I’ve been looking to get back in the blogging swing but it’s seemed like there’s just too many places to start so I’d like to thank my local ABC affiliate for providing me with a two-fer and for pissing me off.

I wanted to tune in to the democratic debate tonight, which is 8pm EST, or 5pm here on the left coast.   Except it wasn’t on when I turned on the teevee.  Instead it was the evening ‘news’ which was actually running an extended segment special on the pope.  What.  The.  Fuck.

Poking around I found that ABC is not only tape delaying the debate, but they’re also restricting use to 30 second clips.  Their reason?  They’re paying for it.  So I guess this is an official acknowledgment of a pay-per-view democracy.  I know it doesn’t exactly fit but if ABC is treating a public debate as their intellectual property, because they funded it, than at the very least they shouldn’t have been given the debate.

And as for the local affiliate and their fawning treatment of the pope that’s just salt in the wound.  You’re taking away my entertainment sham democracy and replacing it with singing the praises of former fascist who now heads up the single most repressive and undemocratic organization on a global scale?  Fuck you very much.  And for anyone wanting to defend the pope or the church I’d point you to the highpoint of my day yesterday, this clip from the local npr station about the church and the pope (it’s a realplayer clip).  It’s hilarious and includes such highlights as:

Birth control is degrading to women, no really, it is.

Christianity is about suffering, not being joyous, so evangelical churches are… bad?  Worse?

The only thing that would have made it even better is if they’d attempted to blame the sex abuse on homosexuals like they have in the past, so hey, progress.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not singling out Catholics, I find all religions equally ridiculous.  I’m still pissed off that the FLDS scandal in Texas is being spun as a polygamy thing and not a crazy fucking religious nutbag compound thing.  They didn’t rape children and abuse women because they were polygamous, they did it because they were religious.

Hah!  Let’s swerve away from our (kinda) usual programming and talk about what’s obsessing America.  Namely, Elliot Spitzer paying for it.  Our ever insightful media is running full steam with this and why not, it’s been a while since we’ve had a good sex story like this (Larry Craig barely counts since he denied everything and stonewalled) especially since Spitzer is a man who has presented himself as such a moral pillar.  He is going to go down.  There seems little debate about this now, but the why is the interesting bit.  He’s going down for two related reasons.

The Law.  Spitzer is a man who built his career enforcing the law.  And now he has broken it.  At the end of the day, when all else has been dissected and discussed this is the fact that will remain.  Prostitution is illegal.  When he solicited sex for money he broke the law and this is what will kill him in the end.  And it’s a shame, it’s a bad law and it’s no where near the kinds of laws he’s used to put away corporate criminals but in the eyes of the public he is the same as those who he’s prosecuted.  And when I saw the prostitution law is a bad law I mean in it’s intent.  Hardly any prostitution laws on the books are there to help women, they are there to legislate morality, a particular antiquated conservative form of morality, and that is the second thing that will bring him down.

Morality.  Yes he broke the law, but that’s not what fascinates people about this.  We barely care about the law these days, at least the sanctity of it.  Most Americans’ knowledge of the law extends only into those laws they find interesting or those which they can use to disapprove of the behavior of their fellows.   And so Spitzer will be vilified, particularly among the more conservative and judgmental among us for violating morality.  And why?  What he really did wrong was break the law, the issue of sex outside of marriage is not one usually legislated (as much as some would wish it) and not what he did wrong here.

But in the end he will go down because he did something that offends our American morality and because the way he did it broke the law.  The people who are in a feeding frenzy of gossip would hardly care if he had been caught cheating on his taxes, and Spitzer’s career would probably not have been over if he’d been like every other politician and just fucked his intern.  But the combination of the two is what’s going to kill him.  He broke the law, and he did it in a morally spectacular fashion.

For about the last week and a half campus hereabouts has been bombarded with flyers, posters, and earnest fresh faced kids pushing something called “Porn Nation” and encouraging people to go to My Sex Survey. It’s obnoxious and in your face and supposedly hip and cool but it’s also more than a wee bit deceptive and sketchy as all hell.

To start with Porn Nation is bankrolled by Bravehearts LLC, an organization that seeks to raise awareness of ‘porn addiction’ but also to bring “the gospel of Jesus Christ” to thousands. But the flyers make no mention that this is basically a religious pitch to a sense of guilt and shame using bullshit statistics to coerce people into thinking that they are a) addicted to porn and b) can only be saved by getting down on their knees and praying fervently to some made up dude in the sky.

