Human Interest

While driving down the highway the other day, I heard a radio advertisement for a week-long television news series on the AIDS epidemic in the black community. I nearly caused an accident when I heard that one of the days of the series was going to be devoted to “Understanding ‘The Down Low’�. I can’t explain to you how angry I was, not only that a series on AIDS in the black community felt the need to focus on this, but also that we continue to lean on this idea as a replacement for real honest conversations.

But alas, let me attempt to explain my irritation.

“The Down Low� is defined as the phenomenon of straight, often married or committed, black men cheating on their wives or girlfriends with other men. With thanks to J.L. King and his book On The Down Low, millions of black women tuned into Oprah with notepads in hand, taking notes and looking for signs that their husband or boyfriend might be cheating on them with men. Suddenly, “The Down Low� has become this huge catch phrase, encouraging black women to be paranoid and homophobic but not mindful of their own safety and health.

“The Down Low� is not new. For goodness sakes, didn’t we all read E. Lynn Harris’ Invisible Life? Even THEN it wasn’t new. When white men do it, we call it being in the closet. When black men do it, they get a catchy new urban phrase. Guess what? In my book it’s called CHEATING.

“The Down Low� allows us to perpetrate the false notion that being black and male is synonymous with being straight. If people weren’t demonized for being anything other than straight, maybe they wouldn’t feel the need to sneak around.

The black community is not a monolith. Contrary to popular belief the black community is no more or less homophobic than any other community, despite the fact that the Right has done an excellent job of presenting us this way, and of exploiting the homophobia in our community (thereby advancing their agendas and alienating us from our potential allies). But the concept of “The Down Low� furthers the existing homophobia in two ways. First, by putting the focus on who men are cheating with, instead of just on the fact that they are cheating. And secondly, by making black women unnecessarily paranoid that black gay and bisexual men are lurking around corners like predators ready to pounce on their husbands.

“The Down Low� makes Black women into witless victims, and encourages us to spend our time trying to determine whether our husband or boyfriend is making too much eye contact with his male friends, instead of taking care of ourselves, and using some basic common sense. I hate to admit how many black women I know that have taken to reading popular garbage promising to show them all the “signs� that their significant other is “on the down low.� Why not spend the time examining the signs that your relationship needs work and so does your self-esteem?

Recall the Vice Presidential debates, where neither Vice President Cheney, nor Senator Edwards had any idea about the impact of AIDS in the black community. The problem is not going away any time soon, (especially if we’re relying on those yahoos to fix it), and our continual focus on “The Down Low� obscures the actual meaningful conversations we should be having.

As black women we should be talking about not basing our senses of self-esteem and self-worth on other people. We should be talking about sexuality and identity. We should be talking about being accepting of all people, LGBTQ, omni-, pan-, and polysexual, green, purple, and orange. We should stop believing that it’s better to find a person who treats us like dirt, than to be alone. We should be talking about communicating with our partners, and entering into relationships of mutual trust and respect. We should be talking about sex education, contraception, and learning to love ourselves first. We should be talking about honesty, and personal responsibility.

A catchy urban phrase did not bring AIDS into our communities and getting rid of the phrase won’t take it away. But at least then we can address the real issues with some self-respect.

Today is the day to honor fools, and so we take this moment to pay tribute to our year-round fools who excel at fanciful thinking.

:lol:

Echidne points us to Juan Cole's observations:

It isn't just Michael Schiavo -- even George W. Bush has drawn the wrath of American evangelicals. In February 2002, the president and Laura Bush visited a Shinto shrine in Japan, to which they showed respect with a bow. They were immediately denounced by evangelical organizations for having "worshipped the idol." To listen to the anguished cries of disbelief from Bush's Christian base, you would have thought he had met the same fate as Harrison Ford in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," where Indie was hypnotized by the evil rajah into worshipping the pernicious Hindu idol of the thugees.

:lol:

Egalia offers us our esteemed Dr. Frist, whose medical powers are so great he can diagnose people by videotape. Says Roll Call [subscription]:

The Senate’s top doctor, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), has many new and unwanted patients. Over the past several days, they’ve been bombarding Frist’s office with e-mails, describing their ailments, some of them pretty gnarly, and begging for a diagnosis.

"Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him."
-Proverbs 26:12

Drive for Democracy has all the info on how to get Frist the Great to diagnose your ailment.

Who says the Republicans don't have a national healthcare plan!

:lol:

Who knows how many people went outside at 10 a.m. local time to wave like idiots at the Google satellite as it makes a Keyhole pass over the nation with 3D earth-browsing software. What greater validation of oneself than to be confirmed as actually living on the surface of the Earth!

