Results tagged “politics”

Imagine if half a million people marched on Washington, collectively broke federal law, did it in plain sight of the world's leaders and traditional media, and yet we all barely noticed? What if political leaders didn't even see it as a political act, but instead as some sort of funny stunt?

Over the last half-decade, it's become obvious that hundreds of thousands of people around the world have chosen to ignore copyright law and to upload copyrighted material to sites like YouTube without getting permission to do so. Technically, it's illegal. Practically, it doesn't matter. Politically, it's fascinating.

In the past, when an enormous number of people chose to willfully and blatantly disobey laws that they considered unjust, we called it an act of civil disobedience. We understood the social significant of their collective demonstration, and as a society started to reckon with the implications of their actions.Today, we instead see it as an odd quirk of online culture, and outside of some eggheaded discussions about the future of intellectual property law, we largely see it as unremarkable. And that's true despite the fact that traditional political demonstrations in the context of political activism are increasingly ineffective and anachronistic.

Putting the "Party" Back in Political Party

The open culture movement that's expressed through uploading content and remixes crosses conventional political lines and eludes identification with any traditional political affiliation. The sheer number of participants dwarfs movements (or perceived movements) that have attracted much more attention, such as the tea party efforts. Any given march on Washington these days ends not in policy reform or change in any enacted laws, but in pointless and contentious debate over how many people showed up and whether they represent an actual movement. But part of the reason this new online form of political demonstration is so effective in recruiting active participants is because it's made participation as easy as taking part in the existing social networks that so many of us contribute to every day.

For generations, political activists have said that the prerequisite to getting significant participation in a movement is to make the political personal. And nothing is more personal than the entertainment and media we consume and create on our social networks every day. Remixing is an increasingly political act.

So what happens when vast numbers of social networking citizens find another law that they consider irrelevant? What if it's something more contentious or fundamental than intellectual property law? What are the implications of the increasing disconnect between the letter of the law and its practice? Sure, we've had people disregarding marijuana usage laws for decades, but that kind of disobedience was practiced behind closed doors, not in an environment that's inherently public and social.

More importantly, what are the political efforts we can catalyze if we specifically design them to be as easy to participate in as social networking is today, and if we make sure they're not aligned to the traditional structure of political parties but instead are defined by communities of interest?

I don't know the answer, but it seems increasingly likely that even the most technophobic, regressive policy makers are going to start to understand the implications of large numbers of people in loosely-defined online communities choosing to remix and reform laws on the fly without any granted authority to do so. I can't pretend to know what this development implies. What I do know is that we've seen it as a sort of odd aberration for half a decade now, but soon we'll be obligated to see it as a new political tactic to be reckoned with.

Related: The Power of the Audience, about the sense of common experience on the realtime web.

Sarah Palin has been unsurprising in her criticisms of Barack Obama's credentials and policies, fulfilling the traditional role of the vice presidential candidate being the most aggressive and pointed rhetorical attacker in a campaign. But a closer look at her deliberate use of vernacular and language reveals that she has gone far beyond any other candidate in vice presidential history in the dangerous and irresponsible implications of her attacks. She has phrased her attacks on Obama in a way that avoids accountability to the press while specifically addressing the subset of her audience who are most likely to advocate extreme actions against Obama.

The crux of the issue is simple:

1. Sarah Palin has unequivocally associated Barack Obama with the idea of terrorism and specifically with "terrorists".
2. Republican President George Bush has defined in our National Security Strategy, and the Republican Party's platform affirms, that we may identify and strike at terrorists before they have committed any defined acts of aggression against American citizens.
3. George Bush has made clear, by stating before a joint session of Congress that "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
4. Palin has used deliberate choice of language to avoid these connections being highlighted by the media, while increasing the likelihood that the target audience for her message will be incited by her statements.

Through these arguments, it becomes clear that Sarah Palin's assertions are designed not to prove that Obama is unqualified for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Rather, she appears to be attempting to convince a substantial portion of her supporters that Obama supports terrorism against the United States and thus should be, at the very least, incarcerated as an enemy combatant (which we are doing to American citizens already) or at worst, assassinated for supporting terror. She has done this knowing full well that she can retain plausible deniability thanks to the ambiguity of her statements as they'll be interpreted by the media, by her detractors, and by her more reasonable supporters.

