So I’ve been tracking my application to the Healthy Indiana Plan on this blog and I recently got a comment asking if I had heard anything about the status of my application.  I haven’t yet heard anything back about this plan, either through regular or electronic mail. I will post more as I find out more about the process.
Month: February 2008
Stuff White People Like blog and thinking about whiteness in general
A blog parodying the “park slope parent” (public radio listeners, and myself too), Stuff White People Like is really interesting because I think it frames the activities that me and a lot of my friends enjoy, not just as our choices but as part of cultural forces of which race is a component. As one caller on the NPR call-in show where I found out about this blog noted, this blog helps expose white privilege because it examines the activities of a subset of white culture from a more removed perspective and a critical one, even if that criticism is tempered by humor. The blog creator pointed out that, whites often criticize or satirize the culture of whites who live in rural areas, have less money, or education, but that middle-class whites, and especially hip middle-class white culture is not framed as grounds for satire.
I think it’s pretty jolting to look at this blog, because even though I’m not entirely white, and feel like that identity doesn’t adequately encompass some of my experiences, so much of the things listed as likes on the blog are incredibly familiar.
What was pretty interesting was the connection this blog makes to electoral politics and that the blog’s brand of White People like to support Barack Obama.
Link to Stuff White People Like blog
Link to NPR’s Talk of the Nation interview with the blog’s creator
Untitled
From NPR: Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control:
It’s playtime at the Geraldyn O. Foster Early Childhood Center in Bridgeton, N.J., and in one corner of a busy classroom, 4-year-olds Zee Logan and Emmy Hernandez want to play bookstore.
In a normal preschool, playing bookstore would be a pretty casual affair. They would just pick up some books, set the shiny toy cash register on the table by the blackboard, and get down to business.
But this isn’t a normal school. It’s based on the Tools of the Mind program. In other words, it’s a school where almost every moment of the day is devoted in some way to teaching the kids — mostly low-income children who live in the poor surrounding community — how to regulate their behavior and emotions.
So before Emmy and Zee even think about picking up a toy, they sit down with their teacher at a small classroom table and fill out some paperwork.
In the audio for the story a psychologist talks about how free play and imaginative games actually teach children to control their impulses because the imagination games are always governed by social and cultural norms and narratives (the psychologists mentions the rules of parenthood and going to sleep as her examples). But, looking at the Abu Ghraib photos I posted last night, and thinking about the book I’m reading about men’s violence against women, what if it is those rules that are problematic or even dangerous? How can the play of children help them to question or transcend the norms they perceive and follow in their lives and communities?
Still, the idea of preparation for imaginative play, as discussed in this story seems to offer some possibility to this. Children and teachers could discuss the differences between their perceived norms, or decide upon fantastic new rules for their play that might not be drawn from their actual experiences or perceptions (e.g. when playing house fathers and mothers must share cleaning responsibilities equally).
Non-College Kids Outsiders to Rising ‘Youth Vote’
From a story on All Things Considered:
Since the 2000 elections, the number of young Americans going to the polls has increased steadily. This year is no different: In some states, double and triple the number of voters younger than 30 have turned out for primaries, compared with 2006. But another trend is also emerging: the widening voting gap between youth enrolled in college and their non-student peers.
abu ghraib photos
Link to wired news article about this image, from Philip Zimbardo’s TED presentation.
From an accompanying article and interview with Zimbardo:
Wired: Your work suggests that we all have the capacity for evil, and that it’s simply environmental influences that tip the balance from good to bad. Doesn’t that absolve people from taking responsibility for their choices?
Philip Zimbardo: No. People are always personally accountable for their behavior. If they kill, they are accountable. However, what I’m saying is that if the killing can be shown to be a product of the influence of a powerful situation within a powerful system, then it’s as if they are experiencing diminished capacity and have lost their free will or their full reasoning capacity.
Situations can be sufficiently powerful to undercut empathy, altruism, morality and to get ordinary people, even good people, to be seduced into doing really bad things — but only in that situation.
Understanding the reason for someone’s behavior is not the same as excusing it. Understanding why somebody did something — where that why has to do with situational influences — leads to a totally different way of dealing with evil. It leads to developing prevention strategies to change those evil-generating situations, rather than the current strategy, which is to change the person.
Link to this article.
ssh cheatsheat
Port forwarding
from http://www.openssh.com/faq.html#2.11
$ ssh -f -L 1234:server.example.com:6667 server.example.com sleep 10
Backing up files over SSH
$ ssh remote_host "tar -zc -C /path/to/parent/directory -f - some_directory" | cat > some_directory-`datestr`.tar.gz
Backing up a postgres database over SSH
$ ssh remote_host "pg_dump --username=db_user db_name" | gzip > db_name-`datestr`.sql.gz
Women’s History Month Events
Women in Science Research Conference
Monday, Mar 3. 9a-2:30p
Solarium, Indiana Memorial Union
Su E Pian (Lady of the Moon): Women and Sexuality from the Kinsey Institute Asian Collections
Thursday, March 6th 7p
Asian Culture Center, 807 E 10th St
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days film screening
Sunday, March 9 2p
Monroe County Public Library Auditorium
Yo Soy Boricua, Pa’que Tu Lo Sepas (I’m Boricua, Just So You Know!)!: An Interview with Rosie Perez
Thursday, Mar. 20th 7:00p
La Casa
“Human Trafficking and Sexual Tourism”
Friday, March 21 12:30-1:30p
Asian Cultural Center, 807 E. 10th St.