:lol:

Amanda points out that House Republicans are now eager to pass an unconstitutional bill to revoke citizenship of children of illegal aliens. Presumably, since they're sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States of America, they've actually read it. Maybe their reading comprenhension skills are impaired. Maybe they also forgot that our Founding Fathers were all illegal aliens and that our country was built on blood-soaked land when we conquered the land from the people who actually were born here to people who were born here. (How many generations go back 10-20,000 years? I think that makes even the DAR a squatters' association.)

:lol:

As a dog returns to his own vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.
-Proverbs 26:11

BBC reports on Tom Delay's ranting against the courts and judges:

Senior Republican Tom DeLay, who leads the House of Representatives, attacked the US courts for allowing Mrs Schiavo to die, calling them "out of control".

"We promised the Schindler family that we will not let Terri die in vain," Mr DeLay said.

"We will look at an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president."

That nose thumbing has become the greatest offense anyone can make. Look what happened to Saddam when he thumbed his nose at Bush! Poor Tom Delay also seems to have not read the Constitution he's sworn to uphold -- especially the part about the judiciary. Maybe he just can't count to three (branches of government).

:lol:

"Better a witty fool than a foolish wit."
-Shakespeare

Wired reports that the Department of Homeland Security thinks that if they don't call the RFID chips in new passports "RFID," then they won't have the security vulnerabilities inherent in the technology:

The U.S. government will not use radio-frequency identification tags in the passports it issues to millions of Americans in the coming years.

Instead, the government will use "contactless chips."

The distinction is part of an effort by the Department of Homeland Security and one of its RFID suppliers, Philips Semiconductors, to brand RFID tags in identification documents as "proximity chips," "contactless chips" or "contactless integrated circuits" -- anything but "RFID."

The Homeland Security Department is playing word games to dodge the privacy debate raging over RFID tags, which will eventually replace bar-code labels on consumer goods, said privacy rights advocates this week.

Privacy rights groups such as the EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union and CASPIAN have for years argued that RFID tags on consumer goods could be used to spy on individuals.

That is why Homeland Security is engaging in doublespeak, to dupe Americans into accepting RFID tags on their passports, said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program.

"It's a frightening, Orwellian use of the language," said Steinhardt, referring to the "contactless" branding effort. Steinhardt called the RFID tags the Homeland Security Department is using, which have faster processors and more storage capacity than retail tags, "RFID on steroids."

Government agents will use reader devices to track individuals wherever they use their RFID-tagged identification documents, Steinhardt and Tien said.

"They can call it a contactless chip," said Tien, "but it is still RFID. And it shares virtually all of the same vulnerabilities."

Maybe the identity thieves and kidnappers out there won't notice if we don't say "RFID." Maybe if the government spins hard enough, all the bad guys will just assume the chip is hack-proof.

:o

If only these were only jokes.

"I had rather have a fool make me merry, than experience make me sad."
-William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

I say "Puck for President!"

Who is are "the media"?

Rad Geek's kindly props to yours truly and DED Space (whom I neglected to mention in my excitement) for our having been mentioned in the Inside the Blogs segment on CNN's Inside Politics, led to some interesting musings:

I don't have a teevee these days, so I don't get much of a chance to follow the ins and outs at CNN or Fox News. But I gather this is a short segment run on one of CNN's daily commentary shows. Yeah, that's only a couple of minutes a day, but it is and ought to be exciting. Tom Tomorrow was exactly right just about this time two years ago when he smacked blog-triumphalists upside the head and pointed out that the relationship of bloggers to the mainstream media is roughly that of wood tick to deer. That's still mostly true now, but we are seeing the first creaks and whispers of a change in front of our eyes. CNN is beginning to pull material from blogs because that's just as easy, or even easier to do than churn out more of the same commentary from the same set of blowhard usual suspects. Thus two feminist bloggers got some recognition that they deserve as much as anyone, and a lot more than the blowhard set that usually gets air time on CNN.

The more DIY media that people produce, and make freely available for re-use, the more that turning to grassroots media will become the path of least resistence. This is not about to revolutionize media; it's unlikely to even reform it much in the immediate future. But it is a step in the right direction and it is exciting to see writing that used to exist strictly as marginalia on mainstream media discussions begin to enter, step by step, into the conversation.

Become the media.

Yes, we are the media ... the citizen media. It certainly is nice to get mentioned on what is probably the only MSM programming that doesn't treat "the bloggers" like some special-interest lobbying organization.