Code Switching, Oprah, and Straight Talk

Palin has been hammering home this alleged link between Obama and terrorism for weeks. And there's a deliberate intellectual dishonesty of using the plural form of "terrorist" for describing what was meant to be an allusion to William Ayers alone.

But just as telling as her assertions is the way in which she phrases them. Obama is not consorting with terrorists, in her formulation, he's palling around with them. I'm not one of those overbearing language nerds who's chiding her for using informal speech; instead, I want to point out a deliberate and telling choice of grammar that she's employed.

Linguists use the phrase "code switching" to refer to the act of using more than one language when speaking. As someone who grew up in a multilingual household, I'm intimately familiar with code-switching, and one of the most interesting traits about the practice is not merely how easy it is for people to switch language on the fly, but rather how the choice of language actually informs the meaning and the nuance of the words being said.

This gets even more pronounced if we use an expansive definition of the idea of "code switching" and include switching between dialects of the same language. Then, we can look at some familiar examples to learn from them.

For example, Oprah Winfrey is an extremely successful businesswoman, obviously well-versed in the General American or Standard American English that's the language of business in this country. But Oprah regularly and effortlessly code switches to AAVE (also known as "Black English" or, to its detractors, ebonics) on her show or in various media appearances. Though her use of the dialect is clearly sincere and authentic, it's also obviously a savvy way to stay connected to audiences with whom she wants to maintain a particular resonance or credibility. In short, code switching is an efficient way to target a particular message to a particular group without explicitly telling the world that's who you're speaking to. The context makes it obvious.

We see George W. Bush do the same thing regularly, as well. No man who has an MBA from Harvard and grew up among the most privileged families in the United States can be unaware that "smoke 'em out" isn't Standard American English. That's not to say his use of folksy sayings is merely a put-on, but rather that it's a linguistic choice he makes in some settings, and with the same goal as Oprah: He's speaking directly to a particular audience in a way that resonates with them as credible, and signifies to others that they're not the target audience for his words.

In the case of Sarah Palin, this strategy has been taken to its logical extreme. Where John McCain used the phrase "straight talk" in his 2000 campaign to represent the idea of telling the unvarnished truth, without regard to the actual grammar of the statements themselves, Palin has changed the meaning of the phrase slightly. In her formulation, "straight talk" is not so much about the clarity of the points being made, but rather a signifier of the dialect in which she is offering up her talking points.

I'm not speaking solely of the North Central American dialect, though Palin's use of what's often referred to as "the Fargo accent" is of course one of her most distinctive verbal traits. In fact, you can see her attenuate how pronounced that accent is based on where and when she's speaking; In front of large crowds in rural areas it tends to be pretty strong, and when she's on TV with an interviewer (or on Saturday Night Live), she dials it back. Those attenuations are normal, and any of us who've ever done any public speaking in different circumstances know that we adapt our language to the audience we're addressing.

Others have criticized Palin for her language. I have no interest in taking her to task over the fact that many of her statements lack a clear structure or that she often reverts to rambling, run-on sentences. The truth is, coherent, cogent public speaking, especially trying to tailor one's speech to sound bites, is a difficult skill that must be practiced. I don't fault Palin for not being expert at it yet, and in fact even when her syntax is tortured, the general point she's trying to make is often still very clear.

Rather, the most dramatic technique in Sarah Palin's speeches is the use of vernacular to mask the seriousness of an assertion. Sarah Palin cloaks her ideas in "straight talk" to avoid them being subject to fact-checking that would happen if she were to use standard english to make the same points.

Saying It Plainly

Put simply, if Palin says "Barack Obama consorts with terrorists", she is making the assertion that he supports acts of violence against American citizens and the media will refute this obviously false assertion. If, instead, Palin says he "pals around with terrorists", she's used code-switching to mask the seriousness of the charge, obfuscating her meaning enough to get away with making an assertion that inevitably calls for the imprisonment or even assassination of a political opponent.

