Adam Serwer justifiably excoriates the Democrats for not spending political capital on repealing DADT

In December the Defense Department is reportedly set to release a study showing that, like the American people, most servicemembers aren’t opposed to gays and lesbians openly serving. That’s in contrast to the vast opposition of most servicemembers to racial integration in the 1940s; if Truman had insisted on staying his hand until a political climate as favorable as this one had come along, integrating the military might not have happened until decades later.

Truman ended segregation in the military because it was the right thing to do, despite the fact that it was unpopular. Ending DADT happens to be both popular and the right thing to do, and Democrats today still can’t get it done.

If the Democrats want to begin to repair the damaged relationship with their base, taking a stand on this issue is a good place to start.  This is an issue where the business community doesn’t have a dog in the fight.

via Andrew Sullivan

Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda during the Third Reich, infamously said that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” and “the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

The unceasing repetition of certain terms in the media has become fair fodder for critiques by comedians such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Watch Colbert’s quick deconstruction of the “wave” metaphor in the midterm elections:

Colbert Midterm Election Coverage

One of my students forwarded me a recent Rachel Maddow segment similarly fact-checking an assertion that’s been propagated through many platforms about Obama’s expenses during foreign visits:

Maddow on the Media

It’s a sad day when some media commentators like Maddow have to turn from their jobs reporting and analyzing on all the happenings of governments, businesses, etc.—to spend their time fact-checking and trying to prevent corruption in other media. Stewart and Colbert have been our primary media critics of the past decade, and that these roles are being taken over by Maddow and others tells us just how bad the repetition problem has become in an oligarchic news industry.

All you really need to know:

Older voters came out… younger ones didn’t.  The underlying fundamentals were pretty much the same as they were in 2008 Whites turned out at slightly greater number (78% this time compared to 74% in 2008) and they did vote Republican in greater numbers (55% in 2008 compared to 60% last night), but all racial and ethnic groups voted for Republicans in slightly greater numbers.  White women in particular shifted to the GOP in greater numbers.  They went 58%-40% for Republicans this year, compared to 53%-46% in 2008.

Be comforted Dems, the President and the Congress used their political capital and achieved significant legislation in the first two years.  They knew they would never be as popular as they were in January of 2008 and they moved a progressive agenda forward in the face of a horrible political context.   Regardless of what the Dems did, they were going to lost their majority.  They have a significant body of work to show for it.  If they could have gotten one more Senator in 2008, you could have seen an even bigger progressive legislative Renaissance.

Via: Matt Yglesias

From an otherwise depressing election.

According to the Las Vegas Sun, Latinos turned out in big numbers to keep Sharon Angle out of the Senate.

Despite earlier polling data that indicated Hispanics would skip this election, exit polls showed they accounted for a record 16 percent of total voters. That turnout was likely backlash to an ad aired by a Republican operative explicitly telling Hispanics not to vote, as well as inflammatory ads from Angle’s campaign that used images of Hispanic youth dressed as gang members.

I hope this signals to Republicans that they will pay a political price for making implicit racial appeals like this one.

Man is this cynical, but funny!  All I can say is…  ouch!

For those of you who are grad students out there, don’t believe the hype! Being an academic is a great job.  There is a whole lot of kool-aid drinking in my discipline, but there are lots of different ways to be a college professor.  I admit that if I had taken a different career path, I might be as cynical as the freakishly long armed professor in this video.

Via The Monkey Cage.

It’s been two weeks since I returned from Port-au-Prince.  I’ve been using the term “grim” to describe conditions there.  As the official tropical storm/hurricane season draws to a close next week, the sigh of relief I’ve been waiting to exhale is on hold.  Instead of a threat from hurricane force winds and flooding and mudslides, the 1.3 million residents of tent camps face a cholera epidemic.

Ansel Herz of Inter Press News reports that heath workers are scrambling to bar cholera from the crowded camps in and around Port-au-Prince.  As of yesterday, at least 160 people have died in the central Artibonite region, according to Zanmi Lasante, the Haitian arm of Partners in Health.

Cholera, a waterborne bacterium, stands to devastate the camps by contaminating the drinking supply.  The Haitian government says that the bacterium can incubate in the human body for days and rapidly cause death by dehydration.  Spokespersons from the Pan American Health Organization said Friday that laboratory tests had confirmed the outbreak.

Acting like generals responding to an invasion by hostile forces, authorities have sped medical personnel to St. Marc, about 70 kilometers north of Port-au-Prince, where a single hospital is overwhelmed with cholera patients.  Villagers from remote areas are sprawled on the floors, intravenous lines in their arms.  In the meantime, patients queue up outside the gates.

