Another cheerless anniversary has arrived, this time in Port-au-Prince, destroyed by a massive earthquake one year ago today.  The media commemorated the first month and the sixth month after the earthquake, recounting the death and destruction and assessing the recovery.  Perhaps the most heartfelt approach to observing the grim event came from Haitian author Edwidge Danticat, writing in an opening comment in The New Yorker Magazine.

Danticat shared a Haitian voudou tradition about the souls of the dead slipping into the waters of rivers and streams.  They remain submerged there  for a year and a day until ritual prayer and songs lure them from their suspension and they are reborn.  Danticat tells us that the year-and-a-day tradition is seen among families who hold it as an obligation because it maintains a continuity that has kept Haitians linked to their ancestors for generations.

Because of the scandal of recent presidential elections that are believed in many quarters to be fraudulent, the slow recovery of Haiti from the earthquake has likewise been suspended.  If Haiti is to rise from the ruins, the deadlock must be addressed.  In many ways, the election symbolizes the continuing ritual of suffering experienced by Haitians for its entire existence, but it also offers the opportunity for the spirits of the nearly dead society to rise figuratively from the waters where they have floated for one year.

I bore witness last night to the earthquake anniversary from Port Sulphur, LA, where I’ve volunteering in a Katrina rebuild five years after the hurricane.  I reminded the other volunteers that today is the first anniversary of the horrible event.  In this way, I try to explain how important it is not to forget the the dead and survivors who struggle to restore and, with luck, improve Haiti.

Sports fans in the United States wax ecstatic about the period from mid-October to late November as  because a perfect storm swirls through the sports world.  The boys of summer head through the playoffs into the World Series.  College football players are playing decisive games and their big brothers in the National Football League are starting to eliminate the weaker teams.  By the third week in November, the professional basketball players are finishing three weeks of their six-month season and their younger siblings are playing in holiday basketball tournaments in garden spots like Hawaii and Cancun.

Other contests with a lot more at stake took place in on the second Tuesday in November this year.  Barack Obama suffered the loss of his Democratic Party majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and saw a shaving of the party Senate majority.  Another critical election took place in earthquke-ravaged Haiti on the last Sunday in November, for the office of President.  Unlike the decisive United States results, described by Obama himself as a “shellacking,” the outcome in Haiti, delivered amidst less-than-ideal polling conditions and charges of widespread fraud, left virtually no one happy.  The election council deemed that Jude Célestin, the handpicked candidate of incumbent René Préval, and Mirlande Manigat, the wife of former (and deposed) President Leslie Manigat, would face each other in a runoff.  Followers of compas singer Michel (“Sweet Micky”) Martelly took to the streets, protesting their candidate’s exclusion as another example of the deep-seated corruption endemic to the Haitian political culture.

In the continuing electoral limbo in a country the United States has never been shy about invading and occupying, and manipulating the affairs of,  perhaps not many observers have noted the shadow cast  by the last closely contested U.S.  presidential election.  The Supreme Court decision that awarded the White House to George W. Bush, Bush v. Gore, came down on December 10, 2000, in an act of judicial activism that usurped the jurisdiction of the Florida Supreme Court that was in the process of ruling on a recount of the Florida vote.

Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker Magazine legal writer, has noted that, unlike the landmark Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade cases on school segregation and abortion rights, respectively, which produced numerous citations in subsequent cases, Bush v. Gore as a precedent is significant for having produced nothing but a resounding judicial silence. 

In my humble opinion (I’m admittedly neither an expert on Haiti or politics, but I do have a sharp eye for historical irony), what links the two elections is a fear, in some quarters, that a protracted period of electoral indecision opens the door to political and economic instability.  Miami Herald writer Jacqueline Charles’ lead from a Dec. 20 news analysis says it all: “In a traumatized nation with a poor history of clean voting, Haiti’s recent elections were a disaster waiting to happen.”  When I was in Port-au-Prince, I heard that the $9 billion in international aid wouldn’t be distributed until after the Nov. 28 election.  U.S. Senator Richard Lugar warned that “political uncertainty” caused by “dueling political candidates” could cost Haiti the reconstruction dollars it so desperately needs.

And what did the “political uncertainty” that hung over Florida and Washington, D.C. threaten a decade ago?  As Toobin points, even former President Bush in his recently released memoir has little to say about the momentous decision that opened the door to his presidency beyond that he felt “relief,” something that the Haitian people are getting precious little of.

