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Jamshedpur Activist Mukesh Mittal Clinches National Essay Contest

Local Business Leader’s Vision for India Wins Top Honors Mukesh Mittal’s essay on citizen expectations from new government earns recognition from national Marwari association. JAMSHEDPUR – A prominent local community leader has been awarded first prize in a national-level essay competition. Mukesh Mittal, who heads the Purvi Singhbhum Zila Marwari Sammelan, has emerged victorious in a nationwide…

[prettyoddfever]

the 2008 Honda Civic Tour

This tour was purely in North America and had nothing to do with PATD’s other spring & summer tours in Europe, Asia, or Australia.

PICTURE TAGS

onstage

other events / appearances

misc offstage stuff

meet & greets

other tour-related content

TOUR DATES

April 10: San Francisco, CA

April 11: San Francisco, CA

April 12: San Diego, CA

April 13: Mesa, AZ

April 15: Tulsa, OK

April 17: Ruston, LA

April 18: Dallas, TX

April 19: Austin, TX (Stubb’s BBQ)

April 20: Houston, TX

April 22: Clearwater, FL

April 23: Miami Beach, FL

April 24: Orlando, FL

April 25: Orlando, FL

April 26: Atlanta, GA

April 27: Charlotte, NC

April 29: North Myrtle Beach, SC

April 30: Washington DC

May 2: Orono, ME

May 3: Troy, NY

May 4: Bamboozle in NJ

May 6: Rochester, NY

May 7: NYC

May 8: NYC

May 9: Philadelphia, PA

May 10: Wallingford, CT

May 11: Boston, MA

May 13: Montreal, QC

May 14: Toronto, ON

May 15: MTV Live

May 16: Cleveland, OH

May 17: Columbus, OH

May 18: Indianapolis, IN

May 20: Detroit, MI

May 21: Grand Rapids, MI

May 23: Chicago, IL

May 24: Chicago, IL (this was filmed for the dvd)

May 25: Milwaukee, WI

May 27: Maplewood, MN

May 28: Des Moines, IA

May 30: St. Louis, MO

May 31: Council Bluffs, IA

June 1: Kansas City, MO

June 3: Denver, CO

June 4: Salt Lake City, Utah

June 6: Vancouver, BC

June 7: Seattle, WA

June 8: Portland, OR

June 10: Reno, NV

June 13: Las Vegas, NV

June 14: Anaheim, CA

ABOUT THE OVERALL TOUR

This wasn’t the first tour for the Pretty. Odd. era, but the announcement material was some of the earliest stuff we saw from the new era that was slowly beginning in January. Panic at the Disco was announced as the headlining band for the 2008 Honda Civic Tour on January 10th. They also filmed some promotional material for Honda the day before that event. This clip explains the most and then here’s an ad. 

This tour was a giant corporate promo in many ways, but it also had a tour mission or “action plan” of “effecting positive environmental change.” Jon told the Times Union that the tour itself wasn’t being advertised as eco-friendly, but the band hoped that it would raise awareness of environmental issues. Here’s an interview that sums up the band’s most common comments about that angle (that interview happened while the tour was in NYC). So the band had started doing small things like using soy ink & recycled paper on the tour programs, traveling in a biodiesel tour bus, using biodegradable food service supplies, replacing old bulbs at shows with compact fluorescents, and recycling backstage (Also, as long as I’m on the topic of going green – here’s Ryan & Jon for Connect2Earth).

Panic at the Disco picked Reverb and Global Inheritance as their two nonprofit tour partners who would engage with fans in booths & exhibits before the shows. The band talked a lot about this… I’ll just summarize things with this bit from the tour announcement press kit:

Honda also helped make tickets more affordable, so they only cost $30-$40 (which made them cheaper than some merch that was for sale at the shows). $1 of every ticket sold went to a fund for the two nonprofit partners. Honda Canada said they contributed $10,000 to the tour’s eco-fund to celebrate how 2008 was the first year that the tour went to Canada. Here’s Brendon talking a bit more about the contest that decided how that fund was spent. Like Brendon said in that video, SPIN Magazine was part of the online challenge where fans suggested how the eco-fund should be used. Laura Gonzalez won that essay contest. 

Spencer said in a LiveDaily interview:

“We’d never really worked with a sponsor for a tour before. Or any big sponsor. But Honda approached us for it. They wanted us to do it. They pitched us on it. A big thing for them this year was using a hybrid Civic. They’re really promoting the green aspect of … the company. I guess we were really into that just because we’re a young band and we’re on our second record. We’re concentrating on trying to write the best songs as we can. We want to help support and feel strongly about [the green movement], and we want kids to know about it. We didn’t know the best way to go about showing that. I actually just watched “The Simpsons Movie” for the first time. The first scene in the movie is with Green Day and they say something about how they played for three-and-a-half hours and now they want to say something about the environment and everyone starts booing. [Honda] already had their foot in the door, promoting that type of philosophy.”

PLAYING SMALLER SHOWS

Jon made it clear in a few interviews this year that the Nothing Rhymes With Circus tour had not been his scene. He mentioned that playing shows in an arena wasn’t satisfying for him, and he was more interested in playing a simple stripped-down show where the music could speak for itself without “distractions” because he wanted things to be more “honest.” I talked more in previous posts about how Jon played a huge part in redirecting the band in summer 2007 when they were a bit uncertain about what to do next. A lot of his personal philosophies & interests became core ideas for the Pretty. Odd. era that the band talked about in spring 2008.

Brendon explained the band’s current stance in a PopMatters interview:

“During this production, we wanted to be more honest. It’s more about music, but we still bring out stuff that we like to have fun with on-stage, like bubble machines, video and stage props and designs. We play the songs, not the tracks. We don’t have a lot of the horns and strings on any of them, so we’re pretty much duplicating it on pianos and guitars. It is us playing each musical part that you hear. It’s all about us playing more music live and trying to improve on that… Playing in arenas, that’s very non-personal with the crowd. It’s more just people coming to see that show. We’re playing a lot more smaller places than arenas so it’s definitely a lot more intimate which is great, we’re getting a lot more intimate with the fans, you can get a lot more personal interaction with the crowd, it’s great.”

ABOUT THE STAGE DESIGN

Earlier this spring Brendon had dropped words like “weather,” “flowers,” and “organic” to describe the theme they’d be going for in their North American tour. He told DigitalSpy that “With Fever, we just tried to do something as crazy as the album sounded, and I think that's going to be the goal this time around. We just want to keep up with the music!” 

Parts of the stage and microphones were covered with fake flowers – Ryan said they were trying to make it feel like the show was happening outside. There were even pot leaves woven into their mic stand floral arrangements for part of the tour haha. Robb Jibson designed most of the set and did the lights each night. You can see him talking to Zack here.

Spencer said in a LiveDaily interview:

“We just love doing that--putting on a show, planning a show. I think of it more as a performance than just a rock 'n' roll concert. Trying to find the balance in between the two is kind of cool. One thing, though, that I guess will be different than the last tour is, the last tour, we were able to have such an elaborate stage show because of the size of the venues we were playing. Not the giant 25,000 seaters, but 8,000 to 10,000 people a night. But, at the same time, you're in an ice hockey arena or you're in the Utah Jazz basketball court, and it's not the greatest place to see a concert if you love the band. For this tour, we wanted to go back to larger theaters. It's a lot cooler place to put on a show, but I guess you have some limitations with size and space.”

Spencer also talked to Alt Press about going back to playing smaller venues: “That kind of limits you, though, with the production and what you can do… it was gonna be the first time we were playing these songs in front of people, we just decided it would be better to just make that the focus and attention rather than having three or four people coming on stage and doing crazy things.”

Spencer told Drum! Magazine:

“There are a million endless concepts of what we could do live, and we’re having fun figuring out what would go well with these songs. We wanted to do something with video but I get annoyed when I go to shows and there’s a giant video screen behind the band, just showing live footage from a couple camera guys standing in front of the stage filming what the guys are playing. It seems kind of weird. So we’ve talked about maybe doing more artistic kinds of music videos to play on stage. Something a little more out there.”

Here’s Shane’s footage of the band recording the green screen content to use in the video backdrop for the shows.

THE OTHER BANDS ON THE TOUR

Here’s some of the behind-the-scenes footage that I loved. The 2008 Honda Civic Tour lineup included Panic at the Disco, Motion City Soundtrack, The Hush Sound, and Phantom Planet. So there were four official bands, but Eric Ronick’s band Black Gold also made an appearance.

The Hush Sound had opened for P!ATD during the summer 2006 tour, Motion City Soundtrack had been on the 2005 Nintendo Fusion Tour with P!ATD, and Black Gold had opened for P!ATD on some nights during the Nothing Rhymes With Circus tour & throughout the spring 2008 tour in Europe. So Phantom Planet was the only band that PATD hadn’t toured with before. The Panic guys had been obsessed with the O.C. in 2006, so I hoped that they were still excited on some level about hearing Phantom Planet play “California” ha.

Spencer told Out.com:

“There was a really good vibe among all the bands… We hadn’t toured with Phantom Planet, but we instantly got along with those guys. It was a really musical environment where every band was working on songs, even though everybody had just put out records. That kind of camaraderie we’d never been a part of, and it was something we really missed when the tour was over.”

Spencer also told Artistdirect that “Phantom Planet and The Hush Sound are some of our best friends so throughout the day being around your friends and working on music, there’s really nothing to complain about.”

Fans talked about seeing Brendon on the side of the stage many nights or in the balcony watching the opening bands and dancing on his own. Sometimes Brendon came out to sing the same song with The Hush Sound that he did in summer 2006 (Don’t Wake Me Up). He also sang with Black Gold like he did during the European tour.

Ryan sometimes joined Phantom Planet onstage during Do The Panic. He grew close with Alex Greenwald during this tour. Towards the end of the year Ryan told MTV that he didn’t know much about Phantom Planet before this tour and that he “got [their] album a few weeks before the tour started and was blown away.”

Phantom Planet / Alex did some acoustic songs outside after shows that sounded pretty fun. A lot of the videos are in nice convenient playlists on their youtube now: Chicago, Denver, Cleveland, Boston, Columbus (there are more videos from other shows too). Ryan was in quite a few videos... some examples: one, two, three, four.

ABOUT THE ACTUAL SHOWS

The May 24th show was filmed for the Live in Chicago dvd. Just like with Live in Denver from the 2006 summer tour, the dvd is not an accurate representation of what the whole tour was like (I thought fan videos were way more fun tbh). There were almost 50 shows in the Honda Civic tour... May 24th in Chicago was only one single night. The band was more uptight than normal, some fun moments that fans captured were cut out of the dvd, the lighting was weirdly darker on the dvd than it was irl, and it just felt strange to not hear the crowd much. That dvd didn’t come out until December when the Pretty. Odd. era ended, so it also didn’t fit into the concept of the Honda Civic Tour that I’d already formed from 5,000+ fan videos. The dvd is nice!! I’m just saying that there’s a lot more to this tour than what’s shown there.

The average set list for this tour had a lot of similarities to the spring European tour, but it was still different in many ways. The band cut Build God and The Weight from this tour’s regular set list (they still played The Weight a couple times, though) and added several new songs like Northern Downpour, Behind the Sea, Pas de Cheval, and Folkin’ Around (but at first they played I Have Friends In Holy Spaces instead). 

This was their first headlining tour where they didn’t have any song covers in their regular set list.

Fans had complained a lot about a lack of an encore in 2006, so the band now left the stage after Northern Downpour. Then Brendon would come back out to do his solo acoustic version of Time to Dance and then the band would do introductions and play the last 2-3 songs as an encore.

The shows changed a lot each night as the tour progressed. The video on the screen behind the band was pretty basic for most songs at the early shows, but eventually it became more elaborate. Brendon talked a lot at the first few shows but that noticeably decreased as the tour progressed. The band introduced There’s A Good Reason as a jazz song during the first half of the tour, and then they started doing the “jazz hands” bit for the second half of tour. Brendon & Ryan also didn’t do much mic-sharing or switching until mid-May. They initially ended Mad as Rabbits without adding the whole extra "na na na naaaaa” bit on the end too (that’s what their set list sometimes called it ok lol).

Almost all of the mic sharing pics are from when Ryan would walk over to Brendon’s mic. Ryan was noticeably more interested in the center mic this spring. Sometimes it looked like he forced Brendon to back up (by shoving his head between Brendon’s mouth & mic lol), but other times it looked like Brendon moved aside and just let Ryan have the mic. Brendon would let Ryan sing there for a bit, would try to join Ryan, or would retreat to use Ryan’s abandoned mic instead. Then that mic switching became their normal choreographed routine for the end of the show each night. A lot of the moments when Ryan approached Brendon’s mic in the last half of the tour were the same every night, but some were still spontaneous.

They used the bubble machine during Behind the Sea & the ending at a lot of shows, but not all (Spencer told the Cleveland crowd on May 16th that they had just gotten the bubble machines that day). 

Brendon & Ryan didn’t come out to perform with the opening bands at every single show.

“Ryan Ross got a tambourine.” haha that sums that up.

Spencer got a microphone on this tour! He could talk to the crowd before some songs now (especially Behind the Sea) and he also sang at the end of Northern Downpour at many shows.

Ryan stuck some city/state names into Mad as Rabbits (ex: “now he drags down miles in _______”) and Brendon stuck some city names into That Green Gentleman (ex: “I never said I’d leave ______”). 

Ryan was still doing his thing where he’d pick a couple girls to stare at super intensely at most shows (I hate saying “eye sex” but that’s what the girls were screaming about so I might as well say it).

You could text stuff and watch it scroll across the screen up front before the bands played. There were also some commercials, the video of Brendon talking about the eco fund, and music videos shown on the screens. Rolling Stone wrote that “There were some jarring product placements at the opening night of Panic at the Disco’s North American outing — even for something called the Honda Civic Tour. Motion City Soundtrack, the Hush Sound and Phantom Planet opened, and between sets automobile commercials alternated with videos from acts on the record label that distributes PATD’s music.” Again, this was an extremely corporate production.

there were so many stories of fans legit moshing to songs from Pretty. Odd. haha. Ryan even told Rolling Stone that kids were moshing to Northern Downpour in Tulsa. That song meant a LOT to him, so he complained that "I don't think they were even listening.” It sounded like the crowds were waaaaay less intense than the Fever era, though. There were still normal injuries, but nothing that sounded even close to 2006. (This perceived difference could also be because the ages & types of fans attending the 2006 summer tour vs the spring 2008 tours were different).

Rolling Stone said that “Drummer Spencer Smith proved himself the most confident musician... Singer Brendon Urie furrowed and arched his brow to signify emotions he couldn’t fully articulate with hands occupied with guitars, while guitarist Ryan Ross looked uncomfortable, and affable bassist Jon Walker acted as spokesman.”

MASTERPIECES: the bracelet song and the pancake song.

People threw a black tophat onstage at more than one show in this tour.

Jon often took his shoes off onstage. I heard that sometimes Ryan did too.

a review of one show said “For much of the set guitarist Ryan Ross could have passed for a mannequin, and lead singer Brendon Urie didn’t even seem to break a sweat until the last three songs.”

Las Vegas Weekly said that the songs got a warm response from the crowd, but wrote that “Warm isn’t the same as ecstatic, however, and crowd participation seemed lacking compared to the over-the-big-top affairs of before. Though technically sold out, about a fourth of the mezzanine seats remained empty, and there was a noticeable lack of anything resembling crowd surfing. Not even bubble machines and Urie’s mention of this being his first time playing Vegas since he’d turned 21 could arouse all-too-familiar shrieks of total sensory ecstasy. A lower-key affair from a more mature band? Are we sure these guys are still from Vegas?”

PATD claimed that Bamboozle was their first time headlining a festival (even though they’d made that same claim for Summerfest 2007). They closed the whole festival and played the main stage after Gym Class Heroes. Black Gold also got to play on a smaller stage earlier that day. Here’s a tag for some of those pictures (others will be in the regular tour tag).

STUFF THAT’S ABOUT THE BAND MEMBERS

At the start of this tour Jon was 22, Ryan was 21, and Spencer & Brendon were 20.

Ryan had some Star Wars action figures for good luck.

Spencer told some crowds that he was from Denver and Brendon was from Utah.

Ryan & Jon led the shows and talked more than Brendon (and obvs more than Spencer). I couldn’t get over how completely different Ryan was this year... like I was shocked at how much he’d changed by August 2007, but now he was even more talkative & outgoing. Fans said he was smiling and even cracked jokes at meet & greets!

Brendon’s voice had grown a lot deeper... it honestly weirded me out at times. He was having a harder time hitting the high note in Camisado this spring while his voice changed, but he had better control by the end of the year. 

Hints of Ryan’s faux accent appeared during this tour, but it didn’t really peak until summer.

Jon had spread the flip flops to the rest of the band… even Brendon wore them now.

here’s some of the Q&A footage from this tour

The guys played a lot of hacky sack on this tour haha. Alex Greenwald even said that, which I thought was hilarious.

There was an international CosmoGirl interview with Brendon & Spencer where Brendon said he hadn’t found the right girl yet. And then the interviewer asked if he ever got seduced by fans and Brendon said it wasn’t really something that happened weekly. And apparently Spencer was laughing at that point in the interview.

Jon sometimes gave a shoutout to Eric’s band Black Gold during the spring tour in Europe, and he continued doing that randomly during this tour too. Jon was the only guy in PATD who knew what it was like to tour in a small band that wasn't an instant success, so he was good about trying to help his friends & family over the years whenever it wasn’t weird to add a shoutout (in interviews too).

If their show the next day was somewhere nearby then sometimes the band stayed in the same city that night to party.

One fan asked the guys about their favorite dinosaur at a meet & greet. Ryan blanked, Brendon said euoplocephalus, and Jon & Spencer got into a serious debate over whether a pterodactyl was technically a dinosaur lol. I just really liked that story.

fans were throwing a lot of bracelets onstage this spring, so that’s why the guys often had matching bracelets that said silly things.

Jon said that they mainly played Mario Kart & Halo on the bus and worked on demos for new songs. 

The band really did bury themselves in older music. When interviews asked what their favorite albums had been last year (2007) they struggled to come up with recent music and admitted they were kind of out of the loop.