This clever use of language only hides Palin's meaning from members of the press. Because writers for traditional media are usually highly educated and pride themselves on their mastery of Standard American English, they can often look down on dialects like AAVE and North Central English. Instead these forms of language being seen as legitimate and interpreted in the social context where they've formed, they're dismissed as being the words of "people who don't even speak proper English!" In the cases where the ideas aren't outright dismissed, there is still rampant misinterpretation of meaning: Reporters wrongly see a term like "palling" as imprecise, when compared to a word like "consorting".

But these words are not imprecise to their intended audience. They are, in fact, clearer than using legalistic terms like "consorting". They amplify the urgency of the statements, and increase the sense for Palin's audience that they're on the same page with her, speaking a language too "plain", too full of "straight talk", for the press to understand. And they're right. Palin has consistently pitted herself against the media, depicting them as hostile and foreign to her campaign, and thus making it even less likely they'd take her less formal-sounding charges seriously.

On top of this, by deliberately omitting the word "domestic" as a descriptor of "terrorist" after its initial mention in her speeches, Palin has amplified the recurring theme of "otherness" that the McCain campaign and its surrogates have pinned on Obama. There is an unequivocal attempt to assign a commonality of purpose and intent between Obama, his supporters and campaigners, and terrorists who would attack Americans.

This is especially telling because "domestic terrorism" hasn't been raised, by Sarah Palin or anyone else, as an issue that the McCain campaign is genuinely concerned about. There has been no mention of Joel Henry Hinrichs, or Jim David Adkisson, or even Timothy McVeigh. There is not a single mention of domestic terror on the McCain campaign website except in reference to William Ayers. So it's impossible to assert that Palin is introducing this term to raise the issue of security for Americans; It exists only in the context of attacking Obama and inciting a specifically targeted subset of her audience to see him as deserving of imprisonment or violence.

I firmly believe that Sarah Palin is a smart, talented public speaker who makes deliberate choices about her use of language to elicit particular responses from different segments of her audience. She's college-educated and has been a professional broadcaster, understanding the nuances of addressing a large audience. She is certainly experienced enough to understand that signifiers like "hockey mom" and "Joe Six Pack" are explicitly communicating to an audience that is white, overwhelmingly not college educated, and lives in rural or suburban areas.

I know because I've been part of that audience. I grew up in an overwhelmingly white part of rural and suburban Pennsylvania, the very same place that many of these attacks are being leveled. I was coincidentally in Greensboro, North Carolina on the same day that Palin first talked about "Real America". I don't have a college education, and I've spent a lot of time around highly-educated professional writers working for the biggest media organizations in the world, and seen their attitudes about language, dialect and vernacular within our country. I've done enough public speaking myself to understand how important word choice, and use of slang, and choice of accent is when speaking to different groups. And it's obvious to anyone who knows American culture why Palin wouldn't identify as a "basketball mom" or talk about "Joe Forty Ounce". These things are not accidents.

So we see a simple pattern emerge:

• George W. Bush uses informal language like "smoke 'em out" when referring to targeting terrorists, setting the precedent of such terms being not only appropriate for the conversation, but in fact binding as policy.
• Bush, Palin and the Republican Party keep most media outlets on the defensive by consistently distancing the media with both fair assertions of bias and unfair attacks on the journalistic imperative to act as a check to political power.
• Palin sets a tone from her very first national speech where her deliberate use of vernacular explicitly connects her to rural white Americans.
• Palin defines Obama as linked to terrorism, ignoring the actual issue of domestic terrorism in favor of a context which is most likely to inspire radical elements of her audience to pursue the Bush policy of striking at friends of terrorists before they have attacked.
• Palin presses the argument using language that the mainstream press cannot grasp firmly enough to refute or highlight as incendiary.

I believe the vast majority of supporters of the campaign of John McCain are honorable, honest, well-intentioned and sincere Americans who want what's best for this country. And I believe that all of us, regardless of party affiliation or political support, deserve better than someone who cynically twists language to inflame and incite the very worst elements of our culture. That's why it's important to point out the danger of these actions.

Sarah Palin's conduct has gone far past the bounds of decency, and far past even the most dangerous efforts of any previous candidate for such high office. This is an inexcusable, unforgivable, and unacceptable transgression and my belief is that she should be removed from consideration for the office of Vice President for her dangerous, unethical and unamerican display of irresponsibility.

