3-D Blogger

September 15 Elections: Vote for Yassky as Comptroller

David Yassky is running for NYC Comptroller.

September 15 will be election, and if you are like me, you're getting mighty sick not only of all the robo-calls, but the mounds of junk mail.

I think nowadays, like a lot of people voting, I pay more attention to email and Facebook than junkmail which aggravates me. So I pay attention to the Freelancer's Union, which says:

"Christine Quinn has been a strong ally for independent workers, championing our Unincorporated Business Tax proposal, which was just signed into law, and she will continue to fight for us to meet the needs of freelancers."

She's in the Murray Hill area.

In our area, a candidate who also supported reducing the harsh impact of the Unincorporated Business Tax on freelancers and home workers was David Yassky.

Says the Freelancers' Union:

"We’ve endorsed David Yassky for Comptroller for all that he has done—like tax reform—and all that he will do, like creating unemployment protection for freelancers."

The flyers are geting bigger and more colorful and glossy and more frantic about the "hate" in "negative campaigns" of the other guy (itself a kind of hate) -- and the cost in designing and producing and mailing it would likely be enough to put some people without health insurance like me on at least some minimal plan...

But it rains, and pours, and it is hard to pick your way through it. I did save the magazine printed on newsprint that seemed to describe all the positions, but to be honest, like other people in the neighborhood, I'm going to be looking for the candidates who actually get up and out on the street to shake hands with people and hear their concerns about issues like health and housing, people like Brian Kavanagh who has always walked around the ward here the old-fashioned way unlike the ward-mailers who never seem to set foot up here.

I will be struggling to make sense of them all -- but I have a request for next time. Could you guys and gals quit it with the endorsements from the big guys? I don't care if Mayor Koch endorses you or if you are Cy Vance's son. I'd like to know what YOU stand for. Your endorsements might give you some luster, but they aren't helpful in really pulling the lever, to be honest.

The Moral-Equivalence Squad at the Russian-American Summit

This sort of article, even by Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe -- which knows better -- was bound to appear during the Russian-American summit with the first black American president visiting the Kremlin. Just as the politically-incorrect Charles Wrangel quipped that Obama should stay out of visiting some New York City neighbourhoods, where even black policemen are mistaken for criminals and shot to death by their fellow policemen -- Obama should stay out of a lot of Moscow neighbourhoods where even just plain white Americans can face rampant hatred.

Criticism of American racism was a long-time staple of Soviet propaganda, and the existence of both slavery and its after-effects in racist policies were often duplicitously used by the Soviets to distract from their own crimes against humanity on their own territory.

It seems as a consequence of that very effective propaganda, especially as imbibed more uncritically by the Internet generation, liberal intelligentsia in both America and Russia today still see the American legacy of slavery and racism as "worse" than anything that ever occurred in the Soviet Union. I think this bears some nuanced context -- and a lot more history than it gets.

People who have a stake in trying to portray the U.S. as "worse" cite what in fact was highly selective propagandistic Soviet manipulation of figures like Paul Robeson as proof that the Soviets were "more tolerant". Or they cite the presence of a figure like Yelena Khanga in the Russian elite of today as proof that Russians are "more" progressive and tolerant on race.

They aren't. And the Soviet legacy is abysmal, regarding the minorities and non-Russian ethnic groups on Soviet territory as well as those of Africa descent.

The alarming increase in racist murders in Russia indicated by the research of Sova and other human rights monitors is part of the story that lets us know that all is not well with the issue of race in Russia today.

But it's also worth looking at the two countries over a longer period of time.

My Encounter With Frank Zappa

 

Weasels Ripped My Flesh cover by Neon Park. 1970.

It was a curious encounter indeed -- and a memorable one, and was strange and directly appealing, the way everything about Frank Zappa had been strange and directly appealing from the beginning.