Brendon was sick at the end of April.

Ryan had his pretty guitar for this tour!!! (the Stratocaster that I’m pretty sure he said was surf green... but it definitely liked to change color depending on the lighting ha. Some fans called it his “blue” guitar. I even remember people questioning whether Ryan had several different colors of the same guitar).

Ryan’s stage banter during the Honda Civic Tour would sometimes reference smaller venues the band had played in each town, as though he wanted it to sound like PATD had been a relatively unknown band at one point that had played small shows for just a few fans. Ryan was really working hard this year to distance the band from the whole scene that they’d been thrown into during the Fever era, so I understood that these comments were just part of his process of shifting the band’s image to be more in line with what he wanted. But it was still kind of funny to hear him talk about their time doing half of the Take Cover Tour in this new light because obviously some of us still remembered what fall 2005 had been like… the season where the band played to a small crowd that only had a handful of fans who were specifically there for P!ATD lasted for a couple weeks lol (and several of the shows within that window wouldn’t even qualify). And even when the band played their sold-out headlining shows at the small venues in December 2005, they still had an international fanbase and were getting ready to be on national tv & the covers of big magazines. Panic! at the Disco was never a small indie group or a band who had to truly pay their dues. They’d been linked to Fall Out Boy and had international attention before they even wrote most of their songs.

Ryan seemed to be really into what the guys in Phantom Planet were doing. He was clearly drawn to Alex Greenwald and the whole scene that Alex was part of... and Ryan looked pretty content when he was with Phantom Planet outside after shows too.

Jon also seemed to want to make PATD feel like a small, relatable band who could casually hang out with their fans after shows. He kept inviting large crowds around the country back to his house for hotdogs or to swim. I remember some fans definitely thought he was serious and were disappointed afterwards ha.

Shane filmed some Honda Civic Tour updates, and those were still showing up even after the tour ended. I tried to edit them together here to go in the order of the tour (so they’re not in the order that the actual updates were listed on the site):

Shane also filmed the footage in his documentary that was part of the Live in Chicago cd/dvd:

MISC STUFF FROM THIS TOUR

here are some appearances during this tour! That’s definitely not everything – it’s just some highlights. 

The band did a lot of interviews this season.

This tour was basically a way for Honda to try to sell their cars to teens. The tour booklet and booths at the shows had a lot of information on how to finance a car, and Honda Financial Services was giving away a guitar autographed by PATD if you checked out the info on Honda’s special APR financing.

Here’s more about the custom Honda Civic that fans could enter to win. The matching tour bus was obviously not the one that the band actually used. It was more like a decoy & mobile advertisement that was parked in front of venues. The band members used a nondescript gray bus that parked with the rest of the tour buses.

the autographed custom Honda Civic was given away at the end of April but that confused me because it was on display at shows in May too. I heard that Christy Martinez of Robertsdale, AL won it.

There was originally supposed to be another Atlanta show on April 27th, but the venue (the Tabernacle) was damaged by a tornado or something like that. Both of the Atlanta shows got combined into one night at the Masquerade Music Park then.

The band went to the beach in Orlando and Shane filmed some stuff. 

Ryan said at the Orono show that they spent some time in Bar Harbor.

Shane was filming everything. everywhere. he would interview fans in line, he was at the meet & greets, he was somehow in the back of the room and up by the stage at shows... it sounded like the guy could apparate. A couple girls also mentioned that Shane would set up some cameras but it looked like he had an assistant to operate them during the shows. The band talked about how some concerts were filmed for them to watch themselves and see what they could improve on. Later that year Jon also explained that “We usually videotape the shows while we’re on tour and watch them two to three times a week just like a football team, checking out what we did wrong and what we can do better.”

At a couple shows Shane was spotted just sitting in front of the stage taking pictures of Brendon on his phone lol. A decent amount of people were serious fans of Shane, but I mainly just appreciated that he obviously made Brendon happy. 

The Honda Civic Tour was one of my favorite parts of 2008 because the guys had many friends on the tour and seemed to be having a genuinely great time. There were still occasional hints of the underlying ongoing tension, but overall this season was a ton of fun to see & hear about. 

There were contests throughout most of this year to win leftover Honda Civic Tour crew t-shirts. I got my shirts, jacket, bag, and other gear from someone who had been at the announcement event on January 10th, but it was the same stuff that was used for prizes later… so there must have been a lot of it.

Some magazines reported that the band was at Pete Wentz’s wedding, but they definitely played a show that night (where Ryan dedicated Northern Downpour to Pete).

The band got trophies at the Fillmore in Denver for selling out their show. Ryan dedicated his trophy to the crowd.

Zack still wasn’t allowed into Canada, so he missed the Vancouver show.

The Honda Civic Tour site had a “moodreader” that would assess your mood and give you a Panic at the Disco song to match it. 

Pictures of the “reinvent love” vest showed up in May. That had been made out of one of the t-shirts that was for sale during this tour. (speaking of merch – hoodies were $50 and most t-shirts were around $25).

it sounded like Zack was running a lot of things at this point... like he’d be pouring drinks for the guys, reprimanding a crew member for not spotting a sharp object onstage that Jon might’ve stepped on with bare feet, wrangling the band, coordinating stuff with Shane & Dan, dealing with fans, and generally monitoring a lot. I heard he was even able to tell at a glance what height each microphone should be at for each guy.

Spencer’s mom and some of Ryan’s relatives were at one of the east coast shows (I think North Carolina). Jon gave his mom a shoutout at a show she was at too.

The final night of this tour had a “Panic in the OC” party. For about $1,300 – $1,400 you could get 1 concert ticket, 2 nights in the hotel, an autographed picture of the band, a meet & greet at the exclusive party, concert transfers, and a VIP laminate & swag bag for the OC party. You had to be 18+ to go, though. And that price didn’t include airfare.

There were a lot of giveaways & sweepstakes from places like radio stations where fans could win tickets to shows or a chance to meet the band. A lot of the hype this season was riding on the back of what the band had been during the Fever era.

A lot of the fans who watched Zack pour the drinks mentioned that Ryan drank white wine onstage, Jon & Brendon had beer, and Spencer sometimes got stuck with lemon-lime Gatorade since he wasn’t 21 yet.

Cassie, Keltie, Regan (Shane’s gf), Zack’s wife, and Haley were all at the Anaheim show on the final night.

STUFF THAT’S ABOUT THE FANS

“There are some crazy people out there who are kinda willing to do whatever to meet you. It’s kinda a strange thing for us to even think of. We don’t really enjoy it that much.” – Jon to College Candy during this tour

This tour sounded way more chill than the last half of the Fever era. There were still some stories about fans pounding on the side of the bus or chasing a band member to the bus, but it was nothing like 2006. The band definitely came out to sign stuff by their bus more often too.

Brendon had been the one who came out to greet fans the most in summer 2006 and the one who reportedly looked the guiltiest when the band members were instructed to put in ear plugs and walk quickly past crowds of fans in late 2006 without stopping. Brendon really wanted to connect with the fans in 2008 too but Zack was still in kind of a nanny role and would block him. There were several stories from different cities about how Brendon would basically sneak away from Zack to meet fans waiting outside and then Zack would get stern when he found Brendon and literally haul him away lol. I know sometimes Brendon used Zack as a bad cop figure so that Brendon didn’t need to disappoint fans, but there were definitely moments that sounded like Brendon wanted to stay & greet fans but wasn’t allowed

There were also stories about how Brendon would be allowed to come out to greet a small group of fans who had waited for a long time, but then Zack would drag him back onto the bus at a certain point. A few times it sounded like Brendon successfully snuck off the bus and back on without Zack ever showing up, though.

Multiple fans from one show said that a girl was being creepy and making Zack mad, so the guys were sent to the bus and that was it. They weren’t going to come out and greet anyone else. Quite a few fans from that night went online and bashed the band, saying stuff about how once again the guys were too good for their fans and would rather hide than take 10 seconds to acknowledge the people who have dedicated years to them. So this was yet another example of how the stories of the band being “rude” often had more context.

Ryan walked right past groups of fans by the barricade outside at the Vancouver show and said he’d be back, but just hid in the bus instead. He had a right to do that, but some fans still acted like they were being robbed of their right to meet the guys.

Ryan, Jon, and Spencer came out to greet fans in Seattle, but Brendon didn’t… so that felt like a noteworthy rare combination.

Zack brought Brendon out to meet fans in Atlanta while the other guys prepared a late surprise birthday party for him. Then Jon & Ryan came out to greet fans too.

this same situation happened at several different shows so maybe it’s worth mentioning: Brendon came out to greet a small group of fans who waited for hours by the bus. They asked Zack if they could meet Ryan too and were told that Ryan had gone off somewhere after the show and was too drunk to meet anyone. So it sounded like Ryan hung out with friends on this tour and was having a fun time.

By this point fans knew that if Zack told you to leave, that meant you should stick around because then the guys would come out to meet the remaining smaller group. So I’m sure that became challenging when Zack actually did want everyone to listen haha.

I was usually entertained to hear what Zack had added to his whole speech before meet & greets because obviously those things had happened in order for him to mention them. By this tour he was saying stuff about don’t smell the guys, don’t try to trip them when they walk into the room, don’t fart, don’t scream at them that you want to have their babies…

Brendon’s family was at the show on his birthday and I heard that a lot of fans were really rude to them. Some kids recognized his family and were horrified that many fans actually told Brendon’s dad stuff like “get the f--- out of my way,” assumed that his brothers were gay and started taunting them & calling them fags, and basically did a great job demonstrating what Brendon had to put up with in his career.

Not all of the screams of “northern downpour” at the shows were random enthusiasm for the song… sometimes it was members of the fan club making themselves known.

Zack said that fans could bring cameras if they were under 7 megapixels and didn’t have a detachable lens, so I just want to emphasize that all of our cameras back then were not as bad as a lot of pictures look. But I heard that cameras weren’t heavily investigated at some venues, so some people still brought in decent ones.

Just like with previous tours, professional photographers were only allowed up front for the first few songs. Some fans printed fake photo passes that actually worked.

I heard a fan tried to give Brendon a t-shirt with Audrey Kitching’s face on it.

I thought it was funny how so many of the people who were complaining about Ryan’s new “hippie hair” in August 2007 were now demanding that he bring that back instead of his current 1960s haircut.

I stopped keeping track of the ridiculous amount of fan projects/presents that were mailed to the band, but I did think it was neat that the girls who organized the scrapbook for Brendon’s birthday had sent it to the venue that the band was at on April 12th so it was waiting for him in the dressing room.

Las Vegas Weekly wrote this about the band’s Vegas show in June: “Spotted in the Palms parking lot was a hand-painted Toyota Prius, splashed with purple, pink and yellow paint and the messages ‘We Must Reinvent'... The artwork also included a bright sun/smiley face, musical notes, and, along the back, “Honk If You Love Panic.” Panic at the Disco fans, in town for the Vegas band’s show at the Pearl.”

MISC STUFF FROM THIS SEASON IN GENERAL

Here’s Spencer’s stuff for Meinel.

by the end of tour we knew that Northern Downpour would be the next single.

the band was MusicChoice’s Artist of the Month in May.

Pretty. Odd. honestly did well on the charts at first! It debuted at #2, but by May there were articles about the poor sales. The street team was mobilized again to call radio stations & request that they play PATD (which was a little concerning tbh). It felt like fall 2005 all over again... except the band’s success/popularity was not increasing exponentially this time. 

The band started getting questions about their poor record sales in interviews and most of their answers just shrugged it off. They wanted to focus on other ways of measuring success, like whether people came to their shows. The guys also understood that a lot of people were pirating music online now, so sales might not be an accurate representation of the number of people actually listening to your music.

Honda & MTV were responsible for the majority of the hype surrounding PATD this spring. A lot of the media attention this season was also riding off of the Fever era’s success. 

T-Mobile released the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phone during the Honda Civic Tour. That came preloaded with a song from P!ATD and one from Phantom Planet. The video for That Green Gentleman was also preloaded on the phone, along with “an exclusive making-of video with a greeting from the band.”

The amount of staggeringly lazy journalism this year was even worse than normal. Some small details were just entertaining, though. Brendon’s name was spelled wrong so often and there were a lot of different stories for how Jon joined the band (one article made it sound like the guys scooped Jon up at a Chicago tour stop and booted Brent out the other side of the van on their way out of town). Another article claimed that “Vocalist Brendon Urie, guitarist Ryan Ross and drummer Spencer Smith were 17-year-old buddies from Las Vegas when they suddenly had a No. 1 hit on MTV with the video for “I Write Sins Not Tragedies.” (Brendon turned 19 a couple months after that video premiered on MTV and he wasn’t even the oldest band member).

Most fans were on the same page about the Ryden stuff: we’d have fun listing “proof” but obviously almost nobody actually believed it (because that wasn’t the point). However, the Brendon/Shane stuff was different… that relationship looked plausible without fans even trying, and some people did honestly wonder about them.

There were a LOT of fake myspace pages for Dylan Urie-Valdez (the dog that Brendon & Shane shared). A lot of them were mainly focused on the idea that Brendon & Shane were gay. Someone even made a fake myspace page for Pete Wentz’s dog and then used it to tell people to follow this fake “dilloncornbreadandchicken” account (which was one of the more committed fakes that made even the biggest PATD fans do a double take... and it took me a few solid minutes to figure out it was fake ha). Hobo’s myspace was real, though! Keltie ran that and shared lots of pictures.

Out.com told Spencer that “It seems like the crowds at your concerts have changed over the last couple years. There are still a lot of girls and gay guys, but there are also a lot of stoned college dudes.” Spencer replied:

We have observed it. We think it’s awesome. It’s something we kind of hoped for -- not specifically stoner college guys, but trying to get a more broad audience. We definitely have noticed people in the audience who only know our first album, which is totally expected. But there’s also people that know every word to every song off the new record, and aren’t as familiar with the old stuff. 

[ucflibrary]

Every October UCF celebrates Diversity Week. This year’s dates are October 14 - 18, and the theme is Empowering Equity. University-wide departments and groups champion the breadth and culture within the UCF community, and work to increase acceptance and inclusion for everyone at UCF and the surrounding communities.

 One of the fantastic things about UCF is the wide range of cultures and ethnicities of our students, staff, and faculty. We come from all over. We’re just as proud of where we are from as we are of where we are now and where we will be heading in future.

 UCF Libraries will be offering a full slate of Diversity Week activities. To learn about the upcoming events visit: guides.ucf.edu/diversityweek

 Join the UCF Libraries as we celebrate diverse voices and subjects with these suggestions. Click on the link below to see the full list, descriptions, and catalog links for the featured UCF Celebrates Diversity titles suggested by UCF Library employees. These 12 books plus many more are also on display on the 2nd (main) floor of the John C. Hitt Library next to the bank of two elevators.

 And thank you to every Knight who works to help others feel accepted and included at UCF!

  Girl, Stop Apologizing: A shame-free plan for embracing and achieving your goals by Rachel Hollis In Girl, Stop Apologizing, Rachel Hollis sounds a wake-up call. She knows that many women have been taught to define themselves in light of other people—whether as wife, mother, daughter, or employee—instead of learning how to own who they are and what they want. With a challenge to women everywhere to stop talking themselves out of their dreams, Hollis identifies the excuses to let go of, the behaviors to adopt, and the skills to acquire on the path to growth, confidence, and believing in yourself. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 It Ain't So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas Zomorod (Cindy) Yousefzadeh is the new kid on the block . . . for the fourth time. California’s Newport Beach is her family’s latest perch, and she’s determined to shuck her brainy loner persona and start afresh with a new Brady Bunch name—Cindy. It’s the late 1970s, and fitting in becomes more difficult as Iran makes U.S. headlines with protests, revolution, and finally the taking of American hostages. Even puka shell necklaces, pool parties, and flying fish can't distract Cindy from the anti-Iran sentiments that creep way too close to home. Suggested by Cindy Dancel, Research & Information Services

 Lean in: women, work, and the will to lead by Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell Lean In continues the conversation around women in the workplace, combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what they can. Sandberg provides practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career.  Suggested by Katy Miller, Research, Education & Engagement

 Out of Many Faiths: religious diversity and the American promise by Eboo Patel In this inspiring and thought-provoking book, Patel draws on his personal experience as a Muslim in America to examine broader questions about the importance of religious diversity in the cultural, political, and economic life of the nation. He explores how religious language has given the United States some of its most enduring symbols and inspired many of its most vital civic institutions―and demonstrates how the genius of the American experiment lies in its empowerment of people of all creeds, ethnicities, and convictions. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. Suggested by Cindy Dancel, Research & Information Services

 Reclaiming the Black Past: the use and misuse of African American history in the twenty-first century by Pero Gaglo Dagbovie In this wide-reaching and timely book, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie argues that public knowledge and understanding of black history, including its historical icons, has been shaped by institutions and individuals outside academic ivory towers. Drawing on a range of compelling examples, Dagbovie explores how, in the twenty-first century, African American history is regarded, depicted, and juggled by diverse and contesting interpreters—from museum curators to filmmakers, entertainers, politicians, journalists, and bloggers. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Savage Feast: three generations, two continents, and a dinner table (a memoir with recipes) by Boris Fishman The acclaimed author of A Replacement Life shifts between heartbreak and humor in this gorgeously told, recipe-filled memoir. A family story, an immigrant story, a love story, and an epic meal, Savage Feast explores the challenges of navigating two cultures from an unusual angle. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Text Me When You Get Home: the evolution and triumph of modern female friendship by Kayleen Schaefer From Broad City to Big Little Lies to what women say about their own best friends, the stories we're telling about female friendship have changed. What used to be written off as infighting between mean girls or disposable relationships that would be tossed as soon as a guy came along are no longer described like that. Now, we're lifting up our female friendships to the same level as our other important relationships, saying they matter just as much as the bonds we have with our romantic partners, children, parents, or siblings. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 The Best We Could Do: an illustrated memoir by Thi Bui This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 The Moment of Lift: how empowering women changes the world by Melinda Gates In this moving and compelling book, Melinda shares lessons she’s learned from the inspiring people she’s met during her work and travels around the world. As she writes in the introduction, “That is why I had to write this book―to share the stories of people who have given focus and urgency to my life. I want all of us to see ways we can lift women up where we live.” Melinda’s unforgettable narrative is backed by startling data as she presents the issues that most need our attention―from child marriage to lack of access to contraceptives to gender inequity in the workplace. And, for the first time, she writes about her personal life and the road to equality in her own marriage. Throughout, she shows how there has never been more opportunity to change the world―and ourselves. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 Tinderbox: the untold story of the up stairs lounge fire and the rise of gay liberation by Robert W. Fieseler Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue- collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community. The aftermath was no less traumatic―families ashamed to claim loved ones, the Catholic Church refusing proper burial rights, the city impervious to the survivors’ needs―revealing a world of toxic prejudice that thrived well past Stonewall. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Womanish: a grown black woman speaks on love and life by Kim McLarin Searing in its emotional honesty, Womanish is an essay collection that explores what it means to be a black woman in today’s turbulent times. Writing with candor, wit and vulnerability on topics including dating after divorce, depression, parenting older children, the Obama’s, and the often fraught relations between white and black women, McLarin unveils herself at the crossroads of being black, female and middle-aged, and, ultimately, American. Powerful and timely, Womanish draws upon a lifetime of experiences to paint a portrait of a black woman trying to come to terms with the world around her, and of a society trying to come to terms with black women. Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

[fanhackers]

Much of the debate surrounding "Rebel Girl" centers on the question of whether or not someone can be a political fan in the same way one can be a sports fan or media fan. In an essay on youth activism, Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova (2016) tell the story of an MIT conference where several speakers, who had just presented on participatory politics, were asked if they viewed their work as activism. The speakers were quick to distance fan engagement from activism because of the perceived political connotation. Increasingly, fan communities are becoming places to mobilize political action; yet it seems fan scholars are reluctant to view fan work as overtly political (Brough and Shresthova 2012; Hinck 2012; Jenkins and Shresthova 2016; Sandvoss 2013). Ashley Hinck (2012) points out that many would prefer to refer to fan engagement with politics as media engagement instead of civic engagement.