It's also a big break for us that women are doing this show. Abbi Tatton and Jacki Schechner I think do a great job at quickie summaries of various blog posts ... and I can only wonder what this CNN "Inside the Blogs" segment would be like if men were hosting it. Would women's voices be noticed at all then? I mean besides Ana. Is there any reason to assume that the phenomenon we see online -- that most men don't notice, don't respect, don't appreciate "women bloggers" or what we have to say -- does not manifest as well in the newsrooms?

And yet we're here, and in this day and age, where radical conservatives want to take away women's reproductive rights, while liberal progressives say that women's rights are not in jeopardy (or are at best secondary concerns), our presence online in itself I think helps democratize (small 'd') the media.

It can be a maddening experience, though. ms. b.'s announcement that she's leaving the fray shows how taxing it can be to "argue with stupid people" like men's rights activists. I agree.

I’m still a feminist, in case anyone was worrying for a minute there. I still believe passionately in my politics and in making things better. I’m just not so sure the blogosphere is the place to do it, and if it is, that this is where my place is. So I’m gonna write what I know, and how I feel, and screw what my blog description limits me to.

Bloghercon

On the flip side, two women who feel very strongly about the blogosphere and women's places in it are Lisa Stone (aka Surfette) and Elisa Camahort (of Worker Bees Blog), who are working to put together Bloghercon. Elisa offers some history of how this came about:

Men, as well as women, have been asking, "Where are the women?" And we have been responding...we're right here. That the same question is being asked now as was asked one year ago or two years ago is frustrating, but the real question is: what, if anything, do women bloggers want to do about it?

There's room in Bloghercon for philosophical discussion on questions like:

-Is blogging genderless? If you didn't know a blogger's name, could you always tell their gender? And does it matter?
-If, as Shelley claims, links are the powerful talisman of the male blogger, and to women sometimes a link is just a link, then what do women want to get out of blogging?
-How can such a new medium already have an "old boy's club"? Or is this just a continuation of an existing club? Does certain content make a woman an acceptable mascot for that club, while other kinds of expression will keep us out?
-Do women marginalize themselves without any help from men? What drives us to do that?

Even more importantly, Lisa and I want to have a Bloghercon to take action:

-Do we care if there is and old boy's club-does it affect us? Do we want to be part of that club? Do we want to change the club?
-If we care, then how can women promote women, without being dismissed as a sewing circle? And should we? Is creating a women's network the answer, or do we really seek gender-transparency?
-Where are the other barriers? And what are we trying to break through those barriers to do?
-What would be measurable success? If we had a Bloghercon again in a year what would cause us to pat ourselves on the back and say "job well done"?

I am a bit torn personally. You see, every time I ask the question, "why are there so few women in the Technorati Top 100?", my next thought is, "Who cares about the Technorati Top 100? Is that a desirable measure? And if not, then what is?"

We can all acknowledge that there are different kinds of bloggers, and some will never care about links and traffic and being quoted...that's not why they blog. But there's a whole group of women bloggers who are creative and expressive, but also ambitious and driven about their blogging.

How do we all increase our individual satisfaction within the group endeavor that is the blog community? That's what Bloghercon will explore.

Via email, Lisa told me that they hope to announce a time and place for this event very soon. On her site, she shares her views on the why:

I submit that women bloggers deserve Bloghercon, based on the events of the past month. I don't just mean reacting to what he said, what he wrote and the data behind what she's on about, important conversations all.

No, I'm talking about a conference that enables women bloggers to tesseract to proactive social and intellectual networking with each other. Women bloggers have much more enticing sashimi to gobble than Summers and Drum--politically, economically, socially and personally. For example, let's examine what she blogged about women on seven continents, her comments on a facet of family law, her syllabus of political bloggers, what she and she see coming in Elections 2006 and 2008, her red-alert about our rights as bloggers and what she said a television commentator called us.

She also links to other sites discussing Bloghercon. There are more listed in choconancy's del.icio.us page.

Subverting the dominant linking heirarchy, feminist edition

Meanwhile we keep reading and blogging. One of the pleasures for me always is discovering new voices ("new" in that they're new to my narrow experience of the blogiverse). Thanks to props by Genia V. Stevens (who is behind the new jane campaign; see her ad in the right column here), and following the lead of Ophelia of XX, I'm adding some new women to the blogroll, citing here some interesting posts:

Solotude on the Circle of Life (as opposed to "Culture" of Life)

coloredgirls.com with reviews on books, films and other stuff. (Site uses frames, so I can't bookmark a particular review.)

