Listen. I've seen Law & Order SVU so I know what I'm talking about.

The Village Voice, which I've never been crazy about because I'm boring, is up in arms over an anti-child prostitution campaign by Demi Moore & Ashton Kutcher that cites what they've uncovered to be unsubstantiated data. They're campaign says that 100,000 to 300,000 children are being forced to work as prostitutes or in some other sex-related capacity, the Village Voice has found that this oft-quoted statistic is from a study that was identifying the amount of children at risk.

They offer up as an alternative the averaged 827 arrests per year. While I'm all for correct information and the compilation of as much data as possible and a perfectly informed public and legislature, and while I have no love for either Demi Moore or Ashton Kutcher (actually, the most interesting part of the article is about the PR/charity firm that helps celebrities put together these public causes, confirming once again that even the "best" intentions are always commercial enterprises), the writers of the article so clearly have an axe to grind that it's hard to take them seriously. And it's not even an axe against underage prostitution. They clearly just don't like Ashton Kutcher. It's not even-handed or even well-informed, and certainly not convincing. It's a rant against a few groups of people (celebrities, conservatives, anti-prostitution politicians, anyone who doesn't like the Village Voice). Even if it does offer up new information, it is only going halfway. You cannot offer up arrest records as an alternative data source for something that is illegal and underground. Even their graphic is clumsily worded, saying "Advocates Insist 100,000 to 300,000 American Juvenile Prostitutes Annually" (do what, annually? I assume "exist"; the benefit of not specifying is because those advocates use the statistic in several different ways)-- there is a word missing there, especially if you're making the comparison, as they are, directly underneath, to "Actual Underage Arrests Yearly: 827 Across America." It is wishful thinking on the journalists' (...) part that the actual number of children in this situation is matched by the arrests each year, and a strangely optimistic assessment of the efficacy of the police in quashing this problem. I welcome a broad-minded look into the numbers, but this article is not it. It's like if I came up to you and told you that I've looked at the arrest data and that's how I know not only how many people smoke weed, but also that only blacks and Hispanics smoke. With a straight face.

How to figure out Obama

Cornel West is up in arms because Obama is afraid of "free black men." West's colleague at Princeton, Melissa Harris-Perry, says that West's critique of the President stems from personal matters, including unanswered phone calls, rather than true political analysis.

While I don't know what the nature of the relationship is between West & Obama (he's the president of the free world, he's a busy guy), I don't think you need limit the personal nature of his verbal attack to simple interpersonal relationship issues. West "called the black president out for what he sees as his complicity with the agenda of white, moneyed elites. He called Obama a "black mascot" for Wall Street, and at one point accused him of not acting like a "free black man." West is taking it personally that Obama does not act like West believes a "black man" should behave.

In an Op-ed for the LA Times, conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg expresses a view I have long held (see, the political divide can be breached.) Obama is a politician. It is bound to happen. He is not betraying any one race or ethnicity with his behavior. He is, like all politicians, betraying, to some degree or to the nth degree, all his constituents. As Erin Audrey Kaplan points out, "the president owes blacks as much as he owes Jews or any other constituency that voted for him in significant numbers." Indeed, as the President, he owes it to everyone living in America (legally or otherwise.)

This is a nice spread of responsibility that I like to see. Citing racism as the motivating factor for opposing Obama's agenda is simplistic and basically not true. Wanting to hold Obama responsible for his campaign promises, which I've never felt were realistic, is not a product of my hatred of this so-called black president or of blacks or African-Americans, or Kenyans, for that matter (har har.) Understanding that Obama, before his being a black man or a white man or a biracial man or a man, is necessarily a politician makes his actions understandable, if not always laudable.

It's easy to pretend only whites can be racist, and it's easy to pretend the South is full of bedsheet wearing white guys. (Of all the places where I've spent time in these US of A, the North has been the most racist and racially uncomfortable place I've experienced. Not the South.) The problem with all this pretending is that it means the political dialogue is firmly oriented around ad hominem attacks, polarizing figure, and ridiculous rhetoric from both sides (see Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Maddow.) And the problem with this is that people forget how to debate and forget that issues are complicated and hydra-headed.

This simplified political atmosphere is why West can basically imply that Obama isn't black enough-- in a very particular understanding of being black, as defined by Cornel West. If my experience as a biracial individual is a common one, if you're pink and purple, the purples will always call you pink and the pinks will think of you as purple. I don't know why Obama is an exception to this suddenly in the dialogue. I was very disappointed when Obama chose to fill out the census as a black man, especially considering his background. Science tends to recognize nature and nurture as vital to development, and it's too bad claiming traditional labels can't take that in. It is, in general, a failure of understanding the particularities of racial makeup and socialization in America that has resulted in Obama's being considered a black president. He had the opportunity to show that that "certain rootlessness", in the words of Cornel West, can benefit a multiracial individual who, owning this rootlessness as the qualifying feature of multiracialism, can move past skin-associated expectations and start getting work done. This has happened with whites, where it is somewhat unimpressive when somebody is half-Irish, half-French, despite the fact that the Irish were considered ethnic minorities, hired to do work that was considered too dangerous to waste costly slaves on. (And it was hardly a Southern phenomenon. Italian and eastern European immigrants, in addition to the Irish, met the same resistance in Northern cities.)