Davisson, Amber. 2016. "Mashing Up, Remixing, and Contesting the Popular Memory of Hillary Clinton." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 22.

[writeaboutart]

of demons and spectres

“Of Demons and Spectres” is the essay written by Joselina Cruz, curator of the Philippine Pavillion at the 57th Venice Art Biennale. The essay first appeared in the exhibition catalogue for the pavillion, and then in the exhibition booklet of the re-positioning at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, which took place from 23 May to 20 July 2019.

The essay is quite long, but I am amazed at how it was able to piece together all these different lines of thinking. In other news, I learned by posting this that formatting outlines on Tumblr is a real pain.

I. Questions / Context

A. How does one represent one's own country (in the context of Venice as the most prestigious art stage in the world)?

Can we find it in current art practices?

Can we seek it from past art productions?

Can we ascertain it elsewhere, through generative ways of reconstituting the contemporary without being trapped in the past or the present?

B. Shifting ideas about nationalism, nation identity, and the national.

Politically, we see shifting nationalisms emerging in Europe and Asia

Authors addressing the idea of "nation" come up with a discourse necessarily based on the context of the contemporary, and influenced by continuous re-definitions of gender, literature, and history.

Some events of the past year occurring in other parts of the world show a global shift to very "interesting times". [1]

II. Framework

A. The art of comparison as origin of nationalism

Jose Rizal calls it el demonio de las comparaciones in his novel Noli me Tángere

Benedict Anderson's experience with Former President of Indonesia, Sukarno, as mentioned in the introduction of his The Spectre of Comparison.

B. Nationalism in the midst of spatial and temporal dislocations

Nationalism that is spatial and temporal

Spatial, developed during the latter part of 19th century, equality across borders

Temporal, subsists in fear of difference and protects sameness

Nationalism as experienced in parts of the world

Europe - traverses both definitions, may run the spectrum of ethnocentricity or may be civic-focusedb.

Asia - countries play off the world powers and are not beholden to them

The nation exists best as imagined (thesis)

Individuals hold different nationalities and occupy different geographical spaces, essentially allowing the individual to be part of various nations.

Temporal dislocations allow for ideas, objects, and people themselves to be imagined beyond the present.

C. Contemporaneity

Rizal and gardens as triggers

Gardens triggered Crisostomo Ibarra's el demonio de las comparaciones.

Gardens are bound to the colonial act of forcing nature to follow shape under the hand of the gardener/colonizer.

Gardens to which Rizal, through Ibarra, compares Jardin Botanico to is a generalized garden Europe, a failed utopia.

Rizal in the garden observes two states of existence, without losing sight of his position - living in the present and capable of seeing both colony and colonizer.

Rizal's el demonio de las comparaciones is part of contemporaneity that re-maps history and art production outside of national and disciplinary frameworks.

Contemporary and the Contemporaneity

The usual definition of contemporary is an unsettled present, constantly bound by time.

There are several difficulties with this definition of contemporary.

The contemporary finds itself in a constant state of becoming, always being made, and as such, the present becomes the past before it can even get to the future.

"Contemporary art" has no critically meaningful referent, and often the term is diluted without its existential, social, and political meanings.

The exhibition depends upon the coming together of different but equally present "temporalities" such that all temporalities are present, but one must also be aware of their distance from it; one must be critical.

"The contemporary is understood as a dialectical method... with a more radical understanding of temporality." [2]

'Dialectical contemporaneity' does not designate a particular style, rather an approach [3] making it possible for the exhibit to be mined as a politicized project.

D. Point of Engagement

Access by the point-of-view of Anderson to produce a sightline that accesses past and future (Rizal) and future and present (Maestro and Ocampo). 

Access through its triple temporalities - as a 21st century exhibition linking with 19th century via an experience during the 1960s, the twentieth century.

III. Artworks Overview

A. Lani Maestro and Manuel Ocampo exemplify belonging to two states.

Maestro's belonging is of Canadian and Filipino, while Ocampo's belonging is of FIlipino and American.

The two artists' practice are intertwined with their own thinking of origin and status.

Their individual practice are also responsive to their shifting topographies, calibrating reflectively as they move across places.

B. With the two artists' works, the point of engagement is the body, the means by which either negotiate areas of their critical positions.

In Noli Me Tángere, the politics of Rizal was embodied by Crisostomo Ibarra, echoing the work of Merleau-Ponty when the body enters a space.

For Maestro and Ocampo, the site of engagement is the body itself

Maestro's work references the body in terms of its presence, whether absent or distant.

Ocampo's work references bodies that are ruinous and ruined, rendering them in utter disregard of their natural contours or functions.

IV. Lani Maestro's in The Spectre of Comparison

A. Engagement with the Body

The works feature the body as a metaphor, a political site, and a social construct.

The works present how the body occupies and is occupies, and how it produces a presence in its absence.

The works echo previous works in this qualification.

ladders that reach out to windows inside a box

book of images of waves picturing a moving ocean

sound piece with a murmured phrased.

silent post cards containing a line or two

The works incite a return to the individual.

B. No Pain Like This Body (2010/2017)

Influences

The novel of the same name by Harold Sonny Ladoo

The conditions of poverty, homelessness, prostitution, and drug abuse prevalent in Downtown Eastside Vancouver

Characteristics

The work has the same height as a regular person, thus situating the body to the work, its text and color.

The work employs a text reversal to derive the capacity and incapacity of the body to handle discomfort.

Appearance in Previous Exhibitions

The work was first exhibited in a gallery with shop windows opening to the street.

The work glowed bright enough so that people were drawn to and were able to experience the work even after gallery closing time.

C. these Hands (2017)

Influences

The poem Flowers of Glass by Jose Beduyab.

The "cradle of jewelry-making" in France [4]

Reading

The work resonates to the body part valuable to artists.

The work speaks in anticipation of the wounding of the body

The work speaks about fear of violence that comes with the severance of limbs.

D. meronmeron (2017-2019)

Title

The word meron comes from mayroon.

The analogy may: existence, roon: place; thus mayroon: existence in a space.

The word meronmeron doubles itself: meron is to have, thus meronmeron to have being.

Reading

The art work awaits the audience to fill the latent obligation of its title. [5]

The benches fulfill the work's commitment once they are occupied.

V. Manuel Ocampo's in The Spectre of Comparison

A. The body as unabashedly present B. The disappointment with the real

Manuel recalled the experience seeing the paintings of Juan Valdez de Leal in Seville in 1997.

Manuel is a painter first and everything else is a poor second, and as such his paintings resist definitions.

C. The iconography of Manuel

Catholic elements (which have received attention)

Swastikas

Bodies cut up revealing spilling organs

Excrement

Abstract art with a native version

Magritte shown as a rat

Ad Reinhardt cartoons

VI. Synthesis

A. The artists do not simply resist authority, as they also engage and critique the discourse of their practices.

Maestro rethinks her oppositional relationship with "East" and "West".

Ocampo ponders on his "contamination" of culture.

B. The site of the spectre is not firmly situated.

The loci where the local and global meet are not essential to the practices of Maestro and Ocampo.

The same applies for artists and curators moving across nations and spaces.

The registers of experiencing the spectre (in the exhibition) are varied.

Rizal's sad melancholy

Anderson's moment of understanding

Maestro's re-thinking of "East" and "West"

Ocampo's contamination of cultures

The consciousness of the colonial émigré was crystallized by Rizal as he continuously flipped between the contexts of home and the colonizing other.

The same privilege exists for us who live in the 21st century, although not similarly as luxury, as there remains the call to determine whether we will remain as tourists or engage beyond mere surfaces.

VII. Conclusion

A. Venice as “the exhibition” ought to be contested, unless participation is a national desire to “officially” be part of the contemporary and global art discourse (which have its own responsibilities and consequences.

B. The artists in “The Spectre of Comparison” produce a global discourse, interrupted by discursive and complex imaginings that allow for the consciousness of worlds to be constructed across geographies, temporalities, and he haunting of soectres.

––––––––––––

Footnotes:

[1] Notably, Pres. Rodrigo Duterte's approval of the burial of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, and his bloody war on drugs; the election of Donald Trump as US President, Brexit, and continued nuclear missile testing of North Korea.

[2] Claire Bishop, Radical Museology.

[3] Ibid.

[4] In conversation with Lani Maestro.

[5] Ibid. Lani said an artwork is not complete unless one engages with it.

[thefranklinoutdoor]

LOVE ALL POTATOES

Jim Duignan Claire Pentecost Melissa Potter

Opening: Friday, June 14 from 6 to 9pm

From June 14 to September 7, 2019

Love All Potatoes is a garden laboratory project by Jim Duignan, Claire Pentecost, and Melissa Potter. The artists will plant heirloom variety potatoes (e.g. Jersey Yellow and Okinawa Purple) in improvised planters, start a compost bin, and install a handmade garden cart to seed their intersecting dialogues on plant personal histories, microecologies, and intangible heritage craft histories. Over the summer, the potatoes will blossom on vines running from the sacks along strings to parts unknown. The artists will activate the Franklin as an eco-pedagogical space to engender conversations on the Garfield Park community and land in general, and to develop other collective works-in-progress, such as a publication printed on paper made from potato vines.

Jim Duignan is an artist, forming the Stockyard Institute in 1995 as a civic, artist project in the Back of the Yards community of south Chicago. Stockyard Institute was influenced early by community artists, revolutionaries, local activists, and radical teachers who explored the community as sites of contest and considered the social and civic forms of public engagement as much a part of practice as they did their life. Duignan is a professor of Visual Art in the College of Education at DePaul University in Chicago where he is the Chair of Visual Art Education. Recent print publications include; Back to the Sandbox: Art and Radical Pedagogy, (Ed.) Jaroslav Andel, published Western Washington (2019), Poor and Needy; Baggesen and Brackman, Published by Poor Farm Krabbesholm (2018), Building a Gang-Proof Suit: An Artistic and Pedagogical Framework, for the Chicago Social Practice History Series, (Eds.) Mary Jane Jacob and Kate Zeller, published University of Chicago Press (2015) and No Longer Interested for the Blade of Grass Foundation (2014). Select exhibitions include Stockyard Institute Retrospective, DePaul Art Museum (2021), Envisioning Justice, Sullivan Galleries (2019), PUBLIC SCHOOL, Hyde Park Art Center (2017), Smart Museum (2017), the Chicago Cultural Center (2016), Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland (2016), Interference Archive, Brooklyn, NYC (2015), Sullivan Galleries, Chicago (2014), Kochi-Muziris Biennial, India (2014) and the Hull House Museum (2013). In addition, Duignan’s work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Art Newspaper, Prestel Publications (Nick Cave’s Epitome), New York Times, Chicago Reader, New Art Examiner, Chronicle of Higher Education, New City, Chicago Tribune, and many others. His work has been recognized by the Weitz Family Foundation, Illinois Humanities, Artadia (NYC), and the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in Studio Arts.

Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer whose poetic and inductive drawings, sculpture and installations test and celebrate the conditions that bound and define life itself. Her projects often address the contested line between the natural and the artificial, focusing for many years on food, agriculture, bio-engineering, and anthropogenic changes in the indivisible living entity that animates our planet. Since 2006 she has worked with Brian Holmes, 16Beaver and many others organizing Continental Drift, a series of seminars to articulate the interlocking scales of our existence in the logic of globalization. She is also a founding member of Deeptime Chicago, dedicated to cultural change in the Anthropocene. A sample of Pentecost’s exhibition venues include dOCUMENTA(13), Whitechapel Gallery, the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Nottingham Contemporary, the DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), the Third Mongolian Land Art Biennial, The Times Museum (Guangzhou), Spencer Museum (Lawrence, KS). Institutions inviting her to lecture include MIT; CalArts; RISD; Northwestern University; Rice University; The University of Virginia; Creative Time Summit and many others. She is represented by Higher Pictures, New York, and is a Professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Melissa Hilliard Potter is a feminist interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited in venues including White Columns, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, to name a few. Her films have been screened at international film festivals, such as the Cinneffable and the Reeling International LGBT Film Festival. Potter’s awards include three Fulbright Scholar grants, which enabled her to build two papermaking studios at university art departments in Serbia and Bosnia & Hercegovina. As a curator, Potter’s exhibitions include “Social Paper: Hand Papermaking in the Context of Socially Engaged Art” with Jessica Cochran and “Revolution at Point Zero: Feminist Social Practice” with Neysa Page Lieberman. Her critical essays have been printed in BOMB, Art Papers, Flash Art, Metropolis M, Hand Papermaking, and AfterImage among others.

At The FLAT SCREEN

Solo Land Dive: Dukan Desert

Hope Ginsburg

Solo Land Dive: Dukan Desert is part of a body of the Land Dive Team body of work that proposes meditation, practicing present-moment awareness with equanimity, for coping with climate change. Breathing on land with scuba makes for a kind of assisted meditation. The mild, if not moderate discomfort of the equipment (its weight, warmth, constraints) keeps the wearer in mind of his or her physical presence. The intensification of each breath becomes a kind of involuntary meditation; one must “show up” for each exhalation when an entire apparatus is calling attention to it. In this video, one of thirteen Land Dives since 2014, I undertook a solo meditation, breathing with scuba gear in a remote desert landscape crisscrossed by all-terrain vehicles.  As disjunctive as the image appears, it contains the ominous implication of a “future ocean” as rising sea levels are a threat in the Persian Gulf region.

Each of Hope Ginsburg’s long-term projects builds community around learning. Her work is by turns collaborative, cooperative, and participatory. These artworks are made with peers, students, scientists, members of the public, and experts with knowledge from outside of the field. Rooted in first-hand experience, Ginsburg’s projects are invested in the socially transformative potential of knowledge exchange. Hope Ginsburg has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as MoMA PS1, MASS MoCA, Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Wexner Center for the Arts, Kunst-Werke Berlin, Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, Baltimore Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, and the Mercosul Biennial in Brazil. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Ginsburg is the recipient of an Art Matters Foundation Grant and a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and has attended residencies such as the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Wexner Film/Video Studio, and The Harbor at Beta Local. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Hyperallergic, and Artforum.

Solo Land Dive: Dukan Desert 2015 Single channel video with sound 4 min 59 sec

Camera: Dylan Halpern Editor: Tyler Kirby Sound: Joshua Quarles

Edition of three Courtesy of the artist

At The LIVING ROOM

A Metaphor Against Oblivion

Norma Vila Rivero

A Metaphor Against Oblivion is Norma Vila’s latest conceptual body of work, inspired by two themes: landscape and absence. This collection of images references and criticizes the notions of development by metaphorically representing the absent landscape that remains in the collective consciousness. Vila is tempted to convey the impossibility of the landscape that surrounds her by presenting a critical look at the transformation of the landscape -in the broadest sense of the word- while at the same time a contemplative view of the paradox of development in today's world.  

Vila Rivero works with analogies and the double meanings of objects, words, and concepts. Media, disciplines, and materials are intertwined, thereby creating an intricate web of multi layered ideas. Vila’s starting points originate with personal experiences within her collective environment. She then directs her interests into an in-depth critical analysis of selected topics. With a deep dive into the origins and meaning of her subjects, she prepares the groundwork for making critical, contemporary and pertinent visual commentary.

Vila Rivero comments: "For this project I am working with the representation of the metaphor 'the skin of memory'... Everything we have seen marks us, and many times when passing by some place, it is inevitable to remember that place as it was before ... And that absent landscape is impregnated in us, it is a mark and a metaphor against oblivion. In order to represent that mark or trace in the memory, in this series of photos I place a stencil on the back of a model and the sun imprints the image to their backs... Then I place the model - marked by the memory of what is no longer there - in the place that corresponds to the vanished landscape. All the images used as stencils are based on stories that I have compiled from friends, family members, or myself. The result is a photo that serves as testimony or record of the specific event ... The aim is to present a clear and manifest absence. Photography as a medium is vital as it makes an absence visible and serves as a certificate of presence. In A Metaphor Against Oblivion themes such as the impossibility of the natural landscape on an island, the excessive urban development, the abandonment of cultural heritage, and the negligence in the communities and public spaces are over layered to contrast the effects caused by failed leadership and bad management today."