As you can tell by my tone I’m not a huge fan of these sorts of groups operating on campus. They basically use bait and switch tactics to get people in the seats and once they’re there they start in on them by telling them how bad and evil and sick and twisted they probably are.

And how do they know? Well the survey, duh. As a social scientist the survey offends on many levels. The utter lack of anything resembling survey methodology is almost laughable but nearly all the questions are double barreled (romance novels AND porno mags AND websites AND chat rooms! Oh my!) when they’re not downright hilarious (ha ha sex WITH whips? Like I’m fucking a whip?) and the ‘results’ page, where you add up the number of YES answers basically tells you that you’re a sex addict even if you answered NO to everything.

The variety of sites are also amusing for the almost perfunctory nod they give to feminist concerns about porn (the legacy of Dworkin and MacKinnon perhaps) by at least mentioning body image and the exploitative nature of the industry. But this gets dropped in the ’survey’ and in the deeper pages where the emphasis is almost squarely on the corrupting effect sexuality has on people’s lives.

The account seems to be that the pornography industry is so powerful that they define people’s sexual norms and that the enemy that must be fought is the porn industry to keep people from losing their jobs and their families. But you know what? The enemy isn’t porn. Even if some type of mass media had a magic bullet that allowed them to make us think exactly what they wanted us to think (and porn is just another form of mass media) that wouldn’t be the problem. The problem is that people are taught to be ashamed of their sexuality, of their bodies and of other people’s bodies. We’re taught that sexual desire is wrong and corrupting. We’re taught that the ideal is to be a being who can avoid all thoughts and influences of sex, especially if you are a woman, and that having these thoughts is a sign of weakness and sin.

This is why people hide and ruin their lives and the lives of others. Not because of some abstract idea of ’sin’ or ‘evil’ but because their friends and neighbors are judgmental assholes who go to snake oil sales pitches like Porn Nation and believe it’s their job to be the morality police on their neighbors. To watch for signs of desire and presumed deviancy and then to pounce and judge them, make them feel bad.

It’d be a far better world if we could just get over our ancient hangups about morality and stopped judging consenting adults for doing what they’ve consented to do.

ADDED BONUS:

I’ve been having fun fucking up any potential survey data they are collecting from the sex survey. You can take it as many times as you want as long as you clear the cookie from your cache after taking it. Good luck!

I’ll admit it, I watch politics the way most men watch sports.  Obsessively, with a beer in hand and yelling at the TV.  Hell I even vote, even though I know that makes me a bad anarchist.  If it makes my @ friends fell any better it’s mostly for local stuff and write-ins, but I digress, the rationale behind my voting will (hopefully) be explained in a future post.

Today I’d  like to talk about the most annoying development of the campaign season.  And by annoying I mean mostly for other people. Personally I’ve enjoyed myself quite a bit poking fun at the supporters of Hon. Mr. Dr. Ronald H. Paul Esq. Ph.D. DDS.

Usually I’d give the leader of lock-step drones the benefit of the doubt (with the exception of Ayn Rand and the Pope) but this story today, along with earlier reports of taking money from Stormfront (I’m not going to link to Neo-Nazi sites) pretty much cements his place as a douchebag of the first order to me.

Which is funny because according to some of his supporters I should be voting for him.  Huh?

That’s right, it seems a popular strategy, and one that has apparently won over some ‘leftist’ activists, involves pointing out that Ron Paul supports X, the person being proselytized to supports X so therefore that person should support Paul.  Usually this is an issue such as the Iraq War, or legalizing drugs.  But in my case the person hit upon Paul’s desire to ‘abolish the government’ which I am, apparently, fully in favor of.  The problem with this approach is two-fold.

1.  It assumes the person being spoken to is stupid.  So stupid in fact that they are willing to disregard all of their other beliefs that may be in conflict with Paul’s to embrace this one point of connection.  I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but I am not so foolish as to believe that everyone else who likes PB&J is a going to agree with me on everything else.

2.  It grossly simplifies complex issues.  This one may actually be a bit of smart planning on Paul’s part.  Our modern media environment encourages this sort of behavior to a large extent since it’s all about sound bites and 30 second policy statements.  But my reasons for opposing the Iraq War are not Paul’s reasons, my reasons for wanting to end the War on Drugs are not the same either.  And my opposition to large scale federal government has absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Paul’s.  I oppose the state’s institutions because they create inequality, whereas Paul seems to oppose them because they prevent greater inequality.