I first saw Frank Zappa's odd albums in the record store when I was 13 and 14, in the old days, when they sold big 33 1/3 RPM vinyl records in stores, in big cardboard jackets with album art. Weasels Ripped My Flesh was one album with a creepy parody of a 1950s sort of commercial on the cover. There were albums Zappa produced as well like Capt. Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and Wild Man Fischer.

Somehow, I recall an album, or perhaps it was even the B side of a 45, in which it seemed to me Frank Zappa was singing (but it was more likely Wild Man Fischer, characterized as insane, even violently so at times) a very odd song, "Miss Jennifer Jones is lying dead on the porch doo doo doo doooh." The song was so arresting because its content was so unlike the sugary bubblegum stuff we usually heard on the radio (at least until I started listening to Spark Hicks' WCMF.fm), and unlike a lot of rhyming romantic 1960s Mo-town stuff, and was more like an opera, telling a story, albeit a very grotesque one of a bizarre murderous rampage. I didn't understand any of this -- the weasels, the dead Miss Jones -- but I felt it was some kind of fascinating parody that was saying something more deep and mysterious about our age than was usually being said.

Zappa had a strange fascination for us. There was the name of the band which seemed so clever -- "Mothers of Invention" (necessity being the mother of that). Then there were all the strange songs that were stories, not just banal lyrics. It's hard to explain now why the weirdness of those songs and the album art and the deconstruction of the 1950s and parody of the 1960s seems to penetrating -- yet it did. I never saw Zappa in any concert, I don't think the Mothers ever came touring close enough to where we lived, but I was interested to follow his career, read about him in Rolling Stone, and see that he even inspired the Czech dissident band Plastic People of the Universe -- in Eastern Europe, where perhaps the edginess of weird deconstructions were more keenly in demand, Zappa was very popular, maybe even more than at home in the U.S. In time, Zappa also came to fight the good fight against censorship of rock music which took the form of a battle over ratings of music (something I'm not sure I oppose, but given the context, it was good Zappa took on the fight).

Back in February 1990, Vaclav Havel, who had just been elected president by a now-free Czechoslovakia, came to the United States for a kind of victory tour, stopping to see the people who had supported him when he was a political prisoner. I worked for several organizations that had campaigned for him and for the rock musicians and we were all invited to a gala event at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York, followed by a fancy reception. The event was very crowded, and I found myself standing next to one of the former political prisoners I knew from various travels who had now been made minister of something -- there was a lot of this free and exciting feeling in the early days of the Havel administration when everyone thought this playwright-turned-dissident-turned-politician was going to represent some kind of new form of governance. Remember, this was even before the Soviet coup defeat in 1991, and of course long before 9/11, it was a day when the wind was really in the sails of citizens' movements especially in Eastern Europe.

My 9/11

9/11 for me has always been a living embodiment of W.H. Auden's Musee de Beaux Arts -- my daughter marvelled at the way in which people kept walking their dogs and even getting a suntan along the banks of the East River even while the horror downtown was unfolding.

I found this year on the 7th anniversary that I simply didn't want to remember or memorialize at all. I will wait until another year to pull out envelopes of items related to 9/11 or watch TV. I didn't go to the memorial service at our church as I have done other years or go to the memorial garden made from cement and metal from the site in memory of our parishioners who died there as well as Fr. Mykal. I listened to my son recount his memories of that day, but the conversation was brief. At the time, he concluded, at the age of 9, "God is a terrorist." He's remained with that conclusion, which I think is intellectually and emotionally sound, given the circumstances, which is that God enabled terrorists to kill innocent people. I don't think God is a terrorist, I merely think He has given man free will, and these are the results. My son, who exercises a great deal of free will that then leads to his free will being removed for periods of time when he is grounded, hasn't grasped yet the larger context of free will -- but then, he's young.

So I wasn't even going to blog, and it was only Zha Ewry's pious musings that impelled in me that notion of civic duty that makes me write again, and again, and write too long, and write in a way that is not accessible to many people, but that's ok, write I must.