Calls for attention on the ways we relate to the environment are a peremptory key in Norma Vila's most recent proposal. Issues that previously emerged in her work are openly formulated today in what will be a long-term research project about environmental sustainability in the face of economic growth. Reflection through the chosen images allows us to think about ideas: memory-event-revelation, games of presence and absence, traces of hidden realities, as activation of the memory, and of updating past marks, cognitively and emotionally.

Norma Vila Rivero (b. 1982, Puerto Rico) is an artist that approaches art making from a diverse number of perspectives while subtly seeking to address emotional issues or intense social themes from a humanist point of view. She is also an active art projects coordinator of numerous innovative projects in Puerto Rico and in Boston and New York. Vila Rivero has a B.A. in Visual Arts from the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón and an M.A. in Arts Administration from the Universidad del Turabo, Ana G. Méndez. Her work has been presented in Mexico, Norway, Switzerland, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, St. Croix and U.S.A. In 2017 was selected to participate with Occupy Museums Debt Fair installation at the Whitney Museum Biennial. Since 2010 she is the Administrator of the Galería de Arte de la Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. In 2011 she co-founded Metroplataforma Organizada an artist run space and since 2015 has been the Director of ÁREA: lugar de proyectos (Founded in Caguas, P.R in 2005). Vila Rivero's work is part of the collection of the Museum and Center for Humanistic Studies Dra. Josefina Camacho de la Nuez (University of Turabo, Caguas, P.R), Luciano Benetton Collection, el Museo de Arte de Puerto RIco (MAPR) and the Foundation FIART (International Foundation Fund of the Arts) in Madrid, Spain, as well as in private collections.

At The FRONT YARD

Are You Ready Kahlil Irving

Previously exhibited at Wesleyan University Center for the Arts, "Are You Ready" is a flag sculpture that connotes the relationship of a surrender flag and a racing flag. There is always a struggle and reality to face. So to use the flag with its complex usage past and present is a symbol I find relevant. "Are You Ready" is a response to the call that Tracy Chapman narrates within her song "I'm Ready".  She is singing for passage, for love, for health, for life. So I am responding to her call. This flag flying is a message for Black life and the perseverance of Black people through the constant pressures faced while living today.

Kahlil Robert Irving (b. 1992, San Diego, Ca) is a multimedia artist, currently living and working part time between Saint Louis, Missouri and Brooklyn, New York. Irving completed his BFA in art history and ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute. In May of 2017, Irving earned his Master of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. At Washington University in St. Louis Irving was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow. Irving was awarded the 2017 Alice C. Cole Fellowship from the studio art department at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Recently, Irving completed the Turner Teaching Fellow at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.  His work is in the collections of the Riga Porcelain Museum, in Riga, Latvia; Foundation for Contemporary Ceramic Art in Kecskemet, Hungary; The RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson Community College in Overland Park, Kansas; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York. Most recently, his practice has involved making objects that are to challenge constructs around identity and culture in western civilization. He wants to challenge realities of Racism and objects that exist within the history of decorative arts and contemporary life.

Are You Ready by Kahlil Irving 2018 3 x 5 feet polyester digital print Courtesy of the Artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, NY

THE FRANKLIN 3522 W. Franklin Blvd, Chicago IL 60624 (312)823-3632 Hours: Saturdays 2-5PM and by appointment http://thefranklinoutdoor.tumblr.com/ Instagram #thefranklinoutdoor

[collapsedsquid]

It feels like election season never ends. But I want to submit that the problem is that it does end, with a very high-stakes election. The integrity of our elections has, thank goodness, become a subject of active public concern. The ways we draw district lines, the ways we form voting rolls, the susceptibility of our voting machines to malfunction or subversion, all demand scrutiny and reform. But there is another vulnerability, hiding in plain sight: the fact that our elections all take place basically on a single well-known day.[1] A short, sharp manipulation of the news cycle, if well-timed, can tilt electoral outcomes. Many people plausibly blame Hillary Clinton’s loss on a letter by James Comey released a week prior to the 2016 election. Perhaps that was not intentional manipulation, but similar events past or future might be.

It seems obvious to me that political actors of every party and creed do their best to exploit this open vulnerability in our electoral system, working to manufacture coverage or even newsworthy events likely to motivate their own electoral base in the immediate run-up to an election. To the degree electoral results turn on this contest, they seem likely to reflect the cleverness (or deviousness) of campaign operatives much more than any colorable expression of the “will of the people”. It’s hard to come up with a justification, even under very naturalistic theories, why this would be a desirable form of democratic deliberation.

Less apocalyptically, the quality of representation is undermined by a predictable election cycle. In the run-up to an election, often inaccessible public figures become suddenly more available and accessible. It is a commonplace that Senators’ willingness to take unpopular votes depends upon whether they are near the beginning or the end of their six-year terms. That might be intended in Constitutional theory, but in practice, in my view, unpopular votes are less likely to reflect dispassionate deliberation on behalf of the polity and more likely to entail privileging the interests of the elites that dominate either political party. Even in theory, however “insulated” we decide Senators should be from vicissitudes of the mob, this cyclicality in time of popular responsiveness seems undesirable. Ideally, our representative would not be “there for us” only during the short season when they are soliciting our votes. They would be there for us all the time.

For a variety of reasons, I think it a good idea that we introduce into our voting system a greater element of stochasticism, of structured, intentional randomness. This may be counterintuitive — sure, a manipulated news cycle may not express the will of the people, but how could a random number? The deep fact of randomness is that while an individual “draw” may be noise, random selection has characteristics that are well defined, widely understood, and intuitively accessible. When statisticians want to examine a population, they take a random sample and characterize that. With good randomness and a reasonably large sample size, it becomes extremely unlikely that the characteristics of the sample will fail to represent the broader population. This fact is already a part of our political process. Pollsters, who affect electoral possibilities as well as characterizing them, seek (very imperfectly) random samples of likely voters. We select juries largely by lottery, on the theory that this is a good way to get a representative sample of ones “peers”. There have been a variety of democratic experiments with sortition, simply choosing by lot, picking random names from the phone book. Perhaps overcynically, many of us might consider that an improvement over our present, professional political representation.

I do not favor sortition for the constitution of our legislatures. There is a lot to be said for choosing among representatives who express an interest in and commit to doing the work, and to some kind of voting process that ideally filters for quality. What I do favor is an idea called “lottery voting” or “random ballot“. I really encourage you to read the first link, a very readable academic note by Akhil Reed Amar which introduced the idea. You should also read this essay by David MacIver (ht Bill Mill). In a nutshell, everybody votes in the way they currently do for their preferred candidate. Then we throw the ballots in a big hat, and draw the winner like a bingo hall door prize.[2] You’d never want to use lottery voting to elect a President. Who knows who you might pick? It’d be totally random. But for a large legislature, lottery voting will predictably yield proportional representation along whatever axes or characteristics are salient to voters, not just formal political parties. Further, lottery voting is immune to gerrymandering, and every vote always has equal influence. (This is decidedly untrue of conventional “first-past-the-vote” voting, where the statistical effect of a vote — the difference in the probability of a candidate winning with and without an additional vote — depends very much on the closeness of the election.) There are lots of reasons to love lottery voting, including the conventional case for proportional representation, which I very desperately endorse. (See Matt Yglesias and Lee Drutman.) Not to let the best be the enemy of the good, I’d favor American experiments in more common forms of proportional representation (multimember districts, party lists), but lottery voting really is the gold standard. It is simple, effective, resistant to entrenchment of incumbents or capture by political parties. The US House of Representatives should be selected by lottery voting today. At the very least, we should start experimenting in some state houses.

One interesting characteristic of lottery voting is there is no need that elections be simultaneous, or even take place at known predictable times. Suppose we had an electoral system that looked like this: Every month, 5% of the voting roll is randomly selected to cast a ballot for a representative. There’s no big election day: Any time during their month selected voters can come in and cast their vote. After the balloting period has passed, one ballot is randomly selected, and then a virtual coin is flipped that comes up heads only one time in 24. If the coin comes up heads, the current representative is replaced with the randomly selected ballot. If not, that month’s ballots are thrown away, and the representative’s term continues. Under this system, on average, a representative’s terms would be 24 months, but there would never be a period when a representative is more or less near an election. Whatever persuasion incumbents (or their political parties or PACs or dirty tricksters) want to engage in to see to their reelection, they’d have to do basically all the time. Challengers also could arise at any time, but would want to make their case continually. That would become a very different enterprise than existing elections, which engender an avalanche of marketing in sprints. People who wish to become representatives would want to become prominent and popular within their communities, or become endorsed by popular civic organizations (including but not just political parties), in ways that are sustainable over time.[3] Is this a good idea? One might argue that it would just make elections more expensive to contest, and so increase the influence of money. But lottery voting by its nature is much less susceptible to vote buying. Your ads can win 60% of the vote and you still have a 40% chance of losing. 

Not only a random ballot, but a random election timing as well.

[mcleemlis]

My 2018-2019 E.J. Josey Scholarship Essay Submission

I'm sharing my submission for the 2018-19 E.J. Josey Scholarship contest. The topic for the 2018-2019 essay was: What is the library's role in the current political climate as it relates to issue around social justice and the community? I was not one of the main winners for this award, but rather a second tier awardee who was lucky enough to win a scholarship when the BCALA obtained additional funding for this scholarship. I hope you enjoy reading my submission!

Please note that no changes have been made to this essay since it was submitted in 2018.

-Michelle

The ALA Code of Ethics states that libraries are responsible for and should be committed to the intellectual freedom, freedom of access to information, and equitable services for all library users (“Professional ethics”). Many of these ideals harken back to the establishment of the ALA Library Bill of Rights in 1939; serving our patrons, communities, and society has been a core value of librarianship for decades (Rubin, 2016). Modern libraries contribute to their communities by providing services for patrons, safeguarding intellectual freedom, and providing a safe space for marginalized peoples (Ettarh, 2018; Gustina & Guinnee, 2017). It is important that we continue to provide these values to the communities and populations we serve, especially during fraught times. The current political climate has increased tensions within American society, such as concerns surrounding illegal immigration, refugees, sexual assault and misconduct, and police brutality against minority individuals. These topics illustrate how diverse the American people and their needs are, but this diversity and the difficulties that come along with it can also create challenges that library staff may not be equipped to handle.

The library profession in the United States lacks racial diversity; 88% of MLIS-holding librarians are white (Morales et al., 2014). Many concerns in our current political climate relate to minority or marginalized populations, which makes them social justice issues. Since the profession is a majority white, many librarians may feel that they have no personal stake in these issues, do not have the background to combat these difficulties, or are not aware enough to take part in social justice initiatives. These opinions do not change what is written in our code of ethics or the Library Bill of Rights. As professionals within the library and information science field, we are obligated to provide “the highest level of service to all library users (“Professional ethics”)”. Even if we cannot identify with all patrons, it is our duty to support them equitably through library services. Supporting our users does not mean we need to be experts in the various aspects of social justice, but it does mean that we need to be aware of these challenges and how they are affecting our users and communities.

We may not have firsthand experience or extensive knowledge of issues like immigration status and rights for illegal immigrants, but we cannot deny that these are concerns for some of our patrons. The current political climate has caused some of these individuals to feel isolated from society and resources that could be helpful to them because now there is a higher level of fear and risk of being exposed and subsequently deported. Our code of ethics not only obligates us to provide resources for these groups within our communities, but it also requires us to protect the privacy and confidentiality of our users when they seek out information on or related to these topics (“Professional ethics”). Exemplifying these obligations, the Arlington Heights Memorial Library in Illinois created a civic engagement workshop called “Know Your Rights” which aimed to inform users of their legal rights within the United States (Peet, 2018). Amidst rumors that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) representatives would be present at the workshop, the library canceled the event due to concerns about the safety of the participants, their patrons, and their staff (Peet, 2018). Community members protested the cancelation of this program, and in response the library dedicated a webpage that not only explained the reasoning behind the cancellation, but also provided the program content so their patrons would still be able to access this information (Peet, 2018). In this example, the Arlington Heights Memorial Library not only provided much needed information to their users, but they also took steps to protect their user’s privacy and ability to access this information.

Librarians and library staff may find topics like police brutality against minorities or racial injustices difficult or uncomfortable to discuss, especially when most members of our profession are white. A librarian’s race does not mean they can avoid or ignore these topics, but it is also important to remember that they don’t have to confront these issues all on their own. Librarians can, and should, use their position within society to bring information and resources together within a space that is safe and open to all who need access to these resources. Staff may not have the knowledge or experience needed to comment on or confront all of the injustices within our society, but we can provide a space for people who do have this knowledge to meet and share what they know with others within the community.

The question shouldn’t be what role libraries have in relation to social justice within our communities, because the ALA Code of Ethics clearly states that our role is to provide information and resources for all within our communities. The real question is if we will allow our lack of diversity, lack of experience with social justice, or discomfort with these issues to be excuses for us to sidestep our responsibilities to the populations and communities we serve. To ignore social justice issues that individuals in our communities must deal with in their daily lives is the same as ignoring these people, their struggles, and their needs.

References

Ettarh, Fobazi. "Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves." In the Library with the Lead Pipe, 10 Jan. 2018, www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/.

Gustina, Margo, and Eli Guinnee. "Why Social Justice in the Library?" Library Journal, vol. 22, no. 4, 1 June 2017, pp. 52-55.

Morales, Myrna, et al. “Diversity, Social Justice, and the Future of Libraries.” Libraries and the Academy, vol. 14, no. 3, 2014, pp. 439–451., doi:10.1353/pla.2014.0017.

Peet, Lisa. "City of Library Love: PLA 2018 in Philadelphia." Library Journal, vol. 143, no. 8, 1 May 2018, pp. 12-15.

"Professional Ethics", American Library Association, May 19, 2017. http://www.ala.org/tools/ethics (Accessed December 12, 2018). Document ID: 39f580a8-833d-5ad4-f900-53ecfe67eb1f.

Rubin, Richard E. Foundations of Library and Information Science. 4th ed., American Library Association, 2016.

[vbrinson]

Mindset Monday with Veronica Brinson. Each Monday, I celebrate a new start, a new beginning, renewal of the mind with Mindset Monday.

This week topics are laid out on Facebook in details. I outline each of the topics here. Follow all week to read or hear discussions pertaining to the various topics:

1. Election 2020, leadership, and civic engagement

2. Strengthening families

3. Wellness via exercise

5. Essay contest via Poetic Reflection

6. Law and the world

7. Post or semi post pandemic:COVID 2019

Thank you for tuning in. Right now, Mindset Monday is done as a hobby and public service activity.

[gravitascivics]

AN ANTI FEDERALIST VIEW OF LIBERTY

This posting aims to continue the topic this blog took up in its last posting.  That posting, entitled “The Natural Rights’ View of Morality” (February 25, 2020), asked and began to answer the question:  what influence does the moral beliefs of the natural rights view over governance and politics have on a person?  And a subsequent question is:  what does such an influence mean when it is applied to the staff of a secondary school especially among that school’s civics teachers?

         That posting pointed out that the main element of that influence is that it encourages people to see politics from a purely personal perspective.  Since that construct emphasizes a person’s right to determine his/her values and the rights associated with advancing those values, the construct directs a person to look inward and remove him or her from the interests of others.  The problem is that in the US, a nation that has a federalist foundation to its polity, it counts on a proactive posture in relation to communal concerns, at least more so then what natural rights view promotes.

         So, a value orientation that affects this relationship between how people feel toward others and the needs of maintaining or, perhaps, strengthening a more communal foundation should not only be of concern to people in general but also should have a targeted effect on what is taught in civics classes.

         Contextually, one understands that holding a belief as a moral claim, a person upgrades that belief as a guiding principle.  The belief becomes more than a standard by which to judge what is prudent; its advocate elevates the belief to a life guiding principle.  As this principle becomes more central to one's moral standing, one will be disposed to encourage others to abide by that same standard.  

Policy preferences that are held because of this principle are given more importance than would otherwise be the case.  The bearer of such a value, in the extreme, becomes ideological about it.  In such a case, practical aspects of related situations or the interests of negatively affected parties are mundane and dispensable.  On the other hand, for “true believers,” related positions and arguments – those that oppose that person’s belief – become extremely important; they are judged as being hazardous.  To the extent that anyone is so affected, related or derived concerns become very serious.

For most educators of civics, this is not the case; a commitment to natural rights values – particularly that of liberty – is more moderate.  The extreme is mentioned only to provide a point of comparison for the varying positions different advocates might take.  As for these advocates, to any degree of fidelity, they follow the tenets of classical liberal political thought.[1]  

To the extent it applies, one benefits from understanding what constitutes classical liberal thought.  Again, liberal thought believes that individuals should be free to form their own values and goals in life along with the freedom to act toward fulfilling those values and goals.  Following John Locke's standard, the right to pursue one's value choices is limited only by the rights of others to do likewise.

This is a legitimate expression of a version of liberty,[2] but that legitimacy does not make it optimal when one considers the interests of the commonwealth.  As a trump value, the sanctity of a person to be such a free agent has been identified by the term, individual sovereignty.[3]  Or as Locke stated, “every man has a Property in his own Person.”[4]  Many can agree with such a sentiment.  Most Americans believe in liberty.  The question becomes:  how central to one's core beliefs is such an allegiance and, in turn, how does that centrality affect the common welfare?  

As this blog has stated elsewhere, one might believe in liberty; one might even cherish it, but is it one’s ultimate or trump value in a general sense or in terms of civic concerns? Those who hold liberty so centrally as the ultimate value tend to see government's most important function, even its only function, as guaranteeing this form of liberty.  

They see government securing individual sovereignty with the least amount of coercion possible.  They ascribe to this political position a moral quality to the point that they see challenges to liberty, as just mentioned, as extremely important.  Such devoted advocates – the ideologues – define how moral a person is in his/her civic behavior by how well he/she lives according to the tenets of liberty.

By applying this whole moral concern to the work of civics curriculum developers and implementers, they would obviously champion individual rights in their proposed instructional plans.  They believe individual students are free to develop for themselves any set of moral beliefs if such beliefs do not trump liberty as defined above. Applying this moral claim to civics curriculum, of course, places individual rights as prominent.  And, in line with this blog’s contention, that construct is currently dominant among Americans.

