This is video circulating that might turn into a meme, but it’s not that exciting. It involves a right-wing candidate for Parliament in the UK getting into an altercation with local South Asian youths. The British National Party candidate, Bob Bailey, made a reference to the youths as “robbers” that caused them to come over. After some words, one of them spat at Bailey and a scuffle ensued. It looks like nobody was hurt and just some egos got bruised.

I’m not sure if the youths even knew who Bailey was, but his views might explain his interest in engaging them. Last June, Bailey went on the record stating his concerns about Islam, how the “British” birth rate is below the Islamic birth rate in the UK, and his looking out for the white indigenous population of Britain {go to 1:33 to see Bailey in an interview-via Iranian PRESS TV}::

Bailey lost the election and finished in 4th. place. The Conservatives won the outer east London constituency of Romford.

Song:: The Specials-‘Simmer Down’

Twitterversion:: British National Party candidate taunts S.Asian youths, gets spat on, & a scuffle ensues—a perfect YouTube moment. @Prof_K

The BBC just announced a hung Parliament, as the Conservatives with a plurality of seats are mathematically eliminated from obtaining a majority with 35 seats to declare. The last time this occurred was 1974. Let the party negotiations begin. Lib-Lab coalition likely to be negotiated and will Clegg’s Lib Dems push for parliamentary reform to do away with first-past-the-post {winner take all in a constituency}. While some say a “coalition of losers” won’t have legitimacy in the eyes of the electorate, Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman says the current Prime Minister Gordon Brown is constitutionally obligated to try to form a government.

Live coverage from BBC News is available here.

Song:: Killing Joke-‘Democracy’

Twitterversion:: BBC calls a hung Parliament, as Tories w/ an expected plurality of seats will be short of majority of 326. #ThickCulture http://url.ie/62oy @Prof_K

So the GOP’s rising star, and fellow Cuban-American, Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio now supports the Arizona immigration bill.

OK, so the modification of the Arizona immigration bill makes it less problematic.  But still, for someone whose parents (like mine) were granted “amnesty” for being on the right side of the Cold War to support this bill is a special kind of chutzpah.

As far as immigrants go, we Cubans got a pretty sweet deal:

Unlike immigrants from other countries, Cubans were granted a special status which made it easier to gain residency. Other immigrants had to prove that they were fleeing for political reasons so that they could be granted the status of a refugee. On the other hand, upon entry onto United States soil, Cubans were automatically given refugee status along with other privileges. Some of these special privileges were introduced in 1966 and included gaining permanent residency status if the Cuban immigrant had resided in the U.S. for at least one year. For Cuban immigrants that had stayed longer than the time period granted on their visitor visas, they were still granted permanent residency.

We didn’t have to “pay a fine” or “go to the back of the line.” But Rubio think that options shouldn’t be extended to mostly Mexican undocumented immigrants:

Rubio also rejected the notion of a “path to citizenship” or “amnesty,” despite “the human stories.”

“There are going to be stories of very young kids that were brought to this country at a very young age who don’t even speak Spanish that are going to be sent back to Nicaragua or some other place. And it’s gonna feel weird and I understand that,” he said, suggesting that those hardships would be a price worth paying.

I understand the politics this guy is facing.  If he ever aspires to national office in this Republican party, then he better be tough on “illegals.” 

I admit that the rule of law and the right of a sovereign people to define membership through a democratic process is important. Fine, but at the very least acknowledge the irony when you advocate closing the door behind you. Otherwise you’re being what we call in my parent’s native tongue “un mal-agradecido.”

via Ben Smith: Politico

Crossposed on rhizomicon.

The Hitler “rant” meme has been around for a few years, but recently it has been targeted on YouTube for copyright violations thanks to a new YouTube tool, Content ID. The original content is from The Downfall/Der Untergang {2004}, a German language film about the last days of Hitler.  The above video is an example of the meme and takes a few good jabs at the recent spate of copyright takedowns. Knowyourmeme has posted a video on how to resist these copyright “trollings”.

Exceptions to copyright infringement often hinge upon arguments to allow critique and creativity. While a Hitler parody may not be “high art” and many would scoff at its creativity, where should the lines be drawn? Old media rules of intellectual property are all about the property and gaining revenue streams from property right. Like it or not, those days are over and deep pockets for lawyers notwithstanding, taking that approach is in the long run futile. The music industry is slowly learning that the music is the loss leader. The real money is in touring, merch., licensing, and capitalizing on the relationship with the fanbase. Filesharing can feed the new model by providing an avenue to cut through the clutter.