At the time, a week or so after that attacks, there was suddenly an alarm at the Empire State Building where I had just been for a meeting and where a colleague was still up on a higher floor -- there was concern that it was going to be "next". It was a bomb scare, and false alarm, but like a lot of the false alarms in those first days of copycatting, you couldn't be sure. I had already taken a hike down lots of stairways in that building because of a false alarm, and while it was reasonable to consider it was another one, I sent an email to the friend in case they were glued to the screen and not paying attention but the phone wasn't answering.

We went to my son's window and stared out at the Empire State Building, which could still be seen in those days before construction blocked it, and began the mental trajectory that all New Yorker's seem to instinctively know these days especially due to constant crane accidents -- if that building falls, will it fall on *me*? Am I in its pathway?

"Are they going to attack our house?" my daughter asked, worried. "No," I said. "They only attack symbols. They crashed into the World Trade Center because it's a symbol."

"But am *I* a symbol?" my little seven-year-old daughter asked, without hesitation.

Chilling, that a child would have to ask that question at such a tender age, not even quite understanding what "symbols" are -- taking it literally as "the thing you become because people make you one." We're not special -- all kinds of people have to live under armed conflict all over the world, but it hasn't been the norm in the U.S.

And I while I tried to reassure my daughter at the time, I would have to conclude philosophically that yes, a little white American girl is a symbol. Just like a little Jewish girl in Israel is a symbol. And, some leftwingers will hasten to add, a little Palestinian girl is a symbol.

And here's where I say, "No." The little Palestinian girl is *not* a symbol, dehumanized, for Israel as a state, or Israeli armed forces or movements (if they existed) to attack *deliberately* as it is for Palestinians, both the armed movements and the mobilized civilizans. Israel is not a state funding suicide bombers as other states are; it is not sanctioning and excusing the deliberate attack on civilians; its citizens don't dance in the streets at another's misfortune, as Palestinians did after 9/11. If Israel has in fact been responsible for the deaths of innocents it is due to accident, disproportionate use of force, even larger policies like the settlements which one might conclude are responsible, but it is not the same kind of raw, murderous, deliberate hateful logic of symbolism that a suicide bomber engages in. There aren't any Israeli suicide bombers. If throughout history you can dredge up examples of a Jewish terrorist here or there, everyone has to concede that they are not the norm, and dwarfed by the numbers of Palestinians. There isn't a moral equivalence to the two sides when you look at the use of symbols. It's one-sided. And that's why the morality you develop around this can't be falsely "bilateral".

And that's why, on this day, I don't fetch up moral equivalence bromides and follow faddish activities like "The Day of Interdependence" trying to whip up more blame to distribute to the U.S. and other Western nations for its bad policies (the war in Iraq) -- as Zha Ewry does here, just to cite one of many examples. And maybe it's simply because Zha, who went to the exact same area I did on that fateful day, had a very different day...

The Russian-Georgia War in Cyberspace

I've been avidly reading all the mainstream media about the war between Russia and Georgia, like many in and out of this field of Eurasian studies, and of course reading alternative sites like Open Democracy and various blogs and lists, like Johnson's list, which has tilted pro-Russian as it often does. These are all standard Internet Web 1.0 tools for understanding the situation officially, or unofficially but within a kind of framework, along with your Skype and your private email where you can hope to write friends in both countries to try to round out the picture.

But this war is different in that it has richly played out on Web 2.0 tools as well, in ways that the mainstream media hasn't even noticed. I got my first pictures from the war outside the standard AP issue by seeing in Tweetscan that someone had Twittered about navoine.ru -- a harrowing photo essay that shows the raw ugliness of war -- burnt people, in jumbles of flesh and bone... Of course, the war began in cyberspace, and Georgia's government made use of Google blogging when temporarily disabled, and the war continues there (cyberspace is the continuation of war by other means, as Lawrence Weschler once said, "war was the continuation of TV by other means" in the Balkans.  For the first time, you could hear an American General give a briefing in which he talked seriously about hacking of websites as a matter of international security, and how the U.S. became involved in hosting Georgian government sites temporarily.