Sports fans in the United States wax ecstatic about the period from mid-October to late November as  because a perfect storm swirls through the sports world.  The boys of summer head through the playoffs into the World Series.  College football players are playing decisive games and their big brothers in the National Football League are starting to eliminate the weaker teams.  By the third week in November, the professional basketball players are finishing three weeks of their six-month season and their younger siblings are playing in holiday basketball tournaments in garden spots like Hawaii and Cancun.

Other contests with a lot more at stake took place in on the second Tuesday in November this year.  Barack Obama suffered the loss of his Democratic Party majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and saw a shaving of the party Senate majority.  Another critical election took place in earthquke-ravaged Haiti on the last Sunday in November, for the office of President.  Unlike the decisive United States results, described by Obama himself as a “shellacking,” the outcome in Haiti, delivered amidst less-than-ideal polling conditions and charges of widespread fraud, left virtually no one happy.  The election council deemed that Jude Célestin, the handpicked candidate of incumbent René Préval, and Mirlande Manigat, the wife of former (and deposed) President Leslie Manigat, would face each other in a runoff.  Followers of compas singer Michel (“Sweet Micky”) Martelly took to the streets, protesting their candidate’s exclusion as another example of the deep-seated corruption endemic to the Haitian political culture.

In the continuing electoral limbo in a country the United States has never been shy about invading and occupying, and manipulating the affairs of,  perhaps not many observers have noted the shadow cast  by the last closely contested U.S.  presidential election.  The Supreme Court decision that awarded the White House to George W. Bush, Bush v. Gore, came down on December 10, 2000, in an act of judicial activism that usurped the jurisdiction of the Florida Supreme Court that was in the process of ruling on a recount of the Florida vote.

Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker Magazine legal writer, has noted that, unlike the landmark Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade cases on school segregation and abortion rights, respectively, which produced numerous citations in subsequent cases, Bush v. Gore as a precedent is significant for having produced nothing but a resounding judicial silence. 

In my humble opinion (I’m admittedly neither an expert on Haiti or politics, but I do have a sharp eye for historical irony), what links the two elections is a fear, in some quarters, that a protracted period of electoral indecision opens the door to political and economic instability.  Miami Herald writer Jacqueline Charles’ lead from a Dec. 20 news analysis says it all: “In a traumatized nation with a poor history of clean voting, Haiti’s recent elections were a disaster waiting to happen.”  When I was in Port-au-Prince, I heard that the $9 billion in international aid wouldn’t be distributed until after the Nov. 28 election.  U.S. Senator Richard Lugar warned that “political uncertainty” caused by “dueling political candidates” could cost Haiti the reconstruction dollars it so desperately needs.

And what did the “political uncertainty” that hung over Florida and Washington, D.C. threaten a decade ago?  As Toobin points, even former President Bush in his recently released memoir has little to say about the momentous decision that opened the door to his presidency beyond that he felt “relief,” something that the Haitian people are getting precious little of.

This was originally posted on Girl w/ Pen on December 8th.  Adina Nack is an associate professor of Sociology at California Lutheran University and the author of Damaged Goods: Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases. ..

I’m working on an article right now relating to problems of incommensurability in communication and deliberative democracy. I just found this neat passage from the prolific anthropologist Clifford Geertz:

“To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.” (Geertz, Local Knowledge, 1983, p. 16).

Indirectly, I think Geertz is dealing with a fundamental crux of much work on public deliberation–asking us to maintain a “largeness of mind” that incorporates the vast diversities of our planet while still being able to produce unities, decisions, and other outcomes. Geertz’s quote leads me to ask: Are there fundamentally incommensurable forms of communication in our world? In other words, are there interpretive frameworks, linguistic understandings, or other forms of human symbol use that could never be brought together or reconciled, no matter how much communication was involved?

I saw this article by Thomas Roche linked to on Twitter, where he finds the genesis of the cartoon character-end child abuse meme. He doesn’t like how the meme, which started as celebrating an artform, took on a life of its own by morphing into the support of a specific cause. It sounds like he’s pretty peeved::

“Such epic asshattery is a the confluence of good-natured light-hearted celebration and rampant, infectious shallowness. It cheapens the cause of child abuse prevention and, just as importantly, it draws a connection between comic books/cartoons and childhood, where none should exist.”

He goes on to criticize how this One Click Activism doesn’t really do anything, which echoes Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change” critique of social media social activism [see criticisms of Gladwell’s article on this blog here]. Both Gladwell and Roche take a dim view of these “consciousness raising” efforts because they do precious little “real” work as diversions. Gladwell sees identity-driven social activism as being at cross purposes with the more hierarchically organized variant::

“It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.”