I've long been a fan of playing the dozens, as is to be expected from anyone who loves language. Last night, in a fit of my usual insanity, I thought it'd be fun to throw out some "Yo mama" snaps themed around this year's election on my Twitter account:

• Yo moms such a ho they set up robocalls for all her booty calls.
• Yo moms so fat Russia can see her from their house.

Things took off pretty quickly from there. Lore Sjoberg (you remember him from Brunching Shuttlecocks and his writing for Wired) picked up the meme and ran with it. His were some of the first, and funniest responses:

• Yo mama so fat, McCain refers to her as "Those Ones."
• Yo mama so fat, she got an endorsement from General Mills. (I would have gone with Colonel Sanders here; That's why Lore is a genius!)
• Yo mama so fat, her other biography is called "The Audacity of Hardee's

Around the same time, a number of other fantastically funny folks joined in the fun:

• Fernando Rizo offers up "yo mama's such a ho, she said she'd sit ON Ahmedinejad with no preconditions"
• Matt Haughey added "yo mama so ugly, the RNC spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup"
• One of my personal favorites, Guillermo Esteves absolutely slayed me with "yo momma’s so fat, John McCain looked into her eyes and saw three letters: KFC." Absurd, obscure, specific — perfect!

As these were taking off, Xeni Jardin, who was dropping some snaps of her own, featured the thread in progress in a post on BoingBoing. Fun! The comments there have lit up with more suggestions, and a Twitter search for other replies now offers up, well, dozens more. I've marked a lot of the best as my favorites on Twitter.

While this is all in good fun, what's startling to me is that none of the jokes I've seen mention, or even allude to, race. Playing the dozens is a uniquely and explicitly African American tradition, and we obviously have an African American candidate favored in the race for the first time ever, and yet it hasn't come up.

Some of this, of course, is selection bias due to the audience that Twitter reaches. (At least so far.) But as these jokes from last night are already making their way around online as email forwards and apparently getting quoted in offices across the country, it seems to me like the playfulness of the language and the absurdity of the medium may have masked something timely and fitting. This obviously and instrinsically black tradition has been adopted by a community like Twitter that is, frankly, disproportionately not black. You could see it as the deracination of the tradition, or even worse as a deliberate omission of cultural context in its appropriation. But I actually see it as something positive.

A running joke on Twitter is all in good fun, but I find the unselfconsciousness of this little political gag to be a comforting reflection of the way that the larger trend around this election is moving as well. Like Barack Obama, playing the dozens is obviously black but we're able to just include that implicitly in our participation without having denying or diminish it. That feels like progress.

And best of all, even if it is just a bunch of jokes on Twitter, making these jokes is something that anyone can take a turn with. Just like your mama.

I found Nelson Minar's thoughtful look at Larry Craig's arrest to be very moving because of its deeply empathetic perspective. I find one of the things that frustrates me most about the public media sphere is the profound lack of empathy for people. Now, I don't like Craig -- I think he is a hypocrite. But Nelson took the time to think through the perspective of the person being demonized and understand and explain a very logical path to how a person arrives at the worst day of his life.

I find myself wishing more and more that we could teach people the ability to see the world through other perspectives. I think we can detest someone's hypocrisy and regret his awful decisions, and maybe even resent his beliefs, while still being sympathetic for his having been in a situation that left him with no good choices.

This is also what I was thinking about when ruminating on design and mise en place a few weeks ago. There is tremendous opportunity in being able to see through someone else's eyes.

In 1992, Brian Springer spent over 500 hours capturing direct satellite feeds of the video clips that powered both news broadcasts and that year's presidential campaigns. By manually monitoring the video feeds and recording selected highlights, he created the raw footage that he would then turn in to a documentary entitled "Spin".

The film is less than an hour long, and amazingly, you can watch it in its entirety on Google Video.

Though some of the techniques seem laughably primitive now, and the efforts of the 1992 campaigns (hey, remember Ross Perot?) are kind of dated the day after the YouTube debates, this is still amazingly resonant. I couldn't vote yet during that election, but now that I'm old enough, I try to be aware of the effort that goes in to crafting these carefully-honed messages. Even with that awareness, seeing the actual footage of that work in progress is incredibly creepy.