So, how to deal with all of this “new” media stuff {which isn’t all that new nowadays} and social media when you’re trying to make a buck. Well, I’ve actually seen The Downfall. It’s pretty good, but not for everyone. If I were Constantin Film or advising them this is what I would tell them to do::

1. Get the film on a site like The Auteurs, which allows Internet pay-per-view
2. Use the parody videos to market the film on Internet PPV & DVD and capitalize on the ongoing buzz
3. Use inline ads on YouTube to get users to view/purchase

Everybody wins. Creative mashups live on. Low-cost marketing can drive additional revenues, albeit in dribs and drabs, but why leave those dollars on the table? What kind of capitalists are you?

While some in entertainment might balk at the idea of work being repurposed and parodies may do violence to the “brand”, don’t we live in an era of the death of the author.

Song:: Beastie Boys-‘Cookie Puss’

Twitterversion:: “Hitler rant” meme takedowns in force, but why not leverage the buzz, remarket, & allow creative expression?#ThickCulture @Prof_K

In the US, antitrust law and the Sherman Antitrust Act are focused on fostering competition and the competitive landscape, not protecting competitors. A monopolist is one seller and many buyers and their profit comes from a lack of competition and a manipulation of supply. Regulating monopolies and enforcing antitrust often {ideally} considers the “welfare” of the consumer, particularly in terms of pricing. Generally speaking, antitrust cases involve the following, often within the context of fairness::

• Market definition, in order to determine if a firm has market power
• Market power, i.e., the ability of a firm to charge a very high price, relative to {marginal} cost
• Barriers-to-entry, i.e., the ability of an incumbent firm to limit competition or secure resources or advantages that others cannot

The problem here is the narrow definition of what Apple does. The focus here is on the single market of the hardware, i.e., handsets. In reality, Apple not only sells handsets, but has created a platform that incorporates both hardware and software {apps}, which are interrelated. The more apps, the more attractive the platform. The more attractive the platform, the more incentive there is to develop apps.

In order to address the analysis of platforms in antitrust, multi-sided markets, which are characteristic of platforms with more than one distinct set of clients/consumers, offers useful insights. Apple’s set of interrelated multi-sided markets are::

1. iPhone hardware {smartphone}/iPad hardware {tablet} sold to consumers
2. Apps and digital content sold to consumers on the web/mobile web
3. Platform for smartphone/tablet apps for developers

In terms of hardware, Apple is profiting from its relationship with AT&T, which is subsidizing the price of the iPhone. Teardowns of the iPad show that margins are relatively slim, but the strategy is to increase the number of users to attract developers. In terms of software, Apple controls the app game.

How I see it is that by forcing Flash off of the iPhone platform, it’s giving developers fewer degrees of freedom for technologies that use Flash. Rather than develop one build for an app that uses Flash middleware, developers will have to create several builds using HTML5. Given the dominance of Apple’s App Store, there are strong incentives to develop for that platform crowding out resources to develop for others, such as Android. Apple’s justification is that it needs to preserve the quality of the user experience, but will that be good enough for the DOJ or the FTC under the Obama administration? Technology is full of uncertainty and fortunes can change overnight. Scrutiny of Apple should consider multi-sided markets and address the health of the competitive environment.

Song:: Feist-‘We Can Work It Out’

Twitterversion:: Development of an #Apple  antitrust analysis framework. How competitive is ecosystem on iPhone platform #ThickCulture http://url.ie/621a @Prof_K

I’ve been following the 2010 UK election which is tomorrow. I saw this John Ross article on the long-term Conservative decline in the UK. The Tories are likely to have the most seats after tomorrow, have a shot at getting a majority of the seats, and the bookies are expecting a Conservative victory. Nevertheless, even if the Conservatives get the expected 35-40% of the national vote, the overall trend is downwards. The Thatcher-Major era in the 80s and 90s saw Conservative support only in the low 40s. Ross notes that the recent rise of Labour since 1997 has a lot to do with the Tories being unpopular.

Also of interest is the rise of the Liberals/Liberal Democrats::

Just like the current situation in Canada, the electorate is fragmented and the major parties are having a hard time gaining support.