What that means in public schools is that, under the auspices of a natural rights view, students can follow any religious tradition – Christian, Judaic, Islamic, secular humanistic, etc. – if one is not coerced into doing so. Which means one does not prohibit others from the same choices.  In summary, all reasonable moral claims are equally tolerated.  Or, using other words, the natural rights moral stand has little to say about most moral questions.  At least that’s the impression it gives.  

It promotes an individualism whose effects have grown through the years and has become in the last seventy-five years or so the moral foundation for how Americans define their nation’s institutions.  That is, it has become the prevalent construct and it has taken on a more institutionalized role.  For example, the reigning economic view, according to William K. Tabb,[5] is the neoliberal view that was initiated by the Ronald Reagan administration and its economic policies.  Those policies glorified individualism in the nation’s markets and, even after the 2008 financial crisis, is still the operating view of economic policy makers.[6]

As such, one can judge how such a position among fellow citizens has become ever more ingrained and a source of many of our assumptions about our social world.  With that influence, it steers, more than any other view, the political views of Americans and into many other realms of life.  As such, it undermines certain other value positions or traditions.  

For example, a bias against welfare programs might emerge. Not that such a policy is necessarily anti-liberty, but with a natural rights moral standing, a person is free to see the value choice that rejects any responsibility toward others as simply another choice with no a priori importance attached to it.  Americans in general have lost much of their communal biases or dispositions.

That is, one is not held to supporting such a policy or rejecting it because these are personal value choices with little demand for any justification.[7]  Further, there should not be any legal stigma on anyone’s indifference to the plight of others; to lack such concern is, again, just another value choice.

To federalists, this is abysmal and dangerous.  To them, given their perception that the polity was based on federalist values, such a natural rights bias among the general population is a recipe for serious problems.  Which problems?  One can look around to find out.  This writer, in another venue, has reported certain dysfunctional attributes afflicting the American polity. [8]  

That is, by asking the question, what is the current state of civics education, he reports that among Americans low levels of knowledge over governance and politics, low levels of political engagement, high levels of uncivil behavior, and, compared to other countries, high levels of criminality exists.  

On a related matter, today one can see how the spending by a billionaire through sophisticated TV adds can make him a contending candidate in the Democratic primary contests.  This is not to counter the prudence of his nomination, if he were to get it, but to just point out what the power 30-second TV bites can have on the political perceptions of people in general.  

This leads to the question:  can a billionaire “buy” an election?  Of course, the question, can a billionaire buy a politician, has long ago been answered and the answer is quite divorced from federalist values. And this type of disconnect leads one to one more concern over natural rights values.  That is, as hinted at with the reference to neoliberal view, their association to market perceptions and values should be questioned.  Hmm, a topic for another posting?  This writer thinks so.

[1] Not to be confused with the position on the political spectrum that lies left of neutral and further left than the conservative point on the spectrum.  Actually, classical liberal thought is considered a conservative view.

[2] Federal liberty is another version.

[3] Jeffrey Reiman, “Liberalism and Its Critics,” in The Liberalism-Communitarianism Debate, ed. C. F. Delaney (Lanhan, MD:  Rowman and Litttlefield Publishers, Inc., 1994), 19-37.

[4] Meir Dan-Cohen, Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 296.

[5] William K. Tabb, The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012).

[6] The neoliberal view has been under attack since the 2008 crisis, but its replacement has yet been defined or taken hold.  As a matter of fact, it has been given new life under the Trump administration.

[7] As a matter of fact, since welfare depends on tax dollars, such a program does inflict costs and, therefore, welfare laws impose the choice of some – those who support them – on other citizens.  That imposition obviously defies the natural rights view of liberty.

[8] Robert Gutierrez, “How Effective Is Civics Education?” A PDF accessed February 28, 2020,  https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=CED163627385DD3C!11783&ithint=file%2cdocx&app=Word&authkey=!AHFo6PFBnpUkePw .

[noramoya]

“IN THE MEDIA WORLD, AS IN SO MANY OTHER REALMS, THERE IS A SHARP DISCONTINUITY IN THE TIME–LINE :’BEFORE THE 2016 ELECTION, AND AFTER IT !”

“Things we thought we understood –narratives, data, software, news events – have had to be reinterpreted in light of Donald Trump’s surprising win as well as the continuing questions about the role that misinformation and disinformation played in his election. Tech journalists covering Facebook had a duty to cover what was happening before, during, and after the election. Reporters tried to see past their often liberal political orientations and the unprecedented actions of Donald Trump to see how 2016 was playing out on the internet.

Every component of the chaotic digital campaign has been reported on, here at The Atlantic, and elsewhere: Facebook’s enormous distribution power for political information, rapacious partisanship reinforced by distinct media information spheres, the increasing scourge of “viral” hoaxes and other kinds of misinformation that could propagate through those networks, and the Russian information ops agency. But no one delivered the synthesis that could have tied together all these disparate threads. It’s not that this hypothetical perfect story would have changed the outcome of the election. The real problem—for all political stripes—is understanding the set of conditions that led to Trump’s victory. The informational underpinnings of democracy have eroded, and no one has explained precisely how.

We’ve known since at least 2012 that Facebook was a powerful, non-neutral force in electoral politics. In that year, a combined University of California, San Diego and Facebook research team led by James Fowler published a study in Nature, which argued that Facebook’s “I Voted” button had driven a small but measurable increase in turnout, primarily among young people. Rebecca Rosen’s 2012 story, “Did Facebook Give Democrats the Upper Hand?” relied on new research from Fowler, et al., about the presidential election that year. Again, the conclusion of their work was that Facebook’s get-out-the-vote message could have driven a substantial chunk of the increase in youth voter participation in the 2012 general election. Fowler told Rosen that it was “even possible that Facebook is completely responsible” for the youth voter increase. And because a higher proportion of young people vote Democratic than the general population, the net effect of Facebook’s GOTV effort would have been to help the Dems.

The research showed that a small design change by Facebook could have electoral repercussions, especially with America’s electoral-college format in which a few hotly contested states have a disproportionate impact on the national outcome. And the pro-liberal effect it implied became enshrined as an axiom of how campaign staffers, reporters, and academics viewed social media. In June 2014, Harvard Law scholar Jonathan Zittrain wrote an essay in New Republic called, “Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out,” in which he called attention to the possibility of Facebook selectively depressing voter turnout. (He also suggested that Facebook be seen as an “information fiduciary,” charged with certain special roles and responsibilities because it controls so much personal data.)

In late 2014, The Daily Dot called attention to an obscure Facebook-produced case study on how strategists defeated a statewide measure in Florida by relentlessly focusing Facebook ads on Broward and Dade counties, Democratic strongholds. Working with a tiny budget that would have allowed them to send a single mailer to just 150,000 households, the digital-advertising firm Chong and Koster was able to obtain remarkable results. “Where the Facebook ads appeared, we did almost 20 percentage points better than where they didn’t,” testified a leader of the firm. “Within that area, the people who saw the ads were 17 percent more likely to vote our way than the people who didn’t. Within that group, the people who voted the way we wanted them to, when asked why, often cited the messages they learned from the Facebook ads.”

In April 2016, Rob Meyer published “How Facebook Could Tilt the 2016 Election” after a company meeting in which some employees apparently put the stopping-Trump question to Mark Zuckerberg. Based on Fowler’s research, Meyer reimagined Zittrain’s hypothetical as a direct Facebook intervention to depress turnout among non-college graduates, who leaned Trump as a whole. Facebook, of course, said it would never do such a thing. “Voting is a core value of democracy and we believe that supporting civic participation is an important contribution we can make to the community,” a spokesperson said. “We as a company are neutral—we have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote.”

They wouldn’t do it intentionally, at least. As all these examples show, though, the potential for Facebook to have an impact on an election was clear for at least half a decade before Donald Trump was elected. But rather than focusing specifically on the integrity of elections, most writers—myself included, some observers like Sasha Issenberg, Zeynep Tufekci, and Daniel Kreiss excepted—bundled electoral problems inside other, broader concerns like privacy, surveillance, tech ideology, media-industry competition, or the psychological effects of social media.

The same was true even of people inside Facebook. “If you’d come to me in 2012, when the last presidential election was raging and we were cooking up ever more complicated ways to monetize Facebook data, and told me that Russian agents in the Kremlin’s employ would be buying Facebook ads to subvert American democracy, I’d have asked where your tin-foil hat was,” wrote Antonio García Martínez, who managed ad targeting for Facebook back then. “And yet, now we live in that otherworldly political reality.” Not to excuse us, but this was back on the Old Earth, too, when electoral politics was not the thing that every single person talked about all the time. There were other important dynamics to Facebook’s growing power that needed to be covered.

Facebook’s draw is its ability to give you what you want. Like a page, get more of that page’s posts; like a story, get more stories like that; interact with a person, get more of their updates. The way Facebook determines the ranking of the News Feed is the probability that you’ll like, comment on, or share a story. Shares are worth more than comments, which are both worth more than likes, but in all cases, the more likely you are to interact with a post, the higher up it will show in your News Feed. Two thousand kinds of data (or “features” in the industry parlance) get smelted in Facebook’s machine-learning system to make those predictions.

What’s crucial to understand is that, from the system’s perspective, success is correctly predicting what you’ll like, comment on, or share. That’s what matters. People call this “engagement.” There are other factors, as Slate’s Will Oremus noted in this rare story about the News Feed ranking team. But who knows how much weight they actually receive and for how long as the system evolves. For example, one change that Facebook highlighted to Oremus in early 2016—taking into account how long people look at a story, even if they don’t click it—was subsequently dismissed by Lars Backstrom, the VP of engineering in charge of News Feed ranking, as a “noisy” signal that’s also “biased in a few ways” making it “hard to use” in a May 2017 technical talk.

Facebook’s engineers do not want to introduce noise into the system. Because the News Feed, this machine for generating engagement, is Facebook’s most important technical system. Their success predicting what you’ll like is why users spend an average of more than 50 minutes a day on the site, and why even the former creator of the “like” button worries about how well the site captures attention. News Feed works really well. But as far as “personalized newspapers” go, this one’s editorial sensibilities are limited. Most people are far less likely to engage with viewpoints that they find confusing, annoying, incorrect, or abhorrent. And this is true not just in politics, but the broader culture.

That this could be a problem was apparent to many. Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, which came out in the summer of 2011, became the most widely cited distillation of the effects Facebook and other internet platforms could have on public discourse. Pariser began the book research when he noticed conservative people, whom he’d befriended on the platform despite his left-leaning politics, had disappeared from his News Feed. “I was still clicking my progressive friends’ links more than my conservative friends’— and links to the latest Lady Gaga videos more than either,” he wrote. “So no conservative links for me.” Through the book, he traces the many potential problems that the “personalization” of media might bring. Most germane to this discussion, he raised the point that if every one of the billion News Feeds is different, how can anyone understand what other people are seeing and responding to?

“The most serious political problem posed by filter bubbles is that they make it increasingly difficult to have a public argument. As the number of different segments and messages increases, it becomes harder and harder for the campaigns to track who’s saying what to whom,” Pariser wrote. “How does a [political] campaign know what its opponent is saying if ads are only targeted to white Jewish men between 28 and 34 who have expressed a fondness for U2 on Facebook and who donated to Barack Obama’s campaign?”

This did, indeed, become an enormous problem. When I was editor in chief of Fusion, we set about trying to track the “digital campaign” with several dedicated people. What we quickly realized was that there was both too much data—the noisiness of all the different posts by the various candidates and their associates—as well as too little. Targeting made tracking the actual messaging that the campaigns were paying for impossible to track. On Facebook, the campaigns could show ads only to the people they targeted. We couldn’t actually see the messages that were actually reaching people in battleground areas. From the outside, it was a technical impossibility to know what ads were running on Facebook, one that the company had fought to keep intact. Pariser suggests in his book, “one simple solution to this problem would simply be to require campaigns to immediately disclose all of their online advertising materials and to whom each ad is targeted.” Which could happen in future campaigns.

Imagine if this had happened in 2016. If there were data sets of all the ads that the campaigns and others had run, we’d know a lot more about what actually happened last year. The Filter Bubble is obviously prescient work, but there was one thing that Pariser and most other people did not foresee. And that’s that Facebook became completely dominant as a media distributor. About two years after Pariser published his book, Facebook took over the news-media ecosystem. They’ve never publicly admitted it, but in late 2013, they began to serve ads inviting users to “like” media pages. This caused a massive increase in the amount of traffic that Facebook sent to media companies. At The Atlantic and other publishers across the media landscape, it was like a tide was carrying us to new traffic records. Without hiring anyone else, without changing strategy or tactics, without publishing more, suddenly everything was easier.

While traffic to The Atlantic from Facebook.com increased, at the time, most of the new traffic did not look like it was coming from Facebook within The Atlantic’s analytics. It showed up as “direct/bookmarked” or some variation, depending on the software. It looked like what I called “dark social” back in 2012. But as BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel pointed out at the time, and as I came to believe, it was primarily Facebook traffic in disguise. Between August and October of 2013, BuzzFeed’s “partner network” of hundreds of websites saw a jump in traffic from Facebook of 69 percent.”

At The Atlantic, we ran a series of experiments that showed, pretty definitively from our perspective, that most of the stuff that looked like “dark social” was, in fact, traffic coming from within Facebook’s mobile app. Across the landscape, it began to dawn on people who thought about these kinds of things: Damn, Facebook owns us. They had taken over media distribution. Why? This is a best guess, proffered by Robinson Meyer as it was happening: Facebook wanted to crush Twitter, which had drawn a disproportionate share of media and media-figure attention. Just as Instagram borrowed Snapchat’s “Stories” to help crush the site’s growth, Facebook decided it needed to own “news” to take the wind out of the newly IPO’d Twitter.

The first sign that this new system had some kinks came with “Upworthy-style” headlines. (And you’ll never guess what happened next!) Things didn’t just go kind of viral, they went ViralNova, a site which, like Upworthy itself, Facebook eventually smacked down. Many of the new sites had, like Upworthy, which was cofounded by Pariser, a progressive bent. Less noticed was that a right-wing media was developing in opposition to and alongside these left-leaning sites. “By 2014, the outlines of the Facebook-native hard-right voice and grievance spectrum were there,” The New York Times’ media and tech writer John Herrman told me, “and I tricked myself into thinking they were a reaction/counterpart to the wave of soft progressive/inspirational content that had just crested. It ended up a Reaction in a much bigger and destabilizing sense.”

The other sign of algorithmic trouble was the wild swings that Facebook Video underwent. In the early days, just about any old video was likely to generate many, many, many views. The numbers were insane in the early days. Just as an example, a Fortune article noted that BuzzFeed’s video views “grew 80-fold in a year, reaching more than 500 million in April.” Suddenly, all kinds of video—good, bad, and ugly—were doing 1-2-3 million views. As with news, Facebook’s video push was a direct assault on a competitor, YouTube. Videos changed the dynamics of the News Feed for individuals, for media companies, and for anyone trying to understand what the hell was going on.

Individuals were suddenly inundated with video. Media companies, despite no business model, were forced to crank out video somehow or risk their pages/brands losing relevance as video posts crowded others out. And on top of all that, scholars and industry observers were used to looking at what was happening in articles to understand how information was flowing. Now, by far the most viewed media objects on Facebook, and therefore on the internet, were videos without transcripts or centralized repositories. In the early days, many successful videos were just “freebooted” (i.e., stolen) videos from other places or reposts. All of which served to confuse and obfuscate the transport mechanisms for information and ideas on Facebook.

Through this messy, chaotic, dynamic situation, a new media rose up through the Facebook burst to occupy the big filter bubbles. On the right, Breitbart is the center of a new conservative network. A study of 1.25 million election news articles found “a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.”

[gokhan-tanriover]

PHOTOGRAPHY IN PUBLIC SPACE: BRIGHTON

The day that I decided to change my final major project idea was the day when we visited 3 individuals to learn about the work they do in various photographic areas. Oliver Whitehead, projects curator from The Photographers Gallery talked about his work for the Brighton Photo Biennial 2012, Agents Of Change: Photography And The Politics Of Space. I had been considering how to continue my work for the Confessionals series and after this packed day, I decided that the Major Project would be the perfect time and space to do so. It felt right rather than forced and the series appeared to be most congruent with the direction my work is naturally going towards.

Brighton Photo Biennial 2012 (BPB12) reflected on how public space is constructed, controlled and contested, how photography is implicated in these processes and the tensions and possibilities created by this dialogue. Looking to recent efforts to politically re-imagine urban space through social and civic uses, BPB12 was concerned with photography as both a tool and a process – a means of understanding the world and an active force in shaping it.

BPB12 presented newly commissioned work, rediscovered archives and UK premieres with exhibitions shown in established galleries, new art spaces and as interventions in the streets and squares of the city and billboards, posters and free newspapers. The Biennial provided a critical space to think about relationships between the political occupation of physical sites and the production and dissemination of images. At the core of BPB12 examined photography as both a tool and a process: a means of understanding the world, and an active force in shaping it.

The co-curator, Benedict Burbridge invited its artists and organised the exhibition of work in unusual spaces and modes that highlighted connections between image and context by underlining the influence that setting has on meaning. Burbridge's research addresses issues of photographic practice. The research was developed and expanded from his work on photography and protest, published in a special issue of Photoworks co-edited by Burbridge in 2011. For Agents of Change, he considered the relationships between the contemporary-image culture and the politics of space. Research was carried out through the Biennial; it is an example of research through practice.The process of research that shaped the Agents of Change exhibitions involved several strands. Existing literature on art and activism has generally focused on issues of participation in socially engaged art, whereas work on photography and politics has centred on issues of contested representation. The innovation of the Biennial lay in brokering dialogues between art and activism in terms of specific image cultures and the spaces in which they are disseminated. 