So next time someone comes at you saying you should vote for Ron Paul (or Clinton, or Obama, Romney, Guiliani, etc) because they have a policy statement approximating yours think about where they’re coming from and where you’re coming from.  Or not.

Whooo-boy.  This is one that we’ve been talking about for the past two days here.  Yesterday on NPR they ran a story about the military using social scientists to help troops deal with the insurgency and forge a tighter bond with locals.

Audio Here

This is all originally from stuff that Noah Schachtman’s been following in Wired’s Danger Room blog.

Most recent post here along with links to earlier posts.

So there are several interesting things here and some very knotty problems.

To start with the AAA has taken a strong stand on this and equate helping the military with a violation of their ‘do no harm’ clause.  The ASA has a similar clause.  The AAA has already come out as saying they’re basically willing to shun anyone who participates in the Human Terrain project.  But there are some problems here.  First off the AAA is a professional organization that wields immense power over the field.  But they do not control the graduate schools.  They don’t control admissions, course offerings, or research agendas.  And there are plenty of other journals out there that would be willing to publish the work of people who collaborate with the military even assuming the AAA would take such a heavy-handed step as to blacklist certain people from publishing in journals or attending meetings.

Why is this important?  Because if, as the reports say, the military is paying as much as $400k to people willing to do this work then the types of applicants we’re likely to see to grad schools may start to change slightly.  Greed can be a powerful incentive to take even the most outrageous slings and arrows of your fellows.

So this may be something that is going to change the shape of social science disciplines.  It’s been happening for a few years with Social Networkers and now seems to be spreading to Ethnographers and will probably sweep up other methods as soon as they realized that they can be useful.

This could have some serious consequences for the disciplines.  As a friend pointed out at lunch today this could be the path to mainstream respectability that social sciences aside from Economics have ambivalently wanted for decades.  At the very least it could create a sort of brain drain right out of the gate that could result in higher salaries for the next few cohorts coming out of grad school as universities have to compete with the government and private sector (I don’t see this being terribly likely though.)

But the question really is; is this a good thing, bad thing, or mixed?

Regarding the issue of social scientists working for the military I’d have to, reluctantly, say mixed.  I agree wholeheartedly with the AAA that this type of program and behavior can put lives at risk and result in the direct killing of people.  This is unambiguously very bad but… what if it results in a net gain of life?  This is one of the arguments advanced by proponents, that the Human Terrain project actually saves lives by protecting American Soldiers and by allowing for more narrowly target strikes against potential insurgent targets.  My personal feeling on this is that it’s mostly a smokescreen in this instance, if the concern was really over saving lives we’d be out of there.  Plus the way a lot of proponents parse this you get the idea that American Lives >>>>> Local lives.  So that’s pretty fucked up right there.

The other thing to consider is how this might spill over to other arenas.  You can bet your ass that Blackwater and other private security companies are looking to hire in the wake of the  announcement of the success of the Human Terrain teams in Afghanistan.  Domestically the pattern has historically been to compel researchers of potentially suspect populations to testify in court (see the case of Rik Scarce for example) rather than hire them to spy on these groups.  But this too may be changing.  I’m not the only one I know who has been approached by government intelligence and security agencies about giving open access to my research.  So far most scholars I know have firmly told them ‘no’ and opted to risk getting tossed in jail on contempt charges.  But this could change if the model changes from compelling people to talk to offering them large sums of money to talk.  Right now few people I know are willing to take DHS’s money because of the strings that come attached.  But as government agencies such as DHS, the FBI, and the CIA get more and more funding for social science related projects we’ll probably see an increase in both faculty and grad students willing to take the money and ignore the ethical constraints of their professional organizations.

And finally how might this affect the professional organizations themselves?  Certainly they are fighting the good fight in resisting the co-oping of their research in such a way.  But is this a fight they can win?  And how far are they willing to go in support of their stance?  It’s all well and good to make calls for more public sociology and activist sociologists and anthropologists but most of our colleagues prefer the type of activism that requires the click of a button on a webpage to show support.  Don’t believe me?  When was the last time the majority of the faculty at a major R1 university marched in solidarity for a grad student union?  That’s pretty immediate and visible to most faculty yet they manage to stay out of such disputes.  Similarly I’m not sure that, in this case, most members of the AAA and ASA would be all that willing to go to the mat for their professional organizations.  I’d love to be proven wrong but I guess we’ll see.

I was going to respond in some detail to the comments but find that I really don’t care enough.  Just two quick points.