Twitterversion:: Graphs by John Ross show decline trend in UK Tory support since 1930. Labour seesaws & Liberals trend up. @Prof_K

Song:: The {English} Beat-‘Stand Down Margaret’ – Reference to Margaret Thatcher, Tory UK PM, 1979-1990

Here’s something you don’t see everyday: The Vice-President of General Motors, Bob Lutz, calling higher gas prices in the U.S. in the long term. In most developed nations, there are substantially higher gas prices than in the U.S in order to pay for the long term costs of gas usage (such as environmental clean-up). On the other hand, Americans have long enjoyed bargain basement gas prices — and probably for a good reason. As Lutz tells us, “The whole U.S. system is based on the premise of cheap gasoline.” What he means is that unlike Europe where trains are readily available and affordable, the automobile is the central means of transportation in America. Whereas the Dutch have a long term love affair with the bicycle, Americans swoon over the latest car.

But it wasn’t always that way. In a deeply disquieting chapter from Joe Feagin and Robert Parker’s Building American Cities: The Urban Real Estate Game, they describe the ways in which the “auto-oil-rubber industrial complex” worked tirelessly to disrupt the extensive systems of electrically-operated mass transit developed in most American cities between the 1880s and 1940s. In just one example, Feagin and Parker tell the story of how Los Angeles went from having more than a thousand miles of trolley car track and 2,800 scheduled runs a day in the early 1920s to having a system based on diesel buses in the 1940s due to systematic efforts by General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil. GM was ultimately convicted in federal court of conspiring to convert trolley systems to diesel buses — the sales of which GM had a monopoly on.

And now, here’s the VP of the very same company, saying that we need to raise gas prices. Lutz believes that it will be affordable once we have a full range of fuel efficient hybrid cars. But maybe we should all be even more excited about the coming of high speed rail.

Above are the predictions for next week’s UK parliamentary election by fivethirtyeight.com, in collaboration with The Guardian. The Guardian doesn’t expect a radical shift from these numbers and the big question is whether the Conservatives will get a majority of seats.

The methodology behind the predictions is being challenged by psephologists adhering to the uniform swing hypothesis, in what Nate Silver calls a nerdfight. The uniform swing hypothesis states that if a party finishes x points behind their standing in the previous election, their share of the vote will decline by x points in each constituency.

“The uniform swing has its proponents, and it has the virtue of being fairly easy to calculate. But, most recent elections in the United Kingdom have not been all that dramatic, with fairly minor shifts in the vote between Labour and Conservatives. The last time that there was something resembling a ‘wave’ election — in 1997 when Labour, under Tony Blair, leaped forward from 34 percent of the vote to 43 — the uniform swing would have underestimated their gains by about 25 seats, and underestimated Conservatives’ losses by 40. And that election did not feature — as this one does — a third party like the Liberal Democrats who were polling right in line with, and often ahead of, the other two.” [*]

Nate does a good job of responding to a critique of his methodology and explaining how uniform swing is still a hypothesis. I like the granularity of the fivethirtyeight.com methodology and agree with Silver’s assertion that not all constituencies will respond uniformly to the political zeitgeist. I’ve explored second choices and the use of social network analysis in order to get a better sense of where the political zeitgeist is and I’m wondering how this could add more fine-tuning to prediction models.

Song:: Billy Bragg-‘Waiting for a Great Leap Forward’

Twitterversion:: New fivethirtyeight / Guardian election seat predictions for UK elections & “nerdfight” over uniform swing. @Prof_K

Notes from north of 49ºN

A shorter, more applied version of this appears on rhizomicon.

The above Wind Mobile commercial is for a Canadian cellphone carrier, competing with the big three, Bell, Rogers, and Telus. The humour is derived from characterizing the major wireless carriers as entities that turn a nominal charge into a much larger one with extra fees and charges. Another facet is the use of a South Asian hot dog vendor to make the point, using an accent and cultural stereotypes familiar in North America. The South Asian-Canadian population was 4% of the population in 2006, categorized as visible minorities., i.e., visibly not one of the majority race in a population.

Is this Wind commercial offensive?

This reminds me of a 2007 Guardian UK piece by Manish Vij criticizing the use of The Simpson’s character of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon by 7-11 as part of a tie-in promotion.

“Apu is quite a unique character on The Simpsons. Unlike the show’s parodies of policemen and Irish-Americans, he’s the only character to mock a small American minority relatively unknown in the mainstream, and he’s by far the most visible immigrant. For desis (South Asians) growing up in America, just one eighth as concentrated and visible as in the UK, Apu shadowed us at every turn. Until the rise of American Idol chanteur Sanjaya Malakar, Apu was the most widely-known Indian after Mahatma Gandhi. And he has that fake Peter Sellers simulacrum of an Indian accent: Apu’s voice Hank Azaria, a Greek-American, is a brown man doing a white man doing a brown man.