Research drew on writing by Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey on the politics of space; Guy Debord, the Retort network and Julian Stallabrass on issues of spectacle and digital culture; and Nato Thomas, Jorge Ribalata and Clare Bishop on socially engaged art. Burbridge considered specific image-based practices and recent essays by Ariella Azoulay, Saskia Sassen, Liam Devlin and Negar Azimi on photography and activism. He interviewed those involved with grassroots political activity and undertook critical study of their literature. He developed a detailed understanding of a variety of contemporary lens-based art practices through several means: visual analysis during visits to festivals, exhibitions and studios, interviews with artists and the critical study of relevant specialist literature. This process of research conceptualised the exhibitions of Agents of Change, the dedicated issue of Photoworks co-edited by Burbridge and a large public programme. Key aspects of the research were mapped in an essay in the special issue of Photoworks, which highlighted the types of connection between the different image practices the Biennial set out to forge and introduced the overarching conceptual framework that made the connections meaningful. The publication placed photo-journalism, art photography, community-based projects and a diverse set of activist image-practices in dialogue. These dialogues were reflected in commissioned texts, drawing together the voices of squatters, members of Occupy, curators, academics and artists to create an assemblage of primary sources. Each addressed a specific practice in relation to Burbridge's overarching conceptual framework.

In Agents of Change, meaning was generated cumulatively across the exhibitions. Many projects exhibited in the Biennial had initially been disseminated as newspapers and fly-posters, using photography to intervene in the urban landscape. Agents of Change's gallery-based exhibitions aimed to examine the `traffic' of such photographs, as they moved from street to gallery wall. The different modes of presentation and dissemination were juxtaposed to spotlight how the place in which images are seen shapes the likely audience and the understanding of images. This approach was extended by placing a number of interventions directly in Brighton's urban landscape. Agents of Change displayed photographs relating to the history of political occupation in Brighton, not in galleries but in the city itself, as fly-posters, newspapers and light-boxes. 

Confessionals can be enhanced not just with the visual representation of the childhood memory/confession but where this visual is placed. The personal memory which has an impact on a developing identity can be made public to play with the binary of public and private. The project can be shown within the gallery space as well as public space to make a bigger impact.

[phgq]

UP Subol Society to hold ‘Padunungan’ 2020

#PHinfo: UP Subol Society to hold ‘Padunungan’ 2020

LINGAYEN, Pangasinan, Oct. 31 (PIA) – The University of the Philippines Subol Society (UPSS) will hold the Padunungan 2020, a series of inter-campus competitions wherein elementary and high school students all over Pangasinan will gather to showcase their academic and artistic prowess, at the Narciso Ramos Sports and Civic Center here on January 6-7, 2020.   In a statement, the UPSS said that Padunungan comes from the root word “dunong,” meaning wisdom or knowledge.   “The first Padunungan in 1977 was a simple quiz show and originally designed to cultivate the academic wits of the Pangasinense youth. Acknowledging the importance of education inside and outside of the four walls of the classroom, it has now transformed into a multi-competition event that engages Pangasinense pupils’ and students’ rigor in academics and grip in their own Pangasinan culture and heritage,” it said.   Now on its 40th year, Padunungan 2020, which is endorsed by the Department of Education, will continue to cater for the development of the province’s future leaders and artists as it is now a host to variety of competitions such as quiz shows, folk dancing and singing, sabayang pagbigkas, poem recital, essay and poem writing, poster making, and extemporaneous speech.   Nex year, there will be a total of at least 1,500 students, coaches and visitors who are expected to participate in the event.   The UPSS, founded in 1975, is a non-stock and non-profit duly recognized university-wide organization of Pangasinense students in the University of the Philippines (UP).   For 44 years, the organization has been promoting its general principle of service and excellence through innovative social projects that will benefit the province of Pangasinan and its people in the sectors of education, sports and recreation, environment, youth empowerment, and social services.   UPSS currently has two chapters based in UP Diliman and Baguio campuses, respectively.   Aside from the annual Padunungan, the UPSS also conducts a college entrance test review in different schools in Pangasinan every year; outreach programs assisting marginalized communities; and other socio-civic projects such as educational fora, Alay Lakad assistance and Pangasinan food eating contest.   For 2020, the Padunungan has the theme, “Rekindling the Fire: Establishing the Youth’s Involvement on Social Change and Innovation.”   For more information regarding the Padunungan 2020, interested participants may visit its Facebook page: UP Subol Society.   The deadline for submission of entries for the contests is on November 25, 2019. (JCR/AMB, PIA Pangasinan)

***

References:

* Philippine Information Agency. "UP Subol Society to hold ‘Padunungan’ 2020 ." Philippine Information Agency. https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1029432 (accessed October 31, 2019 at 05:21AM UTC+08).

* Philippine Infornation Agency. "UP Subol Society to hold ‘Padunungan’ 2020 ." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1029432 (archived).

[grazrhet-blog]

*A musical double argument*

In this entry, I will examine the critical questions: What is a current example of dissoi logoi in a particular rhetorical artifact? In which ways is this a productive and unproductive method, and is it more productive or unproductive with regard to this particular artifact?

To investigate these questions, I examined the song “Welcome Home” and “Welcome Home (finale)” from the Broadway musical Bandstand.The song, “Welcome Home (finale)” is a current example of dissoi logoi in the musical Bandstand due to the reprisal of the familiar song with honest lyrics that have a narrative of their own. Dissoi logoi is a productive method for educational purposes and for the sake of starting a conversation as long as it is used within reason. Overall, this is a productive rhetorical tool in regards to this particular artifact.

Bandstand is about veterans that have come back after fighting in WWII. The main character Donny Novinski is a musician that enters a radio songwriting contest. The song is meant to be a tribute to the war and the winner will ultimately get to perform the song in a movie. Donny gets a band together of all vets because he believes that this status will add another element of realism to the group and will boost their credibility. The band’s lead singer is named Julia and while she did not serve in the war, her husband was Donny’s best friend overseas and he died in combat before he was able to return home.

The song “Welcome Home” is sung twice throughout the show. Once while the band is in the audition period of the contest. It is a song that they write and perform in one of the many nightclubs while they are preparing for the final round of the contest to decide which band gets the regional title and will progress on to the final, national competition. “Welcome Home,” is a beautiful love song that depicts the story of a woman waiting for her husband who is about to come home from fighting in the war. It describes beautiful scenes of the women opening a telegram informing her that he will be coming home and then again her standing in the doorway waiting to greet him. The song is delicate and uplifting to say the least.

At the climax of the musical, the band is notified moments before it is to go on that the competition is a scam. In the fine print at the bottom of the contracts that each band member signed, it states that the radio gets full rights to the songs performed in the competition and the band will get no recognition and no movie appearances. To complicate matters further, the band has been struggling over the morality of the songs they have been writing for the stage. Most of their songs are upbeat, jazzy, and filled with themes of love and honor. Throughout the entirety of the show, we see each of the band members struggling with PTSD and the consequences of the war even after returning stateside.

To combat the radio show’s scheme and to satisfy it’s individual moral dilemma, the band makes a last minute song change and performs “Welcome Home (finale)” for the regional competition. This new rendition of the song features more honest lyrics about what it is like to return from war and it features personal testimonies from the band members about the life-altering impacts that the war had and is still having on their family, their physical health, their mental health, and their overall functioning capabilities in day to day life. The finale lyrics are much more brutal, not like the fantastical, love ridden, victory theme songs the radio show was used to. This performance deterred the radio station from taking the rights to the song (because no producer would want to publish those types of lyrics), it allowed the band to speak the truth about the war, and above all us, it caught the public’s attention (source).

Gagarin and Woodruff (1995) discuss dissoi logoi as rhetorical tool used by the Greeks and was influential as “double arguments.” It is an argument that could be good for some audiences and bad for others. It is an argument that can be proper according to some and shameful according to others. Finally, it is an argument that can be right to some people and can be wrong to others. In the case of “Welcome Home (finale)” it could have been good or bad, proper or shameful, and right or wrong. Disregarding how the fictional public reacted in the plot of the musical, the analysis is as follows. The song might have been good because it sounds upbeat, it is fast paced, it is exciting, and it features fabulous musicians. On other hand, it could have been bad for the audience because of the merciless lyrics that demonstrated the ferocity of the war. Next, the song could have been considered proper or shameful. The song might have been proper because it no longer shielded the terrors of war and the impact that it had on the men and women involved. It might have been proper because it is a testimony coming from veterans themselves, the men who lived those experiences. It could have been shameful because of the kairos surrounding the song, was live of the broadcast an appropriate time or place? The song could have been right or it could have been wrong. This final characteristic will be explored in the following paragraphs.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to this rhetorical tool. An advantage is that it identifies multiple perspectives when considering an argument. In that sense, it makes the argument stronger because the speaker has considered other counter arguments that might arise or it will allow the speaker to sympathize with others. In the instance of Bandstand, the audience is caught by surprise and is moved by our veterans. There are disadvantages to this rhetorical tool. The disadvantages include the falsified illustration of the argument and the confusion of fact versus opinion (Kunde, 2019). Here is the chance for the discussion to become a debate that is more about winning and losing rather than the acquirement of knowledge, and oftentimes extremes are stretched implying that sides of an argument are complex and often cannot fit in two categories. Overall it is a productive method because it reminds readers of the gravity of the aftermath of war, but should be used responsibly.

According to Olbyrs (2006) dissoi logoi can be used successfully for educational intentions. The essay presents dissoi logoi as a rhetorical process that progresses viewpoints and prepares people for ‘public life.’ Olbyrs discusses various environments in which it might be of particular use in addition to education. He lists instances such as those having to do with communications, english, business, and political science reminding readers that “the aim of practice in dissoi logoi is not simply the awareness of other ideas....but rather the ability to reproduce them, to understand them, and to critique them all.” Dissoi logoi offers opportunities to audiences for more democratic engagement, civic responsibilities, and unparalleled learning opportunities. Returning to the song, the song is emblematic of the environments that would be educational to audiences and aid in the expansion of perspectives and knowledge. The song allows for the audience to reproduce the events that happened to the soldiers. The song also assists in helping the community to understand the obstacles the veterans are grappling with each day. Lastly, the tool itself and the song, help us to critique and learn.

In regards to this particular artifact, the musical aims to increase awareness about veterans and the sacrifices that these men and women make for our country. The blunt approach that the song takes, especially in contrast with the original lyrics heard earlier in the show, help dramatize the gravity of the situations veterans face. All in all, the song proves to be a successful argument to challenge the societal bliss and the victory surround WWII.

The song, “Welcome Home (finale) is a current example of dissoi logoi in the musical Bandstand due to the reprisal of the song with more surprising and honest lyrics than the first time theatre goers hear it. Dissoi logoi is a productive method for educational purposes and for the sake of starting a conversation as long as it is used within reason. Overall, this is a productive rhetorical tool in regards to this particular artifact and raising awareness about societal issues like veterans experiences and PTSD.

Sources:

Broadwaycom. (2017, September 14). BANDSTAND's Laura Osnes Premieres New Version of "Welcome Home". Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owa9GbQlrhg

Gagarin, M., and Woodruff, P. (Eds.) (1995). Dissoi Logoi. Early Greek political thought from Homer to the Sophists. 296-308.

Hoang, H. (2018, June 26). Welcome Home (Finale) - Bandstand (Original Broadway Cast Recording) With Lyrics. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUFExKFIVg

Kunde, M. (2019). The Sophists and Gorgias. Personal Collection of M. Kunde, Augustana College, Rock Island, IL.

Olbrys, S. G. (2006). Dissoi Logoi , Civic Friendship, and the Politics of Education. Communication Education, 55(4), 353–369. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520600879188

[healthnotion]

Does Stoicism Extinguish the Fire of Life?

In August 1937, Ernest Hemingway stopped by the office of Max Perkins, his book editor at Scribner’s. Perkins happened to already be hosting another visitor: Max Eastman, a writer of commentary on politics, philosophy, and literature who had several years prior penned a critical review of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. “It is of course a commonplace that anyone who too much protests his manhood lacks the serene confidence that he is made out of iron,” Eastman had written, “[and] some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity.”

Hemingway was extremely sensitive to criticism and derided those who peddled it as envious, milksop non-doers who lobbed invective from the safety of the spectator’s gallery. That Eastman had not only critiqued his writing, but questioned the thing in which “Papa” took the most pride — his manhood — made the “libel” even more galling. Though Hemingway had penned a searing rebuttal at the time, the passage of years had done nothing to dampen his sense of indignation and desire for avengement.

Now his chance had come.

Hemingway had been particularly irked at Eastman’s dig that he had created “a literary style . . . of wearing false hair on the chest.” To literally affirm his hirsuteness, Papa therefore initiated their encounter by ripping open his shirt to reveal a chest which Eastman admitted “was hairy enough for anyone.” Hemingway then tore open Eastman’s shirt, exposing a chest which was in comparison, Perkins observed, “bare as a bald man’s head.”

Thus far, Hemingway had only been “fooling” around. But catching sight of the very volume which contained Eastman’s critical essay lying on his editor’s desk, he got “sore.”

Hemingway demanded that its author read the critical passages aloud. When Eastman refused, Hemingway slapped him across the face with the book. The two fell over the desk and wrestled a bit, before Hemingway broke into a broad grin and regained his good humor.

Many moderns are apt to view this episode as rather ridiculous, and Hemingway as demonstrating an insecure machoism. If not an example of faux manliness, it’s apt to be seen as evidence of misdirected emotion — why care so much about what other people thought of you? It seems like a real exercise in pointlessness.

Except for one thing.

Hemingway’s passionate hate for his haters seemingly fueled his work. After he was especially excoriated by critics for Across the River and Into the Trees, “it was Ernest’s pride that defied the naysayers and goaded him into writing The Old Man and the Sea,” his friend A.E. Housman observed. “It was an absolutely perfect counterattack and I envisioned a row of snickering carpies . . . who in the midst of cackling, ‘Through! Washed Up! Kaput!’ suddenly grab their groins and keel over.”

Being touchy about his honor was what ultimately catalyzed Hemingway’s greatest literary masterpiece. 

Ancient Rome, Contest Culture, and the Rise of Stoicism

“If historians long had the notion that Rome ‘fell,’ it is a notion based on the metaphor of an original firm, stable, solid structure that collapsed or disintegrated. I would argue that if Rome had a fall, it was a fall into a world dominated by exactly that metaphor.” –Carlin Barton, Roman Honor

In the present age, we’re apt to agree with Eastman that a “real man” doesn’t try to prove his manhood, and that the more he sees the need to demonstrate his masculinity, the less secure he is in its possession. We associate manhood with having a “stiff upper lip” — being unemotional, not caring what others think, being sort of “rock-like” in disposition. And we assume that manhood has always been framed this way.

In fact, though, the kind of manliness Hemingway evinced — touchy, thin-skinned, competitive, emotional, unpredictable, concerned with reputation and righting perceived wrongs — was the dominant pattern of masculinity for most of human history.

One of the central pivot points in the shift from the historic paradigm to the more modern one can be traced to ancient Rome. To understand how and why the shift occurred, let us travel back in time, taking along as our guide Carlin Barton, who, in Roman Honor, explains why “the principal metaphors expressing honor (light and fire) and those expressing dishonor (stone and ice)” became completely inverted as the republic became an empire.

Note: All quotes, unless otherwise cited, are taken from Roman Honor.

Light & Fire

“The desire for honor and glory set men on fire.” –Cicero

The early Roman Republic was an honor culture. That is, it followed the pattern which had been set by all ancient societies, wherein people were keenly concerned about their reputation among their peers.

In ancient Rome, it was not enough to live the community’s code, to say you possessed this or that virtue; you had to prove that you did — publicly, in an endless series of tests and trials. Honor was not won once, and forever retained — it had to be earned, and re-earned over and over again.

To be respected, you had to have skin in the game.

Rome was thus not only an honor culture, but a contest culture. Everything was a competition. As the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero observed of the republic’s boys:

“With what earnestness they pursue their rivalries! How fierce their contests! What exaltation they feel when they win, and what shame when they are beaten! How they dislike reproach! How they yearn for praise! What labors will they not undertake to stand first among their peers!”

Whatever could be fought over, big or small, was fought over — though not always so seriously; the Romans’ contests were full of whimsy, playfulness, and plenty of teasing.

Romans competed both with the living and the dead. They strove to not only live up to the good name of their ancestors, but to surpass them in glory. And while we moderns think it gauche to compete with one’s family and friends, the Romans thought these peers made the best fellow competitors, for they were equals with whom one shared the most in common. 

Romans competed over who was most skilled and excellent in rhetoric, in sports, in war, in wealth, and in virtue — particularly the defining quality of manhood: courage. The Roman historian Sallust described the way legionaries not only relished daunting odds, but were driven in their efforts by the desire to be the best soldier on the field:

“To men like these no ordeal was unfamiliar, no position rough or difficult, no armed foe formidable; their courage conquered all obstacles. But the greatest competition for glory was amongst themselves; each rushed to be the first to strike an enemy, to climb a wall, to be conspicuous in action.”

The Roman legionary strove not only for personal honor, but for public recognition; ancient Rome offered many different awards and commendations, and soldiers competed strenuously for them all.

Romans treated the achievement and maintenance of reputation as a contest in and of itself. Any insult or slight was seen as a challenge; “You say I am X, but I’ll prove that you’re wrong.” A Roman could win such a “competition” by pointing to past evidences of their honor; this was a culture in which politicians shamed political opponents or bolstered the credibility of their own arguments by tearing open their tunic to reveal scars earned in defense of the republic. Or, a critic might be refuted by one’s performance in a fresh showdown in which one’s bona fides could be plainly demonstrated.

Whether in peace or bellum, the dominant virtues of Roman culture and its citizen-soldiers were those of the warrior. Regardless of what one was competing over — whether civic pride, martial advantage, or the claim to a reputation worthy of respect — manhood was manifested in one’s willingness to engage. “The Romans associated virtus [manliness] with vis, vires (physical power, vitality, energy, violent or forceful action),” and “A male was transformed into a man by the willful expenditure of [this] energy.” Cicero, who took as his own slogan, “Ever to excel,” declared that “The whole glory of virtue [virtus] resides in activity.”

The placement of dynamic engagement at the heart of the culture affected even the language of ancient Rome:

“As the result of living in a contest culture, Roman ideas of truth (like Roman notions of the sacred) were more active, palpable, and embodied than our own. How much more active and embodied they were can be gleaned from a comparison of a few of our English words with their Latin cognates . . . Our ‘fact’ is passive, for us a fact just ‘is.’ The Roman factum was something made or done . . . Latin existere was to come into view, to appear, come forward, show oneself, come into being; exstare was not only to exist, it was to project, protrude, stand out, be conspicuous, to catch attention . . .