1.  I’m not going to approve any comments for the past post.  If you want to talk about it do it elsewhere, preferably on your own blog.  This applies both to the positive comments (heh yes there were some) as well as the negative ones (my my my some of you visitors have as big a potty mouth as me).  Not will I be forwarding any of the messages to my department chair or the captain of the internets or whoever handles such things (yes that’s sarcasm in case you were wondering).

2.  Jeremy.  Honey.  It’s ok to say fuck.  Or shit.  Or any other words in the English language.  I can understand maybe trying to stay on the moral high ground but it’s a little late after you called me out for calling y’all out and nominated me for king of your haters.  I decline the nomination by the way, I apparently need to spend more time worrying about dying people.  Oh and my family.  ‘Natch.

The question has recently come up (like 5 min ago and raised by myself) about why I don’t blog much. About academics. I blog about other things, like nerdery. And cake. And occasionally politics (no links for you tyvm). But not so much with teh skool.

Oh yeah, by way of lame-ass exposition I’m an academic (kind of) but a rather ambivalent one. One thing I don’t like is other academics, or people who call themselves academics. Worse than this is the community of mewling egotistical twits that seems to cling to the label of ‘academic’ on the blogosphere (insert theme music).

For now I’ll restrain myself to speaking of an ideal type (don’t worry names are named a few paragraphs from now). This ideal type first came to my attention as part of the ljsociology community. If you don’t know lj it’s basically a clearing house for attention-whores and people who want to endlessly blog about their self-diagnosed mental disorders. Yes I have an account. Make of that what you will.

Anywho. The lj version of academia is a lot of critical theory wankery and people asking you to take their ‘omg sooo sceintifik sooperduper quiz about being a furry’ and how that’s uhhh, sociological I guess. There’s also a fair amount of deep question asking, the type of deep questions you probably tossed around when you were stoned with your roommates in your late teens but hopefully realize are really dumb once you get to grad school (or if not you’re ok writing essays that look like this.) Also disucssions about which schools to go to. The primary requirement for that is ‘how easy is it there’. A bit of free advice. If your main requirement for grad school is how easy it is to get in and get out you should do yourself a favor and just fucking apply to wal-mart now. Pretend you’re Barbara Ehrenreich if it makes you feel better, but save yourself the liver damage and debt.

Anyway. Academics with blogs. Particularly budding academics (like me, and my ilk but less mean I’d guess) have a horrible tendency to use their blogs, and especially the community of co-dependent hangers-on that they call their commenters as a sort of self-therapy and hugbox all rolled into one (fair warning on the hugbox link, it’ll probably offend you. It vaguely offends me, but only in as much that I close the office door before giggling quietly to myself over it.)

Anyway, all this ranting brings me to a group blog run by a bunch of academics (I originally was gonna call people out but fuck it, let the commenters have dignity). While the blog itself is vaguely amusing in that ‘oh my god is that what an aborted fetus looks like’ kind of sense the post I’m talking about regards a grad student upset that someone dismissed his discipline, his website, and, one would assume, his overall ability as a teacher to inspire interest in the subject (FWIW I totally agree with the sentiment that I’m not here to make my students happy, telling them that may not be a great idea however) but did so by handing in a paper authored by “Hugh Jass” <gasp>.

My advice would be what he already know, just drop it. Walk away. If that’s the worst thing a student has ever said to you count yourself lucky. Honestly. But just reading through the comments you know that’s not going to be what happens. The circle-jerk of enablers has started circling like the disassociated loons they are and offer their increasingly hysterical and inane suggestions.

Let’s just look at the grab-bag of crazy shall we?

Outrage? Really? Over a kinda humorous dismissal of the class? You get outraged over people dying, not over undergrad dismissal. Reality check on aisle 4.

Threatening? Oh. My. Fucking. God. Hello commenter, the Boston police department called, they’d like you to help them identify a bunch of children’s toys that may be terrorist devices. But hey, let’s report this kid and get the cops on him. Totally worth it to engage in second hand oppression over a goddamn piece of fucking paper. And two the two twits who agreed,? I hope the dept. chair would have the good sense to laugh this out of their office.

Is this about power? Well that would certainly make it all high and mighty. And maybe justify the fact you’re letting yourself get all worked up over it. And hey, maybe it is, but it’s probably not going to address the power issue by getting worked up over an angry student. It will however provide the lulz for those of us putting off working on our dissertation who needed to be reminded what a pack of fools most of us actually are.