2007-08 Fifth Annual Herman Hudson Symposium (Theme: “Lifting the Veil: Multidisciplinary Responsibility in Global Societies”)
Saturday, March 22
10a
Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Mujeres en la Artes: Creating a Tapestry of Expression
Thursday, Mar 27
7p
La Casa
Documentary Screening of “Never Perfect” and Conversation with the Director/Filmmaker, Regina Par
Thursday, March 27 7p
Grand Hall, Neal Marshall Black Culture Center
Your Heart Breaks, Caethua @ Sweet Hickory. 7:30p $3-5.
Your Heart Breaks is sometimes solo, sometimes richly accompanied pop songs played by Clyde who hails from Seattle. I think the songs are really great – catchy but intelligent and personal. I have not heard Caethua, but I’ve heard good things. Claire also plays free jazz and hip-hop music, but her performance as Caethua was described to me as solo-accoustic-based music.
Link to Caethua’s MySpace page.
Link to Your Hear Break’s website.
gaming reviews vs. criticism
I’m not a gamer, but I found this article, linked to from BoingBoing relevent not just to gaming but other types of media:
Similarly, there would be no point today in writing a review of Ultima IV, since it is long out of print. A useful work of criticism, however, is entirely conceivable: discussing, perhaps, its role as one of the first games to consider the moral implications of a player’s acts, and to use tactical combat as a minigame within the context of a larger, more strategic title. Such an article, well-written, ideally with an understanding of the influence of tabletop roleplaying on the development of the early western CRPG, and of the place of this title in the overall shape of Richard Garriot’s ouevre would be of interest to readers today, even if they’d be hard put to find a way to buy the damn game. And it might find a place in anthologies and studies of the 20th century origins of the popular medium of the game, going forward into the indefinite future.
The truth is that, for the most part, we don’t have anything like game criticism, and we need it — to inform gamers, to hold developers to task, and to inform our broader cultural understanding of games and their importance and impact.
Read more at Pro Gamer Review.
I swear I’m going to stop writing about meta-discussions of punk subculture, but this makes me ask the question – does punk’s (and other musical subcultures for that matter) reliance on the review as a source of dialog about media objects narrow the vision for its social relevence and fail to push media producers to make music with a consciousness of its place in history and the current social context? Also, what is the impact, with the rise of web content and media review (I heard a piece about metacritic.com on Morning Edition this morning) coupled with the rise of consumption and review of technological commodities, on punk (and musical subculture in general)? Clearly, a generation of young people, deeply invested in this review culture intersects the listenership of subcultural music.
I single out punk just because if you look at any of the popular punk fanzines (MRR, Razorcake, etc.) an incredible amount of the content is dedicated to the reviewing of zines and records. I guess this is true of music media in general, but I am, of course, most familiar with punk, and I want to challenge the idea that punk is somehow ahead of the curve when it comes to cultural behavior. Looking at mainstream media, I find it even easier to criticize the review because they are increasingly blippy, often dedicating less than a paragraph to a discussion of the content.
notes on The Macho Paradox
p.114:
When men were targeted for prevention efforts, in educational or community settings, they were often sseen as potential perpetrators. The message to them: you need to recognize the triggers for your own bad behaviors so you can interrupt the process before you have the urge to strike your girlfriend/wife. Or, you need to develop better interpersonal communication skills, like good listening, so you do not force yourself on women sexually. Or, if you occasionally or regularly drink alcohol and then behave in a manner you cannot defend when sober, you need to get immediate help with your drinking problem.
The first problem with this approach is that it treats gender violenec as an individual issue that is caused by man’s personality flaws. It presumes that gender violence is a type of dysfunctional behavior that can be cured with therapy or punished by jail time, rather than a specific manifestation of a deeply rooted system of male dominance. As we have seen, people constantly misrepresent gender violence as the behavior of a few bad apples.
p. 118
Men of color are more likely than white men to be held accountable for their crimes, especially if their victims are whire. For example, in the early decades of the twentieth century, thousands of African American men were lynched by vigilante mobs of white men, predominantly in the South, based on trumped up charges that they had raped white women. This racist legacy cannot be overlooked or wished away. But the solution to this disparity is not to ease the pressure on perpetrators; it is to seek fair treatment in the application of justice. If fewer men who assault women got away with it-including wealthy white men-the anticipation of negative consequences would reinforce the need to prevent it from happening in the first place.
p. 121:
Journalist Nathan McCall explains in his essay collection What’s Going On that he and some of his African American male cohorts in the 1960s and 1970s learned a lot about “manhood” from watching gangster films which featured ruthless Italian men who regularly assaulted each other and treated women as little more than property. Gangsta rap in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century borrowed a lot from these cinematic portrayals. Ironically, many young suburban white men today are powerfully influenced by black urban gangsta rappers, who in turn learned about how “real men” are supposed to act from white actors in movies that were written and directed by white men.