Latin sapere, to know, was to have sap, blood, juice, because consciousness was in the chest with the lungs, heart, breath, and blood. Many Latin words for knowledge express the physical aspects of what are, for us, principally metaphysical notions. Comprehendere, deprehendere, capere, and their relatives all stress the notion of grasping, seizing . . .

Verus . . . [often] meant ‘true’ in the sense of firm, capable of withstanding test or trial . . . [because] Generally, in earlier Roman thought, the ‘truth’ of what one said was intimately linked with the ability to endure a test or trial of some sort.”

The vigor of the Romans’ language points to the consolations of living in a contest culture. Existing in such a paradigm, in which your identity was neither fixed nor permanent, your worth was a moving target, and you had to always be actively engaged in proving yourself, required a greater tolerance for vulnerability, volatility, and unpredictability; yet, at the same time, it created a life that was more vivid and immediate, more active and animate — a life lived closer to the bone.

Each day, each encounter, each interaction, each challenge had stakes, had weight; the ancient Roman regularly found himself caught up in the discrimen, “the moment of truth when, before the eyes of others, you gambled what you were.” This was a life of risk, shot through with the exhilaration of constantly walking the line between honor and shame, glory and destruction, success and failure.

Out of these crucibles, “truth was not so much revealed as created, realized, willed in the most intense and visceral way.” In the agon — the test, trial, ordeal — you not only discovered your true position, your status in the pecking order, you discovered your strength, who you were. The contest established your being. It constructed reality.

In a life in which reality is made fresh every day, one remains radically present:

“A Roman’s hyperconsciousness of his or her ‘face’ produced a keen sense of embodiment. The person who underwent surveillance in a contest, who risked death or humiliation, lived critically in the moment. . . . For the Roman on the spot, up against a wall, the world was sharp, immediate, visceral. As in archaic Greek thought and much of Japanese thought — and for similar reasons — the Romans tended to physicalize everything, to make everything present. Reality was immanent; it was spectatus, expertus, probatus, perspicuus, argutus, manufestus. It hit you in the face; you could smack it with your hand.”

As the friction of contest culture ultimately made life incandescent, the Romans associated this way of living with light and fire. The man who exulted in activity, who embraced the agon, who ever existed in the arena, became a “glowing spirit”:

“Virtus and honores won in the crucible of the contest were shining and volatile; the refining fire of the ordeal produced a heightened sense of vividness, a brilliant, gleaming, resplendent existence. The man of honor was speciosus, illustris, clarus, nobilis, splendidus.”

In contrast, “The absence of energy (inertia, desidia, ignavia, socordia) was nonbeing. Inactivity froze the spirit.” The Romans associated dishonor — a disregard for reputation, an indifference to shame, an unwillingness to engage in the contest — with stone and ice. “Hardness was associated with impudence, stupidity, cruelty, numbness, and stupor,” and in fact “Stultus (stupid) was cognate with stolidus (inert, unmovable, dull, senseless).”

Stone & Ice

“Otium, vacatio, immunitas, withdrawal, leisure, the absence of tension and disturbance, became values in Roman society at the moment when it became impossible to maintain one’s being by contest and when the isolation of withdrawal was less painful than the humiliation that came with the active negotiation of one’s honor.” –Carlin Barton, Roman Honor

“From the time of Augustus, there begins a period in which the primores civitatis themselves often regarded inertia as sapientia [wisdom].” –Zvi Yavetz, Plebs and Princeps 

The Romans distinguished between “good contests” and “bad contests” and for the cultural paradigm described above to remain viable, the latter had to prevail. Good contests adhered to the following restrictions: “a) framed and circumscribed within implicit or explicit boundaries accepted by the competitors, b) between relative equals, c) witnessed, and d) strenuous.”

As the Roman Republic fell, civil wars broke out, and an empire was established, “a” and “b” became untenable, making citizens unwilling to live up to the requirements of “c” and “d.”

An honor culture can only function in a society in which there is a shared code — clear rules, standards, and expectations for interaction and engagement — and within a closed community of equals. But as the Roman Republic transformed into a sprawling, porous, far-flung empire, its society became increasingly large, complex, and diverse, and “The citizen of Rome became a citizen of the world,” this common, level playing field disintegrated.

In an honor culture, you can only be insulted by someone you consider an equal. But in Roman society, discerning who deserved this level of respect, and whose slights to take seriously, became increasing difficult and unclear. If someone possessed a different set of values, was a citizen still honor-bound to care what they thought?

Early Romans had shared rules of engagement — boundaries that checked their competitions and kept them civil. In the greater chaos of the empire, in the absence of shared norms, citizens made the rules up as they went. It was every man for himself. In fact, the less a man cared about honor, the more unable he was to be shamed, the more strategic advantage he gained. Early Romans had not played to win, but for the sake of engaging in a good fight; now, citizens were prepared to win at any cost.

Romans thus came to see contests as unequal and destructive. Those who engaged in competitions under the old assumption of participating on a level playing field, found instead that the odds were stacked, and this gap between expectation and reality engendered great bitterness. As did the fact that it seemed more and more men began receiving commendations, laurels of honor, who hadn’t actually earned them.  

As a result, Romans became disillusioned and began to withdraw from the contest, from active engagement with their fellow citizens and civic life. “When competition was insupportable, then paralysis, the desire to hide, and the desire to be insensitive and autonomous became widespread cultural phenomena. With the loss of the good contest and the rules that framed it, cold, callous, brazen shamelessness became a cure for shame.”

“Shamelessness” for the Romans did not necessarily mean, as it does for us, to be unvirtuous, but rather to literally be incapable of being shamed. That is, the shameless care nothing for what others think of them.

While today we tend to admire this kind of radical indifference to public opinion, to the Romans unbounded autonomy was the mark of a man whose energy had been drained, whose being had been destroyed; as Cicero put it: “To take no heed of what other people think of you is the part not only of an arrogant man but, to be sure, of a dissolutus.” How could someone who remained unmoved even in the face of legitimate criticism, who refused to be ashamed even when confronted with their culpability, ever be trusted?

Still, even Cicero, though himself a political leader, was sympathetic to the impulse to become callously disengaged, rhetorically asking, “what spirit trained in these times, ought not to become insensitive?” Elsewhere he quotes a line of Euripides: “If this mournful day were the first to dawn for me, had I not long sailed in such a sea of troubles, then there would be reason for anguish like that felt by a colt when the reins are first imposed and he bridles at the first touch of the bit. But now, broken by miseries, I am numb.”

In this self-imposed withdrawal and “the collapse of conditions for healthy competition in ancient Rome . .  . various strategies [had to be] devised by the Romans for creating a new emotional economy and redefining their spirit.” Said another way, “With the loss of the rules and conditions of the good contest, the entire language of honor ‘imploded’ and had to be ‘reconstructed.’”

This reconstruction process would involve nothing less than a complete inversion of values, and produce multiple radiating effects on Roman society.

First, the values associated with virtus shifted from effective energy, potency, gameness, to those we now associate with our modern idea of virtue — patience, sobriety, temperance, chastity, endurance. Values which had been externally directed and both volatile and valorous were replaced with those more stable and internal in nature. Honor centered around control, constraint, consistency; the ideal man becomes he who is poised, tranquil, disengaged. The passive values were elevated above the active.

While “Virtus often beg[an] to stand for or [was] replaced by the notion of honestas,” the words described two very different types of character:

“The new ‘honest’ man was not tense and dangerous. He was a man who could not be shamed and yet, simultaneously, posed no threat . . . man’s dignitas was no longer his presumptive claim to honor but rather an autonomous well of reserve. The tiger was declawed, the fire extinguished.”

The honest man could not be shamed, because of a second change in Roman culture: the arbiter of a man’s values — his honor in its newly constituted form — became not one’s peers but one’s conscience. Only oneself, or one’s God, could judge a man’s character.

Third, just as the possession of certain values became something that didn’t need to be proven through trial and test, neither did one’s manhood; being a vir was no longer something that had to be earned, but rather was innate.

Fourth, there was a retreat from the public sphere to the private one. “Political quietism” increased. The sentiment expressed by Cicero was common, “If we cannot enjoy the Republic, it is stupid not to enjoy our private affairs.”

Fifth, as Romans collectively withdrew from participating in a contest culture, they ironically began to lionize the individual who continued to play the game, and did so with a “winner-take-all” disregard for the old rules. The “man not prepared to lose” was idolized.

Instead of competition being something in which every average citizen took part, the masses mounted the bleachers, to cheer on, and live vicariously through, the few “gladiators” still in the arena. As spectators, they both worried over and felt excited by the rise of would-be tyrants who were willing to crush anyone who stood in their way; the thrill of the cult of victory, the stimulating spectacle of a man willing to go for the jugular, outweighed concerns about the political implications portended in the rise of such a rex.

As Dr. J. Rufus Fears argues, “When men came to believe that the charisma of victory no longer resided in the collective entity of the res publica but rather in the figure of an individual leader, communal authority and republican government were doomed and monarchy the only reality.”

Instead of citizens feeling collectively proud of their society’s successes, “Victory became profoundly personalized”:

“In his speech on behalf of Marcellus, Cicero explicitly refutes those who suggest that victory in war is the common achievement and honor of the Roman army and the Roman people: ‘This glory, Gaius Caesar, which you have recently acquired, no one shares with you. All of it, as great as it is (and it is undeniably very great) — all of it, I say, is yours. No credit belongs to centurion, to prefect, to cohort, to squadron. Not even the mistress of human destinies, Fortune herself, claims any partnership in this glory. She yields it to you; she confesses it to be yours — wholly and personally.’”

Sixth, the energy that was once directed to external contests was re-channeled into internal ones. The retreat into private leisure didn’t quite scratch an itch which stubbornly remained, nor soothe a sense of shame the late Romans tried so desperately to ignore; “Even while they praise[d] withdrawal from an untenable public life, they dreaded lest they appear to others as inactive or inert.”

And so competition was re-framed as something you could have with yourself — how well could you discipline your baser impulses and attain the new virtus? The will was still active, within. Ascetic practices took off, as ways to engage in a personal kind of battle, for though the ancient heroic virtues had been eclipsed, the Romans “never stopped wanting to be warriors.”

If one did not have to train for the contest, one could still exercise self-control. And one had to — on an almost inhumanely consistent basis; the self-control of late Romans had to in fact be far stronger and more unrelenting than that of their predecessors, who were allowed some lapses, some impulsivity. The irony, however, is that “Complete self-control [only] becomes an ideal — and a necessity — precisely when all control of one’s destiny is wrested from one.” That is, the Romans increasingly sought to master themselves, the less able they felt to master the world around them.

In this upside-down and enervated cultural landscape, the philosophy of Stoicism — begun by the Greeks centuries prior — found ready reception.

The maxims of the Stoics didn’t necessarily sanction this kind of withdrawal, but for those already inclined to adopt a more passive approach to the world, their philosophy provided a ready, even ennobled rationalization for their choices.

Whereas early Romans sought to create reality through sheer will and saw little limit to what was within their power to control, Epictetus said that one should not “demand things happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do,” and counseled against being “concerned with things which are beyond your power.”

Whereas the early Romans believed that one should rise to any challenge, Seneca argued that “If you do not wish to fight, you are permitted to flee,” while Arrian, a disciple of Epictetus, reasoned that it was wise to be like children, who, “when things do not please them, say, ‘I will not play anymore.’”

Whereas the early Romans believed that when you were struck, you were honor-bound to strike back, Seneca argued that “The blows of the powerful must be born not patiently merely, but even with a cheerful face,” and recommended developing “the endurance of the ox and of the horse obedient to the rein.”

Whereas the early Romans found their identity in community, in being part of an honor group, the Stoics idealized complete independence: “Beyond the last inner tunic, which is this poor body of mine, no one has any authority over me at all,” Arrian declared. Stoicism endorsed the new “shamelessness — in the form of apathy and autonomy.”

And whereas the Romans had cultivated an intentional touchiness — a literal and metaphorical blush in the face of shame — the Stoics advised cultivating an “impenetrable mask of indifference”:

“When the Romans begin to talk about salvation, the stone — once the image of callousness and stupidity — becomes the ideal. There was a hardness of the spirit, like a hardness of the body, that, when it burned, could not feel it.”

“Stand by a stone and slander it: What effect will you produce?” Arrian asked. “If a man listens like a stone, what advantage has the slanderer?”

Seneca suggested imagining oneself as withdrawn behind a mighty citadel:

“Surround yourself with philosophy, an impregnable wall; though fortune assault it with her many engines, she cannot breach it. The spirit that abandons external things stands on unassailable ground; it vindicates itself in its fortress; every weapon hurled against it falls short of its mark.”

In a time of upheaval, anxiety, and uncertainty, in which the “shock of embodiment” remained, but there no longer existed the rituals once attendant to a contest culture to manage it, Romans sought safe harbor in a stable standard that wasn’t contingent on other people. They wanted to find a way of being that did not require either competition or collaboration. They wanted to beat a retreat to an inner citadel. They wanted to grow a thicker skin.

“With the idea of survival or salvation came the idealization of natural man and of living according to Nature. Natural man did not have to prove he was a man, and so he did not need the contest. But the life of a natural man was, paradoxically, the life of a rock.”

In assimilating the principles of Stoicism — “a desperate strategy to preserve both life and honor” — the reversal of early Roman values was complete: “the worst imaginable spiritual condition for an ancient Roman — petrification, the cold stony unbeing of dishonor — inverts and becomes the ideal and honorable condition of the Roman soul, the ultimate remedy for dishonor — salvation.”

Walking on Coals

“If the ancient ideal was the make of oneself a target, to say in effect: ‘Here I am, come and get me,’ the Stoic ideal was to declare, ‘I am not what you see; you can’t get me because I’m not here at all.’”

Stoicism’s popularity rose in ancient Rome as citizens began to feel that it was less painful to disengage than to continue to put themselves out there. When the rules of the “contest” became unclear, and the playing field seemed tilted. When participation in civic affairs, in society, seemed an exercise in futility and frustration. A sucker’s game.

Stoicism has surged in popularity today for the very same reasons. When it seems pointless to engage, we are drawn to a philosophy that says that becoming callous and indifferent is not only okay, but noble even, honorable.

It is of course a question of great debate as to whether or not the “pure” philosophy of Stoicism does or does not endorse and encourage a more passive approach to life. For all the lines cited above that point to the fact that it does, other evidence could be marshaled to reach the very opposite conclusion. Stoic philosophy is much like the Christian religion (or any religion); people can use the same scriptural source to come to completely divergent theological conclusions. But while I think legitimate arguments could be made on both sides of the question, I’m actually not interested in making a quixotic attempt to “settle” it.

The question for our purposes is not whether Stoic “doctrine” necessitates passivity, but whether, when it mixes with human nature, it can have a tendency to do so. Lived philosophy, or lived religion, can be something quite different than how it is ascribed on paper, e.g., lived Christianity is much different than Christian theology. So it is with what is better termed “stoicism” — with a small “s.”

The question of how Stoicism affects human behavior is certainly not an academic one, or a niche one, limited to wholesale subscribers of the philosophy. No, we are all arguably stoics now, whether consciously or not. Shades of its principles have in fact become axioms that seem so self-evidently true, they needn’t even be examined.

But, they should be.

It’s axiomatic that we shouldn’t care what other people think, and that no one’s opinions can harm you. But what if there’s actually something to be said for feeling ashamed, at least if the one shaming you is someone you respect — and they actually have a point? What if the hurt of an insult can actually be a good thing, a spur to action? What if “I’m going to prove you wrong” can sometimes be the best possible source of motivation? What if revenge isn’t always a misguided, destructive pursuit, but, especially in the form of critic-silencing success, can be a productive endeavor?

It’s dogma that personal conscience is superior to the opinions of others as a form of moral authority. And yet research shows that shame — the penetrating eyes of the public — is a stronger motivator of ethical behavior.

It’s a truism that the best kind of contest is the one you have with yourself, and yet here again research contradicts this sacred shibboleth, showing that in fact, you absolutely cannot push yourself as hard or achieve as much of your potential when by yourself, than when you’re competing against others.

It’s accepted that self-mastery is one of the best and highest qualities, but what if a focus on self-control rises in inverse proportion to how much control we have in the world around us? What if a retreat to an inner fortress is simply a way of stuffing down one’s disappointment, fear of being hurt, and sense of impotence? The historian Ira Berlin argued that this was the real source of Stoicism’s popularity:

“When the road towards human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves, and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. This is certainly what happened in Ancient Greece when Alexander the Great began to destroy the city-states, and the Stoics and Epicureans began to preach a new morality of personal salvation, which took the form of saying politics was unimportant, civil life was unimportant, all the great ideals held up by Pericles and by Demosthenes, by Plato and by Aristotle, were trivial and as nothing before the imperative need for personal individual salvation.

This was a very grand form of sour grapes. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth, into a kind of inner citadel, in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. The king of my province — the prince — confiscates my land: I do not want to own land. The prince does not wish to give me rank: rank is trivial, unimportant. The king has robbed me of my possessions: possessions are nothing. My children have died of malnutrition and disease: earthly attachment, even love of children, are as nothing before love of God. And so forth. You gradually hedge yourself round with a kind of tight wall by which you seek to reduce your vulnerable surface — you want to be as little wounded as possible. Every kind of wound has been heaped upon you, and therefore you wish to contract yourself into the smallest possible area, so that as little of you as possible is exposed to further wounds.”

It’s taken for granted these days that stoic values are simply superior: competitions are just pissing contests for the insecure; being anxiously engaged in proving yourself makes you a “try hard”; caring about what others think, being thin-skinned, is the mark of an inferior man who lacks real confidence. Is it possibly too convenient, though, that the values which are put down, which were once considered the heroic, warrior values in ancient times, happen to be the ones which make men dangerous and unsuited to the modern capitalist economy?

