informed me that their organization has 70 Second Life members. So the idea that there could be hidden civic spaces was still on my mind this morning while I was sorting through diverging views on the Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah hate triangle.
On the Mosaic blog, David Michaelis talks about how unspoken feelings fuel exchanges of artillery:

`Peace’ is a term not used in the public space in Israel anymore…No one expects any dialogue on a real practical level. The military always offers a shortsighted immediate way out. The wish to identify with the power of the gun and the uniform is still alive in Israeli tribal DNA. Revenge is a word not used in the open; it is there in the undercurrent of the emotions expressed by the public, our bombardment of Gaza had the same motive behind it.

Thus I started wondering whether there might be an alternative dialogue going on in Second Life.

First I decided to swing by ACORN. Below is a screenshot of me hanging out by ACORN’s kiosk, noting they’ve been getting donations in Linden Cash (the Second Life version of Monopoly money). (After I took this screenshot, ACORN also added sandwich board signs about the danger of lead in Sherwin-Williams paint):

Unfortunately ACORN’s information spot is suffering from the same neighborhood degradation as the rest of Second Life. If I’d widened the camera angle a bit, you might catch a row of billboards advertising “Escorts for Dummies”. What you can see in this shot is the Weapons store in the background. Not an auspicious start for my search.

I tried a number of terms: Lebanon, Hezbollah, Palestine…no luck at all. I’d be surprised if such gatherings didn’t exist. Maybe Second Life uses a terrorism keyword filter to block certain group names. Hmmm…hope my search didn’t trigger Homeland Security alarms.

I did find two Israeli groups (note the screenshot claims I’m now an Israeli citizen), but I didn’t see any note about where they hang out. If they have a place, I wonder whether its ancient (the Temple of Solomon) or modern downtown Jerusalem. On the other hand, Hezbollah’s claim to be a community service enriching the lives of the Lebonese people, might be well-served by a Second Life community center. This could host meet ups of Lebonese expats all over the world and provide informational brochures for curious visitors. One of the chief problems of the war zone is that as a place gets dangerous to visit, it gets harder and harder to understand.

Given today’s news about Reuters firing  a Lebonese reporter for putting out fake atrocity pictures, adding fuel to Israel’s Hezbollywood, accusations, it seems like we might as well be playing diplomatic games in cyberspace. After all, who even knows what’s real at this point?

I wonder whether meeting in a cyberspace where there are no permanently marked bodies might change the tenor of the conversation. Will avatars start to convert each other and sieze the land of the infidel? Will avatars that belong to a certain group be presumed to be more shifty or mooching or aggressive? Will revenge count in the real world? (scratch that – revenge and gang warfare are certainly alive and well on Wikipedia, so there must be something cathartic about it…)

If there are such cyberspace conversations going on, it would be interesting to compare them to the commentary from journalists and the futzing about of the U.N.. There could be a huge gap between the way countries officially talk to each other, and what people would say if they met on the (virtual) street. As the current experience of the U.S. shows, a significant difference between the disposition of average people and the posturing of their government can be overcome through persistant lateral communication. Perhaps it just takes the will of the people to communicate to de-escalate tenstions in the Middle East.

After reading about various interesting events that had taken place in virtual venues within the world of Second Life, it finally sunk in. This might have a potential as a civic space, where I could talk to people all over the world about the idea of dignity as a human right.

Second Life is a massive virtual reality environment. It’s not so much a game as a global conference call that takes place in fantastic imaginary settings. All sorts of activists could set up kiosks around the virtual public square. People with common interests could meet and coordinate for political action. One day there might even be ways to facilitate voter registration. Enthralled by the vision of cyber-democracy, I set up an account.
It was very easy for me to get started with Second Life because I have some experience with 3D apps. These skills are more common to people under 30, so I’m sure that for the present participation will skew fairly young. I spent a few minutes twiddling with my character – here she is wearing a “Fight Rankism” t-shirt!

When I did my initial recon, I was a bit disappointed. A lot of the development of Second Life has been commercial, which makes much of the world resemble MYST: The Sleazy Vegas Edition. It didn’t take me long to figure out why a world of virtual casinos was inevitable – in fact it’s necessitated by the game’s economic model.

The number one obstacle to developing civic space within Second Life is its exploitative economic model.

The first thing I wanted to do in Second Life was build a landmark to stand for the cause of dignity while my character was offline. You can’t do that in Second Life unless you own land. Unfortunately land is very expensive within the terms of the game. If you don’t want to indenture yourself to labor some established character, your main option is to collect cash from Money Trees (largesse from the wealthier denizens of Second Life). It took me a few hours to collect $100: this isn’t a fraction of what I would need to buy land: definitely not worth it.

I did try just building a few small objects with a note about dignity attached, to leave on tables and benches. Apparently this is regarded as the equivalent of littering in Second Life, and my objects were quickly returned to my character’s inventory. Suddenly I understood why there are whole sweatshops devoted to farming for game money for online games: since the primary activity of the game (building) costs money, the players themselves enforce a money economy within the game so they can pass on their costs to the next person who comes along.  

While Second Life is a really cool idea, I think the business model is questionable. People can get game cash to buy land by paying a subscription fee to Linden Labs (the owners of Second Life). This means that people are paying to contribute their creativity and labor to develop an attractive game space for the profit of Linden Labs. This is worse than Wikipedia, where people just donate their time to the crowdsource the greater glory of Jimmy Wales. Also, you lose the fruits of your investment and efforts if you are banned for any reason (serious legal thought has been devoted to this issue).

If anyone from Linden Labs reads this, my tip would be to subsidize people who want to build. Just make people pay to buy prefab objects, when they want to be conspicuous consumers instead of producers. From the level of advertising that already infests second life, Linden Labs will be able to find plenty of marketing departments willing to play for bling.

My gripe about the exploitative economic model aside, there is potential for Second Life civic space. I’m certainly not the first person to think of it. After searching through the  Second Life group listing, I discovered that adventurous students at New York Law School have been developing Democracy Island. I’m not sure what activities they have in mind, but I joined the group just for the heck of it.  

I couldn’t find any other obvious political fora, but it could be that I just didn’t hit upon the right keywords. There’s no question there’s room for much, much more development around the concept.

Despite the proliferation of cheesy casinos, there are lots of places within Second Life where you can almost feel the love poured into the landscape. Some of the creations are as sophisticated as any professionally designed game (in fact Second Life might actually serve as a proving ground for designers). There were all sorts of geeky in-jokes from working stargates to the occasional Tardis to a wreck of the Enterprise.

I probably won’t do very much with Second Life for the time being. As mentioned above, I’m not about to pay Linden Labs to develop their product for them. I do think there’s a lot of potential for community-building and fostering civic discourse (on a global scale) within Second Life, though. I am going to wander around a bit more tonight just to see what’s where – if anyone wants to join me, I’m the one wearing the “Fight Rankism” t-shirt. 🙂