I was actually surprised to log on in Second Life at the Memory Bazaar and find two posts on the bulletin board there saying RUSSIA OUT OF GEORGIA! and then of course the trolling maria30 klaar writing AND U.S. OUT TOO! I saw some discussions in Second Life, including one scheduled for 6:00 am SLT tomorrow by a European fearing to lose Internet service. I expected -- and got -- the belligerent Russian commentary which Evegency Morozov has effectively written about as the outsourcing of hate.

But nothing prepared me for this: a Facebook group I myself joined casually the other day thinking it would never have more than a few hundreds members that has grown to a whopping 16,650 people, called Stop the Russian aggression against Georgia. The group gained 3,615 More Members since I logged on yesterday, is showing 13 videos, has 67 Board Topics, and 2,276 Wall comments -- of course many pro and con. Five demonstrations are already being organized, in Washington, London, the Hague, and Tbilisi. Well, imagine all of this! Just imagine! Of course, as I've written before, we are not really 69 million of anything, and the 16,650 people, while impressive, and even if 1 percent go to demonstrations and write congressmen, often don't have any real social weight. And yet...and yet...

The Bitter Truths of ABC

Hendrik Hertzberg got it all wrong. I'll explain how it works.

Oh, sure, ABC may have been glib or even fatuous -- but this is TV, not a Mensa debate. George Stephanopoulos -- anything associated with the Clintons -- can be irritating, sure.

But let me show you how it works.

Open Source=Closed Society

Tony Curzon-Prize, who visited Second Life recently, has an editorial up today at opendemocracy.net about Zittrain's presentation. In a fitting (unwitting) coda to his piece, I can't get logged in to his site to leave a comment. My usual password doesn't work, I finally get the right user name, I urge the system to send me my password again...and it never comes, and no, duh, it's not in the spam filters, which of course I long ago learned to look into. Closed out again, from the Open Society of Open Democracy by a technical glitch (not a ban, in this case, but it could be that at other venues like Terra Nova).

Tony's pieces are always very thinky, and it's always good to find someone this thoughtful on these issues, but they're usually about one or two levels above what I'm willing to exert on a Sunday afternoon. I spent years studying Aristotle, but what's "Aristotelean" about Zittrain's comments escapes me, and it's one of those occasions when you wish the author, instead of appearing learned, would teach, so that others could learn. No matter. The point is he's willing to give a critical study of Zittrain, which is a public service.

Zittrain is ranting on in PowerPoints about all these top-down evil structures that want to control the Internet and which we must fight. However, what we really must fight is him and his technolibertarian viewpoints because ironically, the big bland corporations that he rails against, just by showing up, having a bottom line, and maintaining the rule of law, may provide more liberties for the average person than he's willing to admit. This is an awful trade-off, of course, the kind of trade-off that any cradle-to-grave socialism or corporativism will make, but the question has to be starkly asked online.

When Zittrain (or Curzon-Price) waves around the term "communitarian," I can't help thinking they've merely found a term that they think will have less baggage than communism. But communitarianism is no better, in placing the "community" (as they define it) above the individual, and talking about "social needs" and such -- as these techno-elites, again, define them.

Staying the Dyer's Hand

One day, 32 years ago, I was walking along Elmsley Place at St. Michael's College in Toronto with Prof. Marshall McLuhan. I had taken several of his classes at the Centre for Culture and Technology, one on poetry where he focused on Shakespeare's sonnets. The name of his institute was an awfully grand and tekkie-sounding thing for 1976, but...the Centre was merely a kind of weathered brick and comfy sort of  house overlooking Queens Park, not one of those high-tech buildings over on the main campus of the University of Toronto. I fell into step with McLuhan because he was on his way to Mass, too.

I was only 19 years old, and fairly clueless. No doubt I missed half or more of what was being taught to me and referenced in these classes. In fact, we used to have one professor at St. Mike's, Fr. Belyea, who used to tell us in exasperation that we were useless, and that we shouldn't have come to college, but should be working and putting *our parents* through college. They, after all, with a long life of cares and responsibilities and most importantly *experience*, would now be in a better position to appreciate and benefit from great literature and philosophy, which was utterly lost on us idiot youths!