Black Looks on why nobody is asking "Where are the African bloggers?"

swirlspice on local Twin Cities yokels

rashundatramble offers her living will with snark

Lynne d Johnson on leading a talk with coco fusco at the Bronx Museum

Not Formica on identity blogging

sister outsider on how some people just don't change

This is some good stuff and I gain by adding these women to my blogreading experience.

Via a link in Lauren's comment to Ophelia's post on feminism and race (response in another post tk), I saw this post by Shelley that I'd missed:

So I'll say this, directly and honestly, to Dave Sifry from Technorati: Dave, you are hurting us.

The Technorati Top 100 is too much like Google in that 'noise' becomes equated with 'authority'. Rather than provide a method to expose new voices, your list becomes nothing more than a way for those on top to further cement their positions. More, it can be easily manipulated with just the release of a piece of software.

You have focused on comment spam and you see this as the most harm to this community, all the while providing the weapon that is truly tearing us apart. You are hurting us, Dave.

NZ Bear, you are hurting us. With your Ecosystem, you count links on the front page, which give precedence to blogroll links over links embedded within writings, and then classify people in a system equating mammals and amoeba. Your site serves as nothing more than a way for higher ranked people to feel good about themselves, and lower ranked to feel discouraged. There is no discovery inherent in your system -- no way of encouraging new voices to be heard. So NZ, you are, also, hurting us.

In fact, to every weblogger who has a blogroll: you are hurting all of us.

Rarely do people discover new webloggers through blogrolls; most discovery comes when you reference another weblogger in your writings. But blogrolls are a way of persisting links to sites, forming a barrier to new voices who may write wonderful things -- but how they possibly be heard through the static, which is the inflexible, immutable, blogroll?

So for all of you who have a blogroll, you are also hurting us.

If I had a wish right now, I would wish one thing: that we remove all of our blogrolls and take down the EcoSystem and the Technorati 100 and all of the other 'popularity' lists. That whatever links exist, are honest ones based on what has been written, posted, published, not some static membership in a list that is, all too often, stale and out of date, and used as a weapon or a plea.

To be fair, this is a much longer post and I'm leaving off Shelley's well-thought-out reasoning that has led her to this conclusion, so I urge anyone truly interested in blogging interactivity to read the whole post (link above). And in general, I think she's one of the brightest birds writing about this thing called blogging. (She takes beautiful photographs, too.)

That said, I find myself disagreeing with her. I do not see virtue in chaos -- and I do believe that if we have no blogrolls, no Technorati etc., we're leaving our blog discoveries up to randomness, and I don't necessarily see that as a good thing.

No doubt, we all could serve ourselves and each other very well by revisiting our blogrolls and doing some pruning and updating. I plan on a bit of that today, adding several feminists that have, so far, not made it into our own dominant linking heirarchy.

But there's something to be said for blogrolls. When I link to a blog in a post, I'm almost always linking to a specific post -- Look at this post, it's interesting. That has its purpose. We all want to read good articles, funny posts, interesting distractions. The trusted reference that we are in effect offering each other by in-post links has real value.

The blogroll serves a different function: rather than referencing and/or recommending a specific post, it is recommending an author, or an entire site. The people and sites in my blogroll are there as sort of an author's reference to my blog library. I don't read them all every day, yet they are there because, when I added the link, I was of the opinion that this person comes up with a lot of good stuff and is worth looking at just about any day.

Take the analogy of books. To many people I've recommended Candace Bushnell's Trading Up. I think it's a very powerful book that effectively explores the darkness underneath the glamorous superficiality of life among "the beautiful people." It gets into how small choices end up having huge implications in one's life. It lacerates the high society scene with much more intimacy than, say, Bonfire of the Vanities and Wolfe's "social x-rays." To me, it was a big surprise.

Yet the only other Bushnell book I've read is Four Blondes, which really is a collection of four stories. (I've not read Sex and the City, though I loved the show.) To me, between the two books, she's really on an upswing in her writing power, and I would certainly want to read her next book, just to see what she comes up with. Yet so far, to others, I pretty much just say, "Read Trading Up."

On the other hand, I just love Gene Wolfe. I know I know, he's something of a cheauvinist in his writing, and he has a reputation among the sci fi writing circles as being something of a jerk (I choose one of the more kindly words I've heard). But to me, he's a master of language. His books hypnotize me. And they are full of beauty -- beauty all the more precious for all the darkness around it.

So when I am talking books with someone who is not predisposed to not read anything that is not set in present-day or historical Earth, I will say, "Read Gene Wolfe."

Blogroll.