To be sure, Apu has many redeeming qualities: a loving wife, passive-aggressive cunning, and a Ph.D. Culture-vulture Simpsons fans have felled entire forests in arguing that he’s a parody of a stereotype, rather than the stereotype itself. But the plain fact is that most viewers are laughing at Apu, not with him. They’re enjoying the simple pleasures of a funny, singsong brown man with a slippery grasp of English.”

Manish states that not all South Asians were against the promotion, but quotes a post on an online 7-11 franchise forum::

“This is an absolute embarrassment for our company… The vast majority of franchisees are immigrants… [A]ccepting our portrayal of Apu is nothing less [than] accepting the images portrayed years ago in the US of black people with very black faces, big lips and white teeth… [T]hat image is considered racist, so does Apu [seem] to me… I cannot imagine any store willing to rebrand to Kwik-E-Mart even for a day… I am not proud to be part of this promotion.”

Some commenters on the Guardian’s site and elsewhere this was discussed were quick to say the reaction is overly-PC and that The Simpsons have poked fun of the Scots with Groundskeeper Willie.

It’s easy to get into pissing matches about who one can and cannot make fun of in a post-racial world, isn’t the real issue about cultural power, privilege, and dominant and dominated positions? Does the rise of black cultural power in the US explain why outrageous stereotypes and iconography are now taboo? While some may eyeroll at complaints by groups that point out racism as overly-PC, isn’t protesting/complaining one means of how cultural power is obtained/negotiated?

The problem is that the stereotypes often serve to reinforce unflattering or negative attitudes towards a stigmatized outgroup. So, in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle {2004}, despite Kumar being an upper-middle class medical school candidate who speaks perfect English without an accent, local thugs use cultural power to harass him with the taunt,”thank you, come again.” Later in the film, Kumar used the taunt ironically right back at his harassers::

The lines of cultural power and privilege can get blurry. Media and advertising infuse meaning and shape attitudes, but what’s a marketer/advertiser to do? The use of stereotypes is meant to increase the efficacy of the communication, i.e., ideally the content resonates more with the audience. On the other hand, should marketers and advertisers steer clear of using stereotypes in a non-ironic way, in order to protect the brand from being labelled as insensitive? Some might say that those who take offense need to “get over it,” but before someone goes on the record as saying that, perhaps they should ask themselves how much cultural power they have.

Twitterversion:: Wind Mobile hotdog cart ad in Canada uses stereotypes to make a humourous pt. Is it offensive or benign? #ThickCulture @Prof_K

Song:: M.I.A. -‘World Town’

I found this YouTube video from the UK to be interesting, as it shows a young person trying to sort out politics and questioning democracy in light of the media and capitalism. The video description by Annika sets up the current situation in the UK {from 2 January 2010}::

“Only 76% of Brits bother to vote. Even worse, only 54% of Americans vote.

The present Parliament which first met on 11 May 2005 is scheduled to expire at midnight on 10 May 2010. The next United Kingdom general election is due to take place on or before Thursday 3 June 2010. The governing Labour Party will be looking to secure a fourth consecutive term in office and to restore support lost since 1997. The Conservative Party will seek to regain its dominant position in politics after losses in the 1990s, and to replace Labour as the governing party. The Liberal Democrats hope to make gains from both sides; although they too would ideally wish to form a government, their more realistic ambition is to hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.”

The distrust of the institutions of political parties is an issue in the US, Canada, and the UK, which causes Annika to discount the rhetoric, as well as the spin by the institution of the media. My concerns are that the political institutions and infotainment are turning people off of politics.

While the use of social media, such as YouTube and what Annika is doing, can decentralize information dissemination and foster dialog, does the attention economy bring us right back to large numbers of people going to “destination websites” and what does this do to the signal-to-noise ratio? Also, how can social media be used to foster civil discourse and the exchange of ideas, as opposed to shouting at each other?

While some may think Annika’s thoughts about democracy to be rather cynical, I think it’s a good point of departure for politicians to address the issue of why democracy does matter despite the influence of media and capitalism that can serve to make citizens feel as though it doesn’t. Particularly in the midst of the Big Recession, where government is the bearer of bad news regardless of ideological leaning.

Twitterversion:: Politics & distrust of political parties and media’s influence. Can democracy be made salient? Can true dialog be fostered by social media? #ThickCulture @Prof_K
Song:: Sparklehorse-‘Getting It Wrong’