I must have asked McLuhan something stupid -- I don't remember what it was. There was a certain apprehension, trying to understand, trying to hurry to daily Mass at 12:10 -- and yes, this figure of the counterculture, embraced by so many secularists and Whole Earthers and Extropians, this patron saint of Wired magazine, went to daily Mass. Born of Methodist parents, he had converted to Catholicism in 1937, a good year for that, after reading G.K. Chesterton, we're told by Wikipedia. I don't know. He didn't speak of it. Going to daily Mass wasn't any sign of piety or virtue in this circle. We all went, that was just how it was at the college.

Collapsing Geography

Another Sunday afternoon hoping to read Cory Ondreijka's Collapsing Geography more thoroughly, and distracted again, by the actual virtual living out of "Collapsing Geography" that you experience in Second Life, which is of course, where he got the idea in the first place, being part of the team that coded the 3-D virtual world.

In my rentals business in Second Life, my customers reflect the international nature of this virtual world, which is said to have about 40 percent U.S. now and the rest from South America, Europe, and Asia  -- but the list of countries is extraordinary (you wonder how somebody is actually logging on from Afghanistan or North Korea, or whether those are joke entries).

Cory's notion seems to me a bit of a conceit. That is, it's a kind of technolibertarian fancy, that the contiguous space supposedly interfering between real-life cultures, when removed in a virtual world and mapped in miniature and with more flexibility (teleporting, flying, IMing, groups), will simply melt away and we can all hold hands and sing "Kumbayah" or something. This is a kind of whimsy that is a sort of "geeks of the world will unite" -- because the geeks on the outer edges of their countries and cultures will find it easier to make bridges to each other and collaborate than the geeks might find even with people within their own country.

I saw this phenomenon in the international human rights movement a lot. The people who were human rights advocates, often members of minorities or classes of people who were victimized, would find it easier to contact, communicate with, and collaborate with people in other countries who matched their status of advocacy, minority, discriminated class, victim. They could talk to *each other* easier than they would with the other classes, let along ruling groups of their countries.

International peace movements (some of them built on the Comintern methods and politics, of course) would also use this hands-across-the-sea that actually amounted to a campfire with themselves. Still, it had its poignancy and attraction, and I think those holding their hands around these campfires who had found each other sometimes drew in larger circles. That's why when E.P. Thompson, who tried to lead the charge against the cold war and its military structures in the 1980s European Nuclear Disarmament campaign, resonated so deeply when he coined its slogan: "We must be faithful not to East or West, but to each other."

I think this phenomenon of hands-across-the-sea can give you a false sense of internationality that in fact might prevent dialogue not only within your own country with people in different groups but also prevent all of you in your new-found internationalism from ever gaining any significant following.

Turtles All the Way Down

I made a new group in Second Life called "Council on Virtual Relations". Working draft charter is about discussing international relations and ways in which Second Life could be useful, and also the intersection of real-life and virtual world policies. In trying to envisage a logo for the group, a turtle popped into my mind for some reason and I went Googling around to dredge up half-remembered information about turtles holding up the world and such.

It turns out there is an apocryphal story sometimes attributed to Bertrand Russell, that supposedly after he gave his lecture about "Why I am Not A Christian," and referenced the Hindu belief that the world rested on elephants, and the elephants on a tortoise, but there was nothing underneath the turtle, an Indian woman objected, and said, "But there are turtles all the way down."

I happen to think that there is something rather like "turtles all the way down" but it's also useful to stop at the world-bearing image and imagine that all of us have to behave like world-holders in various ways, and that's what holds up the world (hence the group title "World-Holders"). The turtle is also a good symbol for the concave shell symbolizing the heaven, and the squat feet on earth. And his amphibian nature, whereby he can survive on both land and water, is a reference to the transitions between virtuality and real life.