I think it's very important to remember that we are living and communicating in a "blogosphere" that is very much in its infancy. Hyperlinks, blogrolls, trackbacks -- this is primordial stuff. We don't know what's going to evolve out of this. We don't have a clue what the internets are going to look like five, ten, twenty years from now. Just this past year we've seen the emergence and explosion of del.icio.us, Technorati tags, PubSub, Skype, BitTorrent.... What will we see before the snow melts next spring? Who knows?

But I think it behooves us, as active participants in this new democratic (small 'd') movement, to trust in the smart mob dynamic. It's an incredibly powerful force that, even now in its undeveloped state, is scaring the crap out of the Establishment that is more accustomed to being the arbiters of taste, appropriateness and correct thinking.

This may seem like a very long polemic on behalf of blogrolls, but this is really about so much more. Sure, we could use them better and smarter. They could be more interactive in terms of simple administration. But darn it, they do work. When I look at the True Frescoe referrer block at the bottom right corner of the home page of mediagirl.org, for example, I see an awful lot of people coming from blogroll links. The same is reflected in the StatCounter and SiteMeter stats. When time permits, I often do the same -- on a site I like I'll just click randomly on blogroll links I do not recognize. It's always fun to discover new people. It's one of my greatest joys in going online.

So how do we subvert the dominant linking paradigm? We continue to link to trusted bloggers and communities, places where one has a good chance to read something worthwhile, so that when an anonymous surfer finds one of us, he or she discovers a whole new world of which perhaps she or she was not even aware. And we watch for those new tools, new memes, new services that open up new possibilities in interactivity.

The 'net is growing rapidly. It's overwhelming, really. How we try to make sense of it is always going to be flawed. But all we can do is continue to try.

What has been going on in the Bush White House with its seeming anti-gay rhetoric? It would appear there are gay links. For example, gay male prostitute James Guckert may have used a phony name to gain access to the White House Press Room where he tossed easy questions to the President. That Guckert is gay is not so much the issue as is the fact he was able to gain access and work in the White House under an assumed name. You would think that the Secret Service, FBI, and those types would have uncovered this quickly, so it begs the question--are there gays who are closely connected to the White House, but who are still closeted?

I am not out to "out" anyone, but rather just to get a basic read on the extent of the gay network at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It seems that his gay advisers are among his most able.

The Significator, this is what the Tarot reading speaks to: Page of Swords which the tarot calls the conservative youth. This concept of "youth" does not necessarily mean they are young in years. It could merely mean they are not in the top posts, but they certainly buy into conservative values. Their gayness is not political and, in fact, they are against an agenda that advances gay political rights. They see themselves as having advanced without gay consciousness and see gayness as diminishing their influence and power. They'll leave that to the progressives who will be weighed down by any "gay agenda."

The Significator feels bound to the system.

Covering Card, this covers him: The Chariot, a higher Arcana card associated with Will Power which means that there is great will power being shown by those who are at the core of this. Those who are gay are not letting it be known.

Crossing Card, behind the scenes - everything has a secret side Six of Wands This means A leader arises. The crown of laurels. Victory. Coupled with the chariot, these two cards suggest that the influence is from the military or something akin to it, and it would seem they are capable people.

The Foundation, this is below him on which he stands: The High Priestess Another Higher Arcana card which means Hidden influences at work. This is suggesting hidden powers.

Behind, this is finished business: The Wheel of Fortune Another Higher Arcana card, the one of karmic law. The laws of the world have propelled this situation. The gay people around Bush are there in spite of their gayness, not because of it.

Above, what is hanging in the air: The Lovers Another Higher Arcana card. This is an interesting card in this position, because those who are around Bush are not the hypocrites we might imagine. They truly do believe marriage is between man and woman, and their reasoning is complex. These are men who want to have sex with other men, yet want to have children and family, and in many ways the ban keeps these men on the path they have followed so far.

In Front, this is right in front. The Magician, and yet another Higher Arcana card. Deep power where the figure had all suits available, sword, cup, wand, and pentacle. These individuals are capable and are in important positions.

The Outcome, What is the outcome of all this? King of Wands The gay man who will work his way up in the ranks of the powerful.

The tarot says that gays are in powerful positions. Perhaps they have always been. Those in this case are not politically gay, only sexually gay and they do not see gay politics as having any real bearing on their political careers. They try to keep these aspects separate.

It would seem that the people who are currently in the highest positions of power are not gay, but those who report to them may well be and at least one is going to be put into a very important position.

Bush may be publicly anti-gay, as are some of the gay people themselves, but with all the Higher Arcana cards, the future is following its own course, outside of the power of humans. Even Arnold, in California, has gotten out of the way of that freight train.