“In contemporary American culture, the ‘honorable’ person is ‘honest and true,’ someone who is above all consistent. He . . . is conscientious, predictable, stable, solid, four-square, a rock, a brick.” We need bricks to stolidly build society. We need men willing to keep their head down, accept their role, be completely unruffled by the ding-dong in the cubicle next to them. We need men who will choose to retreat into their inner citadel, who, rather than becoming completely unhinged by the banality of modern life, will constantly repeat incantations that the meaninglessness of modern work, the irritation of a daily commute, the loneliness of an empty apartment cannot ultimately harm them.

It seems objectively true that you shouldn’t try to change what is outside of your control. But dive just a bit deeper, and a sticky question arises: what is and isn’t up to us? Stoics would say that things like wealth, health, and reputation are not completely within our control, and that we should only concentrate on the things that are: our desires, judgements, will. But of course many aspects of wealth, health, and reputation are up to us: we can’t completely control whether we get cancer or not, but we can choose to exercise and eat right; we can’t completely control what other people think of us, but we can choose to act in a way that generally garners respect; we can’t completely control our cash flow, but we can work hard and save.

The Stoics will say that even though we should accept things as they are, we can strive to make the best of the lot which falls to us. But what exactly is the line between submitting to our Fate and trying to change it? The Stoic answer is unclear, and it is in this ambiguity that the philosophy, in its lived form, can become an excuse for inaction.

Stoicism is certainly not all wrong; there is much in the philosophy that is right and true. Adopting some of its principles, in some circumstances, is arguably a necessity for surviving and staying sane in the modern world. But to say something is a necessary way of living, is not the same as saying it is the best way, or the only way, certainly not in all circumstances. 

It doesn’t have to be an either-or thing: you can decide to keep a stony face towards those you do not respect as equal peers, but to be more emotional, more vulnerable, more competitive with those you do. To care, and care deeply, about what some people think. You can choose to restrain your emotions in some circumstances, and yet decide you want to feel it all — the good, the bad, and the ugly — in others; you can decide that you’d rather feel deeply, even when such emotions sear the soul, than live a life that is peaceful, but flat. You can accept the whims of Fortune in some things, and yet decide you want to be the best in others, even if it means fighting Fate tooth and nail, even if in attempting to will a new reality, you burn yourself up.

For there is a risk in taking a stoic approach in every area of your life.

Every code of ethics, every philosophy, every religion, involves certain existential tradeoffs — you gain certain energies and perspectives and powers while losing others — and with stoicism it is no different. In embracing the philosophy we gain certain strengths, certain abilities to deal with life. But we also shut off other currents of existence.

In stoicism we lose some of our fellow feeling. The interesting thing about an honor culture, a contest culture, is that you only challenge someone, and respond to the challenge of another, if you consider him an equal; the challenge thus confers respect. The more competitive a culture is, the more intimate, paradoxically, are its ties. If, however, no one can penetrate our mask of indifference, then no one is our equal; all are beneath us. Others risk becoming inanimate objects, projectiles that can assault our fortress, but only succeed in dashing themselves upon the rocks. “Why should I care what you think?” is a question that de-values the other. When it’s hard to discern which opinions and forces to care about, it’s easy to decide not to care about anyone, or anything. “What could be more dishonorable,” Cicero asks, “but now we harden ourselves to these humiliations and shed our humanity.”

In stoicism we also lose some of the wildness, the immediacy of life. In active engagement there is radical presence, there are stakes, there is weight. There is tension, there is conflict, there is risk. A life of volatility and unpredictability and danger is certainly more challenging than the tranquil life, but it has its own consolations. If one path can be said to be “happier” than the other, it is based entirely on one’s particular definition of happiness.

There is security in being a rock, in being immovable, but is that ultimately what we want — at least in all areas of our lives? Is it better to be safe and inert than vulnerable and alive?

There can be honor (redefined as integrity) in stoicism but no glory.

In ancient Rome, men found that “The ideals of peaceful autonomy and hardness remained ever poor seconds to the contest. . .  . If the Roman Stoic wanted to be a rock, he longed to be a flame . . . [for] there remained for the Romans, even after the adoption of radically new ideas of honor, a nostalgia for life on the edge, for the Roman way.”

Today we too experience a similar longing. As “like the Romans of the early Empire, we are walking on the coals of a fire that is not yet out.”

The post Does Stoicism Extinguish the Fire of Life? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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[judeblenews-blog]

How white supremacists are thriving on YouTube

What role do major institutions play in the promotion of extremism? Two days into this week, we’ve already gotten two important looks at the issue. On Monday I told you about a report from danah boyd about the media’s role in amplifying “digital martyrs” like Alex Jones. (I pasted the wrong link into the newsletter yesterday — come on, Newton! — and so if you haven’t read it yet, there you go.) Today comes a report from Rebecca Lewis looking at another kind of amplification: the closely linked network of conservative YouTube personalities who collaborate in videos and advance an extremist ideology. (Both reports, incidentally, come from the New York-based nonprofit Data and Society.) Lewis set out to understand how YouTube in particular has become a thriving hub of far-right content. Starting with a handful of well-known conservative personalities, she began tracking their appearances on one another’s channels. When another personality popped up on one of these channels, she began charting that person’s path through YouTube as well. Eventually, she had watched hundreds of hours of video from 65 influencers across more than 80 channels. After mapping the network, Lewis makes three findings. These influencers built an alternative media network by emphasizing their relatability, “authenticity,” and accessibility to their fans. They portray themselves as social underdogs, outcasts, and victims, giving them a countercultural ethos that can be attractive to younger viewers. The influencers have effectively promoted themselves using tactics including “ideological testimonials,” in which they recount their conversion from wayward leftists into right-thinking conservatives; search engine optimization, in which they use keywords common in more neutral and liberal-oriented videos to attract viewers; and “strategic controversy,” which is to say stunts. The influencers encourage people to adopt a more radical set of views over time by first encouraging them to reject all non-ideological media, and then introducing them to extremist figures who offer alternative worldviews. Lewis notes that she is not the first scholar to examine radicalization on YouTube; she cites Zeynep Tufekci’s New York Times piece and ex-YouTube employee Guillaume Chaslot’s work on the subject. Where she differs from her predecessors is in moving away from the now-standard critique that YouTube’s core problem is technological in nature. Previous work has focused on how quickly recommendation algorithms push viewers to extremist content; Lewis says the problem lies in the content itself. She writes: While these articles identify a real problem, they treat radicalization as a fundamentally technical problem. What the section below showcases is that radicalization on YouTube is also a fundamentally social problem. Thus, even if YouTube altered or fully removed its content recommendation algorithms, the AIN would still provide a pathway for radicalization. Lewis’s proposed solution is that YouTube should develop a strict value-based code of behavior, actively monitor the content of influencers’ videos, and discipline violators accordingly: There is an undercurrent to this report that is worth making explicit: in many ways, YouTube is built to incentivize the behavior of these political influencers. YouTube monetizes influence for everyone, regardless of how harmful their belief systems are.The platform, and its parent company, have allowed racist, misogynist, and harassing content to remain online – and in many cases, to generate advertising revenue – as long as it does not explicitly include slurs. YouTube also profits directly from features like Super Chat which often incentivizes “shocking” content. In other words, the type of content and engagement created by the AIN fits neatly into YouTube’s business model. The website similarly seeks policies that offer it protection for hosting user-generated content while simultaneously facing minimal liability for what those users say. This report has shown how these attempts at objectivity are being exploited by users who fundamentally reject objectivity as a valid stance. As a result, platforms like YouTube have an imperative to govern content and behavior for explicit values, such as the rejection of content that promotes white supremacy, regardless of whether it includes slurs. It seems fair to assume that YouTube would reject this notion out of hand. (The criticism would start with “it doesn’t scale” and go from there.) But there are certainly smaller steps YouTube could take in the meantime. Lewis notes the glee with which one conservative provocateur received his plaque for attracting 1 million subscribers; surely, she writs, the company could choose to withhold trophies from people arguing against equality or targeting harassment at others. In the meantime, I hope YouTube employees will at least read this report, if only to understand how some of its most influential users are exploiting its viral mechanics to promote white supremacy and other noxious views.

Democracy

Polarization in Poland: A Warning From Europe If, like me, you spend a lot of time looking around America and wonder what is going on, exactly, you’ll want to read Anne Applebaum’s long, discursive essay on how “the illiberal state” has made similar inroads in Poland, where she lives, and in Hungary. The essay’s overall effect is to remind you that people everywhere are basically the same, and in ways that threaten democracy. She concludes: In truth, the argument about who gets to rule is never over, particularly in an era when people have rejected aristocracy, and no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth or that the ruling class is endorsed by God. Some of us, in Europe and North America, have settled on the idea that various forms of democratic and economic competition are the fairest alternative to inherited or ordained power. But we should not have been surprised—I should not have been surprised—when the principles of meritocracy and competition were challenged. Democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, after all, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. Sooner or later, the losers of the competition were always going to challenge the value of the competition itself. Bertelsmann to Merge Unit That Moderates for Facebook With a Competitor With moderation very much in the news, Bertelsmann has agreed to merge the part of its business that offers content moderation services for Facebook and other companies with a competitor, Sara Germano reports: Bertelsmann’s Arvato customer relations management division runs moderation centers in Germany and elsewhere, where workers pore over content on Facebook that has been flagged as objectionable. The task has taken on a higher profile as governments increasingly demand moderation of online content. But the unit hasn’t been growing as quickly as Bertelsmann had hoped, and the company said in January it was considering options for the business. On Tuesday, it announced a merger between the unit and the customer relations business of Morocco-based Saham Group to form a new company in which both firms will retain a 50% stake. Instagram will use ads to help users register to vote Now here’s way that social networks can benefit democracy. As Chaim Gartenberg reports, Instagram will put ads in users’ feeds and in Stories with links to help users register to vote. To provide accurate voting information, Instagram is partnering with TurboVote, which promises “up-to-date information on how to register, how to update their registration, how to look up their state’s voting rules and more.” Additionally, Instagram is planning to offer “I Voted” story stickers on Election Day. In addition to letting you brag to all your friends about how good you are at doing your civic duty, it will also link to Get to the Polls to help others find their polling location. Mark Zuckerberg on Why We Should Support the Dreamers Wired turned 25 — happy birthday, Wired! — and talked to tech-world luminaries about whatever said luminaries would agree to make time for. Mark Zuckerberg chose to talk about immigration. Honestly the photo caption is more interesting than the immigration stuff, which we have heard from Zuckerberg before: “During the photo shoot, Mark’s dog, Beast, stayed by photographer Michelle Groskopf’s side the entire time … until she asked Mark to sit in a chair in his sunroom. At that point, Beast leapt across the room onto Mark’s lap. He responded with an ‘oof!’ and we all laughed.”

Elsewhere

ACLU says Facebook allowed discriminatory job ads that didn’t appear to women - The Verge Here’s a big new lawsuit against Facebook from the ACLU and the Communication Workers of America alleging that Facebook’s ad platform enables gender-based discrimination. My colleague Jake Kastrenakes: The American Civil Liberties Union is filing charges against Facebook for allegedly running discriminatory job ads that appeared only to men, something that is illegal under the Civil Rights Act. The ACLU says that Facebook’s platform allowed 10 employers, including a software developer and a police department, to run ads that excluded women and non-binary users, and it says the social network should be held liable for creating the tools to offer these allegedly discriminatory ads. The complaint is being filed with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency that oversees charges of workplace discrimination. It’s filed on behalf of three women who say they were discriminated against, but the complaint also hopes to cover “millions” of women who were excluded from seeing job ads by Facebook and various employers. Facebook and Financial Firms Tussled for Years Over Access to User Data My read of this Journal story is basically that Facebook wanted access to financial data for use in building chatbots, which no one wound up using. I don’t think there’s much more to it than that. Facebook Seeks Engineers for Custom AR Chips ($) Aaron Tilley and Sarah Kuranda report that Facebook wants to build its own augmented-reality chips, likely to kickstart its inevitable (and probably already in development?) AR headset: It isn’t clear whether Facebook will eventually release its own AR headset using the custom chips it is developing. If such a product emerges, it could be years away from being released since Facebook Reality Labs—previously known as Oculus Research—is typically focused on long-term projects. Facebook is also investing in chip development for artificial intelligence and data center purposes, as Bloomberg has reported. Instagram could still develop a new shopping app — but here’s how it’s trying to woo window-shoppers in its current one On stage at Code Commerce, Kurt Wagner asked Instagram business lead Vishal Shah if he was building a shopping app, as I reported earlier this month. He didn’t say no! (The answer is yes.) Why PayPal’s crackdown on ASMR creators should worry you Some people make videos where they whisper, crinkle up paper, and make other tiny, stimulating noises for enthusiastic audiences. Amid some sort of sex panic, PayPal is banning these creators for life, Violet Blue reports: This past week, nonsexual ASMR video creators Sharon DuBois (ASMR Glow), Scottish Murmurs, Creative Cal, and Rose ASMR have been permanently banned from PayPal and had their funds frozen for 180 days. Like with YouTube’s July censorship sweep, the women create videos of sound effects and have been expelled from the payment utility under alleged violations of the company’s sexual content policy prohibitions. ASMR community websites are now warning all creators to avoid PayPal. Engadget reached out to PayPal regarding the banning of ASMR video creators, the 8chan sex-harassment campaign and how PayPal plans to protect users from this type of abuse — but we did not hear back before publication time. A Viral Tweet Stole Fetish Model’s Photos, Told Fake Domestic Abuse Story to Sell Skinny Tea Here’s a good reminder that the bulk of misinformation is still financially motivated. (Also, like, wow to all of this.) Ashley’s thread went viral over the weekend, with more than 330,000 likes and 77,000 retweets. But none of these images are actually of her. They belong to a cam model who actually specializes in feederism, according to the model’s blog, which Motherboard reviewed. The “Ashley” account was suspended less than two hours after I contacted Twitter to ask whether this account violates the platform’s rules impersonation rules. Palmer Luckey Is Just Getting Started Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey tells Wired that he once tried to build, um, this: A bypass for my peripheral nervous system. Rather than waiting a few hundred milliseconds for a signal to travel from my brain to my extremities, I tried to capture it closer to the source and relay it electronically. If you could do this with all of your limbs, not just one finger or one arm, you could potentially have superhuman reflexes without doing a bunch of crazy work on, let’s say, exoskeletons or predictive analytics. Jack Dorsey on ProPublica’s Experimental Journalism Jack Dorsey tells Lauren Goode how much he likes ProPublica, and it is very charming. (ProPublica is fantastic.)

Launches

Twitter will soon let you switch between chronological and ranked feeds Here’s a surprise from late Monday: Twitter is working on a way to let you switch back easily from a ranked to an unranked feed. Both have their uses — ranked is great for catching up; unranked is great for living in the moment — and so I’m delighted to see Twitter accommodating both as first-class citizens in the app. If You See Disinformation Ahead of the Midterms, We Want to Hear From You If you see misinformation online and decide you would like to report it to The New York Times instead of me, here’s how. (Please at least CC me, though.) HQ Trivia looks to expand with HQ Words, a new Wheel of Fortune-style game HQ has a new game coming in October. Also: it has a new CEO! Also, it has generated more than $10 million advertising revenue, which I found pretty impressive! Maybe there’s some life in the old viral phenomenon yet. YouTube is offering its membership benefits to smaller creators Creators with more than 50,000 subscribers will be able to sell viewers a $4.99 monthly membership fee in exchange for exclusive perks, Megan Farrokhmanesh reports. Previously, the feature required at least 100,000 subs. Pinterest launches API that lets brands find and track influencers Finally, an API to let you hunt down influencers and — we can only hope — subdue them. iPhone XS review: the XS and XS Max are solid updates to a winning formula Did you know that social platforms are most often used on phones? Well, there are a couple of new ones!

Takes

Infowarzel Charlie Warzel reflects on the danah boyd report and encourages reporters to employ “defensive journalism” when writing about extremists: What I take from her is not that we journalists completely lost the plot (though we could do without being so sensitive!), but that there’s room for so much more sophistication in our work and what happens after we hit publish. This notion reminds me a bit of defensive driving. Though the term ‘defensive journalism’ sounds ridiculous, I think this a helpful way to think of reporting in the era of the platforms and the information war. Like defensive driving, defensive journalism isn’t about aggression, it’s about staying vigilant and anticipating how others might ignoring or break the rules. It’s a heightened sense of awareness and skepticism (that should be very familiar to journalists) that doesn’t just keep you safe, but everyone else on the road, too. A New Twitter Feature: Smart Accounts Hot on the heels of news about the Twitter timeline, Jason Kottke suggests that Twitter create “smart accounts” — personalized collections of tweets that you can follow or unfollow. So you could follow a smart account that includes “likes from friends,” for example, “trends,” or “popular threads.” I love this idea.

Updates

Media Manipulation, Strategic Amplification, and Responsible Journalism As noted above, in an incredible self-own, I mis-pasted the link to yesterday’s lead item! Incredibly, only one of you told me about this. Anyway, thank you Roger McNamee! And the rest of you, really do read danah boyd’s talk. Facebook Says This Post About A Firing Squad For A Philippine Senator Doesn’t Violate Its Rules In Friday’s newsletter I included an item about Facebook declining to remove a post that seemingly called for violence against a politician in the Philippines. A spokeswoman wrote me to say that it later decided to remove the post.

And finally ...

Elon Musk recruits Dogecoin creator to fight cryptocurrency scambots Say you are Elon Musk. You’re having a terrible week for lots of reasons, including a possible criminal probe of your tweets. But you also have this other Twitter problem, which is that people impersonate your Twitter account to try to scam people into buying them cryptocurrency. And so he reached out to the creator of joke-cryptocurrency Dogecoin to get some sort of script that … prevents this from happening? Somehow? Details are scarce. But as David Canellis notes: The scambots are so prevalent that Twitter was forced to add a new rule: changing your name to Elon Musk will get you banned from the platform. Ironically, just a few months ago, Musk joked about the prevalence of scambots on Twitter – and how impressed he is by the people behind them. It seems they no longer amuse him. I would venture to say there are a number of things from Elon Musk’s recent past that no longer amuse him!

Talk to me

Send me tips, questions, comments, corrections, and radicalizing videos: casey@theverge.com. Via: Theverge Read the full article