In a blog post by Partners in Health Chief Medical Officer Joia Mukherjee called cholera “a disease of poverty” (80 percent of Haitians live in poverty).  She asserted that loans from the Inter-American Development Bank meant for the development of a public water supply in the affected region were blocked on political grounds during the tenure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The background section of the the PIH website, relates how the “dire” public health situation in recent years was worsened by a U.S.-backed embargo against the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and then by the coup that drove him from office.  Further, “dismal health outcomes are especially pronounced in Haiti’s rural interior, where deforestation, erosion, and lack of infrastructure have crippled the agricultural economy.”  The region supports only 10 percent of the population, but they are the poorest people in the nation, a condition that makes them a perfect target for cholera.

The disease is transmitted by drinking water contaminated by the feces of infected persons.  Only ten percent of those drinking such contaminated water come down with the disease.

Back in the capital of Port-au-Prince, Herz reports that it is not clear that prevention measures have been implemented.  Mark Snyder, a development worker with International Action Ties, has not seen “any general information distributed on the streets or in the camps at this time.”  Snyder pointed out that the U.N. peacekeepers patrol the streets to provide security, not to supply information.

So, while smaller storms have harassed the camp residents, the feared hurricane season is taking second place to the specter of a cholera epidemic.

What can you do to help?  Organize an event to show solidarity with the Haitian people.  Donate to Partners in Health, http://www.pih.org/ or Konpay, http://www.konpay.org/, a Haitian organization that “builds networks and collaborations so that technology and expertise can be shared and used to strengthen Haitian solutions to social, environmental and economic problems.”

It’s been two weeks since I returned from Port-au-Prince.  I’ve been using the term “grim” to describe conditions there.  As the official tropical storm/hurricane season draws to a close next week, the sigh of relief I’ve been waiting to exhale is on hold.  Instead of a threat from hurricane force winds and flooding and mudslides, the 1.3 million residents of tent camps face a cholera epidemic.

Ansel Herz of Inter Press News reports that heath workers are scrambling to bar cholera from the crowded camps in and around Port-au-Prince.  As of yesterday, at least 160 people have died in the central Artibonite region, according to Zanmi Lasante, the Haitian arm of Partners in Health.

Cholera, a waterborne bacterium, stands to devastate the camps by contaminating the drinking supply.  The Haitian government says that the bacterium can incubate in the human body for days and rapidly cause death by dehydration.  Spokespersons from the Pan American Health Organization said Friday that laboratory tests had confirmed the outbreak.

Acting like generals responding to an invasion by hostile forces, authorities have sped medical personnel to St. Marc, about 70 kilometers north of Port-au-Prince, where a single hospital is overwhelmed with cholera patients.  Villagers from remote areas are sprawled on the floors, intravenous lines in their arms.  In the meantime, patients queue up outside the gates.

In a blog post by Partners in Health Chief Medical Officer Joia Mukherjee called cholera “a disease of poverty” (80 percent of Haitians live in poverty).  She asserted that loans from the Inter-American Development Bank meant for the development of a public water supply in the affected region were blocked on political grounds during the tenure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The background section of the the PIH website, relates how the “dire” public health situation in recent years was worsened by a U.S.-backed embargo against the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and then by the coup that drove him from office.  Further, “dismal health outcomes are especially pronounced in Haiti’s rural interior, where deforestation, erosion, and lack of infrastructure have crippled the agricultural economy.”  The region supports only 10 percent of the population, but they are the poorest people in the nation, a condition that makes them a perfect target for cholera.

The disease is transmitted by drinking water contaminated by the feces of infected persons.  Only ten percent of those drinking such contaminated water come down with the disease.

Back in the capital of Port-au-Prince, Herz reports that it is not clear that prevention measures have been implemented.  Mark Snyder, a development worker with International Action Ties, has not seen “any general information distributed on the streets or in the camps at this time.”  Snyder pointed out that the U.N. peacekeepers patrol the streets to provide security, not to supply information.

So, while smaller storms have harassed the camp residents, the feared hurricane season is taking second place to the specter of a cholera epidemic.

What can you do to help?  Organize an event to show solidarity with the Haitian people.  Donate to Partners in Health, http://www.pih.org/ or Konpay, http://www.konpay.org/, a Haitian organization that “builds networks and collaborations so that technology and expertise can be shared and used to strengthen Haitian solutions to social, environmental and economic problems.”