While Roche wants to shame everyone participating in what he sees as a shallow, identity-feeding enterprise::

“But Facebook Activism isn’t just stupid; it’s dangerous. It convinces people that doing next to nothing is actually better than doing nothing at all. And you know what? It’s not. If it’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness, is it the same, but less of a hassle, to just call up a photo of a candle on your iPhone? Seriously. Ask yourself. Is that the kind of person you want to be? Someone who can’t even be bothered to strike a match?”

I disagree.

First, I think a lot of naysaying regarding social movements has everything to do with discontent, simmering in the zeitgeist of these times in North America. The federal parties in Canada are lucky to get support of 30% of voters and many in the US are disillusioned with Obama’s promise of change and the Tea Partiers are advocating their own variant that isn’t necessarily in synch with the Republicans. I feel the Gladwell and Roche articles resonate with those skeptics who are critical of what they see as feel-good do-goodery.

Could there be something to these criticisms? After all, what is the point of just getting people to slap an image on their profiles.

The problem with this discontent is that it’s based on a zero-sum mentality and a conjecture that none of it matters, as opposed to the possibility that some of it might matter—a lot. The zero-sum angle assumes that these efforts are taking the wind out of the sails of more concrete efforts. I think these are apples and oranges. The attention received by being a meme that goes viral may seem like a bunch of wasted effort, but a more useful way to see this is that it raises consciousness and may motivate key people to do more organizing or mobilize resources in this direction. Is this likely? Maybe not in most cases and causes, but it’s a possibility and and a possibility borne out of the power of the Internet. In fact, I would argue that with Web 3.0 that the gaps between memes, activism, and results will be narrowed. So, pissing on the idea categorically is premature.

On my r h i z o m i c o n blog,  this post on Nestlé’s handling of social media criticism and attacks on Facebook for their use of palm oil in Kit-Kat bars shows how activism interfaces with corporations. In this facepalm tale of corporate woe, social media and the old guard media {OGM} converged to raise awareness of the issue that palm oil destroys wildlife habitat. Nestlé allegedly altered its practices due to activist pressures, so while the corporation was touting a greener approach to palm oil, Greenpeace wasn’t buying it due to practices of an Indonesian supplier, Sinar Mas, and an anti-Nestlé, anti-Kit-Kat video was circulated and hammered with—wait for it—copyright infringement. Did it matter that people were changing their Facebook profile images and posting critical comments on Nestlé’s Facebook wall? Nestlé thought so and requested users to stop doing it.

I’m not buying the arguments that social media activism merely feeds the ego or is dangerous because it takes efforts away from more real endeavours. I’m of the mind that if it increases awareness through resonance and meaning and increases motivation by just a fraction of those touched by a meme, it’s far from useless or dangerous.

Roche is seeking a stronger connection between the meme and outcomes. I can appreciate that, but when he expresses his frustration with the government and the public regarding the social ill of child abuse, his argument turns into what I see as an elitist political treatise::

“Do you want to know why kids are being abused in the United States? Because no system exists to prevent them from being abused. Do you want to know why no system exists to prevent kids from being abused? Because some very vocal Americans seem to spend much of their time being terrified that some kid somewhere who’s not their kid will get something for free, up to and including a life without abuse.

Violence against children has been endemic throughout all societies. We in the Western world had a chance, last century, to make great strides toward eliminating it. We chose to fight wars, cut school lunches, privatize national parks and pay lower taxes instead. As a result, we march into a new decade in which the kids of the world are as helpless as ever.

And legions of people out there are exactly upset enough about that to upload an image of Danger Mouse.”

I think this makes huge assumptions about anyone supporting the meme. Maybe it’s cynical of me to take issue with him on the grounds that my take is that he doesn’t get or doesn’t like how the mobilizing of the masses works. It works by making a cause “cool”, e.g., Obama 2008, and if you’re fighting something that’s cool, you need to make it uncool, e.g., adding social stigma to smoking. I say cynical, as it pretty much means that we as a society are often driven by what’s cool—or at least by things that resonate with us through meaning, no matter now tangential it is to anything “real”.