So I guess the take home message is this; academic blogs can be amusing exercises in stupid (both the author’s and whatever is being blogged about) but the true comedy and tragedy come from the commenters.

Self-introspective post here. Consider yourself warned.

So I have, oh I don’t know, let’s say 8 or 9 blogs. These are either blogs I have solo or share with other people. There may be more but 9 or so is a good number to think about so let’s keep it there.

The problem is that I’m not too particularly good at keeping up with any of them. Partially this is a problem of time and motivation. Blogging is something that takes time and sometimes I don’t feel like I should be spending my time blogging.

But mainly it’s a question of audiences. Who do I blog for? This is a problem because as much as I’d like to believe I blog for me the fact is that if that were true I wouldn’t be blogging. I’d just write in a journal. So take, for example, this blog. VF is for me, mostly. But it’s also stuff I wouldn’t mind other people seeing.  I talk about academics, I talk about politics, I talk about things I share with other people.  These are all social activities and should be shared with people.

But there is the problem of audiences.  From past blog experience I’ve learned that audiences definitely have an affect on how often and what you might blog about.  And the question of audiences is one that’s going to grow increasingly important.  I’ve seen people lose out on jobs because of things they’ve blogged about, it’s that chilling effect that occasionally worries me and keeps me from posting the really personal stuff.

Of course you could always go with filters but the problem with filters is that they’re only as good as the people who access to them.  Anyone who can see past the filter can cut and paste to share with anyone else on the other side.  As long as it’s in print it can, hypothetically, get out there.

So what’s the point?  Good question.  I’m kinda bad about the whole ‘point’ thing.  But if pressed I’d have to say that this is probably my primary blog but will remain a bit impersonal on the whole.

Warren Ellis has a column up at Suicide Girls where he ponders the disappearance of alt culture.  There are some interesting points in there but few thoughts it sparked for me were the following.

1.  I’m not sure I agree with the premise that there is no more alt culture.  Just because some uberhip netgeeks wave their hands and dismiss current culture as all having been absorbed by the monoculture we’re supposed to nod along and agree?  I think not.  Yes the monoculture is voracious, but it often eats bits and pieces it finds hard to digest and occasionally spits them back out.  I also think Warren and company probably spend too much time immersed on the cusp of cultural production.  Just because something is the meme of the moment on the internet doesn’t always translate into being absorbed by the monoculture.

2.  Following from this there is also the idea that alt culture has always been, and will continue to be, highly derivative of the monoculture.   Alt culture needs the monoculture as mirror to ape and often the lines between mash-up, new creation, and ironic parody become confusing.  Then there’s alway the retro-cool that comes about as the monoculture tosses fads away after their 15 min.  What do we do with these?  Are they automatically out of consideration as alt?  Or only alt if we alter them significantly from the original?  How often has alt culture taken something of it’s own that was initially intended for consumption for the monoculture, look no further than your favorite TV show.

3.  Ok, as a last ditch cognitive bulwark let’s assume that the monoculture is eating everything at a faster and faster rate and the alt culture is dwindling.  What then?  Take it back to origins.  Do you like what you like because you, well, like it?  Or do you like it because no one else does?  Or only a very narrow sampling of people who inhabit used clothing stores on Melrose and you like it?  Is the purpose of alt culture to be different for difference’s sake?  If so I don’t see it going away entirely, but likely becoming more shrill and extreme in the sense of really pushing taboos.  Everyone dyes their hair?  Then shave it.  Brittney shaved her hair?  Fine, I’m getting tats and scarification.  That’s being done now by someone in Nebraska (because if you live in Nebraska you can never ever be cool ‘natch)?  Fuck that, I’m gonna bolt big stupid chunks of metal to my head.  I mean if we’re ever really afraid that something is too mainstream and monoculture just head over to BME.  It’s like a giant fucking pissing contest where instead of distance they go for spikey metal bits and permanently degraded neural endings.

In the end ponder this.  Is it possible for the alt culture to go to a place you don’t really want to go.  And does this mean that the default position then becomes agreeing with the monoculture because you don’t want to hack your cock off or listen to the most horrid sounds a cat makes as it dies?

In a bit of a blog gap right now.  I’ve got too many of the damn things trying to do too much.  Of course if I had my druthers this would be shit that gets talked out with friends over drinks in a mellow atmosphere but that’s an artifact of the analogue world and we now live int he digital.  So blogs it is.  Maybe trying to get this one a little more face time.  We’ll see.