Ezra Klein is just fine with the term illegal immigrant. He’s not partial to just calling someone an “illegal.” Here’s part of his logic:

it’s not as if the word games fool anyone. The people who need to be convinced of comprehensive immigration reform — which must include a path to legal status for illegal immigrants — are angry about illegal immigration. Trying to paper over that won’t help, and might actually hurt.

But it’s not about convincing opponents of immigration reform. It has to do with how we talk about human beings who happen to be caught in a broader tension between global capital flows and claims to national sovereignty. To refer to a group of people as “illegal” in any kind of discussion is to assert their illegitimacy in the public dialogue. This is why when we have conversations on this issue, few people in the media think to talk with/get the perspectives of those who are “illegal” themselves.

If Klein wants to keep using the term “illegal immigrant,” let’s just go ahead and call anyone who violates the law “illegal ______.” Anyone with a speeding ticket is an “illegal driver.” After all, let’s not avoid the issue using PC language. Parking ticket? No…”illegal parker”! We don’t do it because we see those who commit those infractions as full human beings who made a mistake.

I often ask my class whether undocumented immigration is more like a misdemeanor or a capital crime? If it is a capital crime, then maybe the term applies. Sure, call someone a “murderer” or a “rapist” as their defining characteristic. I’d argue that maybe that person has ceded their expectation that society will view them as a multidimensional, human being. But what have undocumented immigrants done to be placed in that category?

Here’s more what I have to say about it. FYI, not sure why my image is so huge on that site! It’s a little scary 🙂

Maclom Gladwell searches for an activist Facebook in his recent New Yorker piece. Guess what? He doesn’t find it. Gladwell isnot the first person to make the observation that Facebook and other social networking platforms are of limited effectiveness in promoting activism. Evegny Morozov makes the important observation that the ease with which Facebook users can express support for a cause and feel they have taken action on that cause inhibits, rather than promotes, social activism.

I think these social critics are setting up a digital straw man. Facebook, for instance, serves other important political purposes that might not have direct, identifiable effect upon social policy. In my own recent work on Facebook political groups, I find that many of them are created with no specific activist purpose. Often, these groups seem simply to be a site to “park” political views in a place with access to thousands of sympathetic eyeballs. I argue that many individuals use Facebook to perform political identity in a venue that allows them to try on different political selves in a nomynous (not anonymous) venue. This means that individuals are performing a “public” political identity. For many of them this might be the only place they feel comfortable expressing this voice. Those who aren’t good communicators, disabled, low income or otherwise inhibited from participating in political activism can use Facebook as a semi-autonomous space to proclaim their political self.

Rather than see it as the savior of global politics, we should see Facebook as one more site where individuals can development their political voice. It’s often not a voice that we necessarily want developed. There is a great deal of nativist, racist, sexist and homophobic voice development on-line. But as a space, Facebook and other SNS sites allow the development of humanist/transformational voices. It is not an activist training ground, but rather a “third space” for cultivating political identity.

For us, the trick should be transforming these performative identity spaces into deliberative, cross cutting spaces. This requires theorizing digital citizenship to include cross-cutting dialogue as an essential component. In a paper I presented at the Western Political Science Association annual conference last year, I made the case that we should be training young people in a digital citizenship that includes stressing the importance of what Susan Bickford called “the politics of attention” or including the voiceless as be part of public conversations. Listening to the other through what Diana Mutz calls cross-cutting dialogue is critical in helping individuals developed textured, vetted and more nuanced voices in public dialogue.

To his credit, Malcolm Gladwell has opened a critical space of discussion in the media and blogosphere in his latest New Yorker article, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.”.

I won’t detail all his arguments leading to the conclusion that, compared to the merits of face to face communication, activism on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter is very poor activism indeed. There are already many terrific critiques of the article, such as Ken Kambara’s.

I would simply add to this discussion that in constructing his views, Gladwell has forgotten about the findings of his first book, The Tipping Point, which taught us much about the nature of viral epidemics and influence in society. In a section of the book, for instance, Gladwell demonstrates how one type of person critical to such epidemics, “Connectors,” have an amazing ability to make social connections and act as a source of social power/glue by having so many mere acquaintances and “weak ties” in their networks. Before even questioning Gladwell’s notion of weak ties (I again refer you to Kambara, who discusses “multiplex” ties, etc.), surely social media have at least a) amplified the ability of Connectors to continue doing what they do best, and b) created forums for these kinds of Tipping Point ties–the likes of which the world has never seen before. There’s lots of other relevant points from Gladwell’s book, like his discussions of academic diffusion models, which could have been applied and updated to the context of social media.

All in all, though it’s only been nine years, we shouldn’t forget “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.”