Twitterversion:: Is the attack on the cartoon-child abuse Facebook meme warranted or does Thomas Roche just not get the big picture here? @ThickCulture @Prof_K

There are times when I feel Salon.com should be accompanied by a laughtrack or at least a wide assortment of humourous sound effects from Hanna-Barbera cartoons. This week, there’s a confessional tale by a guy who loved a scam. Jason Jellick was man who says he preyed upon liberal returns policies and was willing to tell lies to get free food from McDonalds or free upgrades at 5 star hotels. These mad skills made his friends green with envy. His idea was purportedly to stick it to the man, the corporate hegemon,—not individuals, but over time it became clear that he was interested in the art of the steal. He makes the distinction between shoplifting and conning trusting individuals and gaming a system meant to ensure customer satisfaction, but those distinctions are lost on me. In consumer behaviour lingo, Jellick is guilty of slippage—consumer actions that result in losses, and the only moral high ground he can stand on over shoplifters or Winona Ryder is that his actions are harder to detect as crimes or torts.

He sets this all up by recounting a tale of his mother’s Christmas scam and his conjecture that she was a member of the enlightened bourgeoisie::

“This was something I learned from watching my mother, who knew all too well how to root out a good con. Her defining scam was the Christmas special, when, on the day after Christmas, she’d gather up the presents from under the tree and return them to the stores along with the masses — poor Mommy forced to return all of her thoughtful gifts. But unlike most of those people, she’d circle back to the stores (once the shift change had taken effect) and repurchase those same presents for vastly reduced prices. Was this out of necessity? Was it out of some need to display her cunning? Looking back, I suspect my mother had become convinced of some higher moral agenda, in which the weak (the middle class) outfox the strong (the rich). All I know is that we always got what we wanted for Christmas.”

Ha! No, mommy was a hustler and taught her kids that the ends justify the means. I’m sure mommy would say that she’s just working the system. Don’t bitch her out, bitch out the system.

Jellick goes on to chronicle how he laxed his rule of only targeting corporations once he got a sweet taste of the confidence scam, including a bizarre Minnesota motel scam that went sideways. There’s also a bit of mea culpa and penance thrown in, since Salon needs to have some semblance of a moral centre. Salon tried to use the article as a springboard for more confessional tales::

While I think that stealing from {e.g., de Certeau’s “perruque”} or engaging in antisocial behaviour towards {e.g., Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre”} those with power is part of everyday life, there’s a Machiavellian posture taken by Jellick that leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.

As an aside, this is the perfect Salon article attempting to get people to rethink pathological behaviour by ascribing some sort of higher meaning to the actions. Many commenters weren’t buying it and bitched Jellick out—there are 18 pages of comments, as of 2:25 PM EST. On Twitter, there are plenty of naysayers calling bullshit on his story {e.g., see @snarkysmachine}.

I think there are social implications for Jellick’s actions. I see them as the consumer counterpart to corporate practices that push in the opposite direction. I know of an instance at Wal*Mart in the 1990s where managers had unwritten policies that denied returns. Why? It helped the bottom line, which made the department manager look good, which made the store manager look good, which made the district manager look good…all the way to the shareholder. One could argue that Jellick and the Wal*Mart example are both pathological extremes. Jellick’s alleged “duping” of capitalism and Wal*Mart’s practices to limit returns are cut from the same bolt—these are highly individualistic actions motivated by gain. Jellick does recognize his own rationalizations for his behaviours, but one gets a sense that Jellick is just mouthing the words. His values are that of the theoretical homo economicus, acting rationally in his own self interest in a world of atomized, arms-length social actors. Mommy would be proud.

Twitterversion:: Jason Jellick @Salon article on conning capitalism. The grift is the reward, but sweeter w/phony bourgeois enlightenment. @ThickCulture @Prof_K

Later today, on my other blog, rhizomicon, I’ll be doing a post on the semantic web {web 3.0}, which stems from work I’m doing in the area of semantic web and social media. In my research this morning on information ontologies, I came across Debategraph, a collaborative visualization tool that maps ideas/concepts in the realm of complex policy issues. Here’s a demo video::

The Obama administration used Debategraph for their open government brainstorm last year. You can access the Debategraph here::

A friend of mine once convened meetings on watershed management in the SF Bay Area and this type of technology would have been very useful in the consensus-based planning recommendation model being implemented. While the loud and the cantankerous could attempt to be a thorn in the side at the public meetings, it would be harder to withstand the criticism of most of the other stakeholders. Nevertheless, there is the persistent wiki problem of how status and legitimacy affects deliberation and in this instance, policymaking. What I do like is how content can be uses and repurposed in online collaboration 24/7. I was thinking of semantic web implications in policy, but that’s for another time.