From Slate's "Hypothetical questions they should ask at the presidential debates":

As you are flying home from Moscow--having told the world you will never deal with terrorists--hijackers, posing as reporters, seize Air Force One. ... I'll start with Senator Obama. Do you negotiate with the hijackers in the hope of saving lives, or do you flee into the bowels of the craft, then pick them off, one by one, with makeshift shanks and your bare hands?

John Scalzi shares a gem and kicks off a predictably stupid comment thread, based on an overheard coversation: “The problem with using the Web as a model for what’s really going on is that on the Web, Ron Paul is a presidential front runner and Serenity is the greatest science fiction movie ever made.”

Ned Lamont was undoubtedly helped by his supporters' web efforts in his defeat of Joe Lieberman in yesterday's primary. Lieberman's team was especially incompetent for having a $15 hosting plan that couldn't keep up with his web traffic, and then unfairly blaming the downtime on malicious users who were presumably Lamont supporters.

But. What's frustrating is that the enthusiasm of a tiny group of Lamont's supporters also acted as another demonstration of the ugliness of a mob mentality online. Jon Friedman had a recent MarketWatch story which wasn't about the Lamont/Lieberman race, but articulated the challenge quite eloquently:

Critics can showcase their opinions, too -- within reason. And this is where it gets tricky for a critic, especially, bloggers. Plenty of bloggers have opinions and no reluctance about voicing them, which is fine. A big benefit of the Internet is it allows individuals to feel empowered.

But I contend that too many bloggers hurt themselves. They come across as loudmouths looking for an argument or a way to exploit the relative celebrity of their subjects. It's kind of pathetic when writers can't find something original to say and have to resort to criticizing someone else just to be heard.

Lanny Davis picked up the same idea, but he had the misfortune to be a direct target of the vitriol. From the Wall Street Journal's opinion page:

[T]he issue is not just emotional outbursts by these usually anonymous bloggers. A friend of mine just returned from Connecticut, where he had spoken on several occasions on behalf of Joe Lieberman. He happens to be a liberal antiwar Democrat, just as I am. He is also a lawyer. He told me that within a day of a Lamont event--where he asked the candidate some critical questions--some of his clients were blitzed with emails attacking him and threatening boycotts of their products if they did not drop him as their attorney. He has actually decided not to return to Connecticut for the primary today; he is fearful for his physical safety.

This illustrates two of the worst traits of a lot of the blogs I follow. First, many of us are far too willing to criticize those who are actually largely in agreement with us. It's as if the opponent isn't the person who disagrees with me 100%, but rather the person who agrees with me 99%.

The second, and even more egregious, problem is that everyone who wades into trying to communicate on a broad scale with the blogosphere will face one of these large-scale vitriolic attacks at some point. It may be a small percentage of the total number of people who read an item, but it's hard to describe how unpleasant it can be to get hundreds of angry or threatening messages, even if they only represent a small part of your total audience.

The cost of these sorts of attacks is that people won't distinguish a few bad actors from bloggers and online communities in general. Instead, they'll say, "Those bloggers are crazy!" and retreat from engaging the medium entirely. It'll be years until they come back and try again. I'd urge any community that wants to influence or inspire a movement to consider what techniques it wants to use for policing its most extremist members, as well as what tactics it wants to use for encouraging the accountability that makes for more productive conversations.

Other posts on this topic, which I'm semi-obsessed with:

• Learning From Experience, from two years ago.
• An Unkind Community from later that year
• YHBT HAND 2.0, which stands for "You Have Been Trolled, Have a Nice Day", and was about an oddly undeserved pile-on where tech bloggers flamed O'Reilly about trying to protect the name "Web 2.0" for its conference.

So, we've seen this behavior in tech blogs, and in politics, so perhaps we'll see these kinds of group beatdowns coming to music blogs, knitting blogs, and food blogs, instead of the minor flamewars that they've had so far. Then I can add it to The Blog Cycle.

As I hope anybody who knows me can attest, I'm sick to death of the pointlessly partisan bickering preceding tomorrow's U.S. Presidential election. I'm annoyed by the assumption that I'm partisan. Sure, I have a preferred candidate in tomorrow's election, but like most sane people, I don't think either man (do they have to always be men?) is all right on all the issues, and I don't think the supporters of either side are particularly reasonable.