West is threatened by the idea that something could challenge his racial false-binary (something that for him is very black and white HAHA but for real), and so for him, it is personal: he says that when an independent white man and an independent black man meet, "they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them." I hope he recognizes that both men must be mature, and that both men must be mature to understand that multiracialism is a new can of worms that should not be shoehorned into one or the other. West seems threatened by the introduction of a new way of thinking, where quadroons are not just black people. They are people who had a significantly different personal experience from a full-black (or white) person, and it is ignorant and sadly dismissive to think otherwise. (West mentions the challenge of one's culture being in opposition to one's skintone, but it is still without a real understanding of the possibility that a biracial person might want to claim that as their American experience. Unfortunately, Obama chose to reject this idea, too, with the census.)

What is most unfortunate is that West links the sadly natural tendency of any president, Republican or Democrat, to answer to the moneyed elites to Obama's inability to fulfill his destiny as the black man in office. Kaplan wonders if "Obama will turn out to be yet another disappointing black politician, one who readily articulates the needs of those at the bottom but doesn't ultimately address them." This is problem every politician needs to fix, and the sooner we stop thinking about it in racialized terms-- especially in nation where the poor white has become an "ethnic" group-- the sooner we can get shit started. But I'm pretty sure that won't happen.

People want to say we live in a post-racial world now, which is a truly ridiculous term. On the other hand, we will never live in a practically color-blind world if a biracial man is not recognized as such because those around him are too quick to claim him as their own (or as in opposition to them) in order to make political action "easier" and the country's political dialogue more sensational.

from an Interview with Mary Gaitskill

When did you realize you wanted to write a novel that engaged in some way with Rand’s philosophy, and how did your conception of Two Girls, Fat and Thin change over time? Did you see it from the start as a satire? [The Nervous Breakdown]

I've heard it said about satire, that for it to work, the satirist has to have some sort of secret love or empathy for the thing she's satirizing. That's probably true, but I didn't start out thinking in terms of satire. I felt it poignant and weirdly moving that people wanted to base their lives on the deeds and opinions of fictional characters. Especially since these characters were created by someone so sternly and humorlessly purporting to represent objective reality and rationality; I can think of few things less rational or realistic than trying to imitate made-up people. [1] Yet I didn't have the impulse to just mock it because it came out of an idealistic impulse plus need. Also what these people were doing seemed just a more extreme version of something a lot of people, maybe everybody, does: cobbling together a sense of self or purpose through a combination of ideal and fantasy that gets superimposed over actual experience, and which can seem real, or at least non-nutty if enough people are buying into it. And shared fantasies, like the kind pop culture or fashion create naturally, do have elements of reality that get bigger the more people are acting like its real. That is part of the irony of Rand's appeal; supposedly she was a pure individualist, and the kind of phenomenon I just described is by nature collective. [2]
__________
[1] I envision this applying to anyone imitating anything as received through media-- behavior on reality shows or fashion as delivered through the internet or crimes reported by the news is filtered and tidied up and sensationalized, and has already lost its ability to claim a state of pre-made-up. All of those people on a screen or page are "made-up people."
[2] I like this-- it could apply to any movement that expresses itself as apart from "a crowd" but that relies on representative figureheads and visible proponents.

** emph. + notes from b.

Use Facebook for your Mental Health

As reported by the LA Times Tech blog, "Pew report: Facebook users have a higher degree of social well-being." I used to only log onto Facebook if I got an alert that I'd received some sort of message or wall post-- obviously this meant that I wasn't highly engaged in general, so this logging on didn't go down all that often. Recently I've been logging on ("log on"-- visit) a few times day, but we just finished up a 5 day car trip from LA to South Bend, IN, and going back on to check Facebook was less than rewarding-- while I scrolled through a few pages of blogs I visit to see what had been going on, my Facebook newsfeed wasn't something I bothered to expand the page on-- ok, I see you went to the same party those 20 year olds are going to, and somebody watered your corn, and you posted another news story that directly aligns with your political views that I know already from your other posts, so it was business as usual.

That sounds crotchety-- I don't mind Facebook-- I think it is an interesting social networking tool, and its use during the "Arab Spring" are fascinating to read about. I don't have a problem with people who are constantly on it, as long as it doesn't affect the motherfucking health and safety of those around you. (Seriously.) But this study is interesting because it suggests there is a certain way of being "socially well," defined here as being "more trusting of other people, [having a] larger numbers of close friends, [...] exhibit[ing] a higher level of civic engagement and [receiving] more social support from their friends."

The obviously flipside of that last one is the negative influence of those friends, on the less drastic but just as unfortunate side, peer pressure, and on the far end of the spectrum: bullying. In general, a large group of people coming together to dilute how you should experience things, whether its that civic engagement or what is considered a friend. More problematically, it suggests a "bad":

One disturbing finding: The social fallout from the digital divide. People who are not online have the smallest social networks, are more socially isolated, get the least amount of social support and are least likely to vote, Hampton said.

While I doubt this particular study will lead to anything, it has implications in the nexus of agreement that has come together from the people surveyed: in a world where 99.9% of behavior is classified as diagnosable and able to be medicated, it's too bad that if you don't vote, don't have tons of friends who throw awesome parties where each person only knows 2 other people, and feel that a small group of tight-knit group of friends works for you the way large casual groups of friends work for other people, you could end up being lumped into a "disturbing" set.

Also, speaking of technology, LulzSec, whose mothers never taught them that eventually people wouldn't always say nice things about the things that they hero-worship (single-mindedness like this is why your DVD warns you that the opinions offered aren't those of Sony Entertainment, and PBS? really?) has released a list of hacked email/password combinations, happily confirming (because I'm a fucking genius) my suspicions that they are a lot less political activists and a lot more douchebag cyber frat boys. [ps - pic source]