Maybe the State Department should explore this to flesh out transparency policy in light of the recent Wikileaks.

Twitterversion:: Thoughts on Debategraph visual mappings of ideas 4 transparent complex policy deliberation, used by Obama admin last year @ThickCulture @Prof_K

The Obama Administration is trying desperately to halt the dissemination of documents that they feel will jeopardize lives and diplomatic relations. Today, 250,000 diplomatic cables are slated to go public on Julian Assange’s Wikileaks site and this caught my eye::

“The cables are thought to include candid assessments of foreign leaders and governments and could erode trust in the U.S. as a diplomatic partner.”

The Obama Administration has been trying to limit the blowback for about a week, preparing foreign leaders for what I’m assuming to be unflattering depictions. While Barack has tried his hand at being an internationalist, the leaked documents could undermine his standing in the world. I think it really depends on what is in the leaks and how his administration chooses to handle this.

The State Department stated it will not negotiate with Wikileaks, emphasizing the illegality of publishing the documents, as well as putting “countless” lives at risk.

I find this to be an interesting situation, as the State Department appears to be framing today’s planned leak in terms of a “clear and present danger”. Mark Theissen in an August WaPo op ed has stated Wikileaks in such terms. What’s interesting to me is that the risks aren’t clear. How are lives is jeopardy? Who is in jeopardy? Will this be a credible cause of a military or diplomatic failure? The prior restraint of free speech is allowable for reasons of national security, but where is the line between sensitive information that has national security implications and publishing documents that increase governmental transparency?

I have a sense that these leaks may be more embarrassing than compromising national security, given the response of the State Department. A more forceful prior restraint intervention would be under a great deal of scrutiny and expected to have Constitutional validity.

So, if this is a tempest in a teapot and more about good foreign relations in light of candid statements, it would resemble Harriet the Spy {h/t LinnyQat}::

“Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. In her notebook, she writes down everything she knows about everyone, even her classmates and her best friends. Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before she can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together?”

I’m quite curious to see how this plays out, in terms of the nature of what is leaked and the Obama administration’s response.

Twitterversion:: Showdown b/t State Dept.& Julian Assange’s Wikileaks on intercepted diplomatic cables.Security breach or Harriet the Spy? @ThickCulture @Prof_K

The Canadian House of Commons sent a bill {S-6} back to the Senate that would have done away with the Faint Hope clause {§745.6 of the Criminal Code of Canada-pdf}. The clause allows prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment with a parole eligibility of greater than 15 years to apply for early parole if they have served 15 years. {Canoe News was alluding to the idea that this was politically motivated, in the wake of Conservatives in the Senate killing an environmental bill, C-311}.

The Conservatives have been wanting to get rid of the faint hope clause and may eventually get their way. The Conservatives’ stance is that it re-victimizes the families by having them prepare at an earlier date for parole hearings. A Toronto Sun columnist, Jerry Agar, isn’t interested in rights and rehabilitation of convicted criminals. He wants tougher sentencing and the elimination of the Faint Hope clause for the sake of victims. In my mind, this brings up a fundamental question. Does society view the criminal as forever “bad” or is even the most notorious criminal subject to rehabilitation?

Moreover, while the rights and safety of the victim shouldn’t be discounted, at what point does the weight of a victim’s impact statement have more gravitas than the evaluations of a prisoner’s current state. I wonder about government intervention when it comes to the wishes of the victim. The attempt by California courts to get Roman Polansky extradited from Switzerland in spite of the victim’s wishes after her civil settlement makes me wonder what the guidelines should be. Specifically, how should prosecutors and the courts balance a victim’s wishes and the interests of justice?

One factor that may be influencing this is culture. European sentences for homicide can be lenient by North American {US & Canada} standards, but there appears to be a cultural norm that tough sentencing is a deterrent and metes out justice for the victim. While “vengeance” may be a strong term, I recall watching a HBO documentary on capital punishment about a decade ago and much of how the death penalty was framed was to help the victims obtain closure.

I suppose much of this boils down to whether one believes in rehabilitation. Are the Jimmy Boyles {Scottish gangster and convicted murder turned artist and writer} merely outliers in the annals of crime and punishment?

Twitterversion:: [blog] Do You Believe a Murderer Can Be Rehabilitated?: Canada’s Faint Hope Clause Clings to Hope—for now. @ThickCulture @Prof_K