But more than all of this, I'm sick of shoddy advocacy. I've seen tons of URLs and video clips and a barrage of ads on TV all preaching to the converted. Here's a hint: When an analyst says a candidate is "speaking to his base" that means "he's talking to his own ass". The 10% extremists on either side are the ones who truly hate our freedoms.

And the worst thing about the candidates? They're fucking lazy. Nobody said to me "Vote for me because I'm most able to work with people in the opposite party who have good ideas, and that's how we make progress." These two guys are lazy in the way that can only come from men born into privilege afforded to one hundredth of one percent of all the people who've ever lived in all of history. Work for it, you sad sacks.

Despite all this, I'm voting. My mom and dad didn't travel halfway around the world for me to take their work for granted, and I still want to live in a world where having a civic duty actually means that you have an obligation. Plus, I don't want to be part of the mass bloodshed when P. Diddy has to murder 60 million people tomorrow night.

So, I'll post the platform that I wish someone had the brains or the guts to push at me months ago. I'm not saying I'm great at this, I'm just saying it's a hell of a lot better than any of the messages that got through to me from the campaigns thus far.

I'm in favor of a candidate who supports privatized, faith-based marriage. A lifelong commitment is too important and too personal to be left to any government institution. While the government can, and should, allow people to make contracts with anyone whom they please, it should be impossible for the government to make any laws in regard to marriage, and it should be impossible for churches to have any impact on contracts between any two consenting adults for any purpose.

I'm in favor of deregulated, free-market pharmaceutical sourcing. Protectionism and corporate welfare have no place when it comes to drugs that help improve or save people's lives.

We need a pro-small business foreign policy that considers the social environment for marketing American products and services abroad. Limiting the number of markets where foreign consumers are willing to purchase American goods is bad for our economy.

It's vitally critical to America's future that we preserve America's role as the worldwide leader in science and technology. To do so, we must allow a free market of unfettered research and exploration in every area of development, including the latest areas of genetic technology.

Finally, we need a pro-family health care policy that makes it possible for people to choose to spend time with their children if possible, and increases flexibility in staying under coverage even when unemployed or underemployed. Insurance companies and health care providers aren't properly incented to live up to their social responsibility right now, and a clear system of economic incentives would provide the right motivation to make sure every family in the United States could take care of their children without living in fear of a loss of coverage.

Though I'm an unapologetic liberal, this is (somewhat deliberately) a very conservative platform, and I've tried to couch it in the terms that make most sense to a conservative audience. But if you weigh these issues appropriately, it becomes clear that, of the two major party candidates vying for election tomorrow, John Kerry is the better choice.

Kerry opposes the Federal government mandating regulation of contract law to the individual states in regard to marriage. Kerry is in favor of letting the free market determine supply and demand for prescription drugs. Kerry is trying to encourage an environment where products and services from American businesses are welcomed by overseas buyers. Kerry has pledged a commitment to science over superstition when making decisions about American leadership in research. And Kerry has backed policies which will move us closer to an America where parents can think about kids instead of co-pays.

What is George Bush right on? He's right on not wanting to limit outsourcing. And he's admirably consistent in having a vision that he feels will address our nation's physical security. But I feel the overall military policies of both candidates will be sufficiently similar, due to the demands of our existing (over)commitments and despite protestations to the contrary, that the most sensible way to determine which candidate is best is by a sober assessment of their domestic social policies. Bush's policies are too fiscally irresponsible and not appropriately respectful of conservative values, in addition to being wholly disrespectful of social progressives, and this makes my decision easy.

I'm voting for John Kerry. I encourage you to vote tomorrow, too. And my prediction? We'll see over 290 electoral college votes for Kerry, but with as many as 3 states in contention due to the results being too close to call.

Despite having advocated the decisions of activist judges in 2000, Republicans will suddenly remember their love of states' rights in this year's dispute and ask the decision to go to the House of Representatives, as it has in every past Presidential toss-up except 2000. The Republican-controlled House will grant the disputed states to Bush, or perhaps two states will switch decisions and nearly cancel each other out, but it won't matter due to Kerry's significant lead in electoral votes.

And by the time the whole process has finished, most dumb, loud Americans will go back to hating their counterparts in the other party more than they hate Osama Bin Laden. The other 80% of us will shake our heads, be glad it's over, and get back to work.