June 24, 2012 archive

Asperity, Austerity and 1984: Fulfillment of 1984 & the Replication Today By The Geogre

In the first part, I talked about the false comparison of Orwell to Huxley and how features of the writing made it easy to mistake each author’s purpose and scope. However, there is something else. Neil Postman was not alone in thinking, in 1984, that we dodged a bullet and instead took a pill. I understand the feeling and shared it. It seemed like, as Lord Boyd Orr had said in 1966, “Give the people a choice between freedom and sandwiches, and they’ll take the sandwiches,” but we had already been shot but did not know the blood stain.

We were aware, then, that the public of democratic nations was placidly accepting outrages that would lead to atrocities, but I would propose that it took 2003 and George W. Bush to demonstrate to us how well television and the fragmented Internet have made every year 1984. Indeed, the television, which Postman saw as an abstracted medium that forbade long-form discourse and non-pictorial conceptualizing, would eventually resemble the view screen of 1984 as much as the Soma of Brave New World, especially cable news, where anything not at full volume and alarm was mere caesura for a day of emotional extremes and informational abbreviation. The Memory Hole was far easier to achieve by accident than plan.

I criticized Postman for a misplaced emphasis on the fiction of 1984 whereby he missed the systemic critique of the novel. The novel’s appearance in the midst of a nation enacting a policy called Austerity, where everyone was to “pitch in” to get “England” back on its feet after the war, is conspicuous and screams out for a comparison. Specifically, within the fiction and outside of it, a System of power is above the people, and the people are the enemy of power itself. Big Brother is an image or visage for a system, but the true power is no person or party — just the continuing flow of resources and labor from the people to an indifferent end. This is what is frightening. The group in charge was never fascists or Stalinists or Churchill or anyone else: it was capital.

Austerity today (the “new Austerity” in Europe and deficit mania in the U.S.) is different in cause, but the same in effect. Both ask nations to turn their GDP over to repayment of debt rather than intervention in markets to stimulate employment. The language used in both instances is similar, too: “Get back on our feet” and “recovery.” However, nation states and capital have had quite a bit of time and learned a few lessons.

We can see, in the gap of attitudes and responses of the public, the effect of social and cultural mutation. If we can see a greater or lesser increase in the effects of social control, then we can understand, I believe, just how thoroughgoing Orwell’s book was a description of an ongoing project that has now succeeded.

Muhamad Morsi wins Egyptian Presidency

Breaking: Egyptian Election Commission Declares Morsi President

By: Scarecrow, Firedog Lake

Sunday June 24, 2012 7:39 am

Cartnoon

Elmer’s Pet Rabbit

Doing The Unthinkable

First a bonus track-

Green Shoots

Doing The Unthinkable

Terence Burnham is dead wrong.  Krugman actually does prefer Option B (“devalue through a new Spanish currency”)-

What are Spain’s alternatives here? Well, if they still had their currency, their own currency, the answer would be devalue, let the peseta drop, Spanish exports would become a lot more competitive, they’d be well on their way to recovery. They don’t have their own currency, so people are saying: Well, you have to do all this stuff to stay within the Euro. At some point you say: Well, you know if your answer to our problem is just ever more suffering, ever more you know… 25 percent, 50 percent youth unemployment. If that’s your notion of a solution, then maybe although it would be a very terrible thing to have the Euro breakup, maybe that’s better than what we’re doing. So that’s becoming a real possibility now.

On This Day In History June 24

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

Click on images to enlarge.

June 24 is the 175th day of the year (176th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 190 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment.

Roth v. United States, along with its companion case, Alberts v. California, was a landmark case before the United States Supreme Court which redefined the Constitutional test for determining what constitutes obscene material unprotected by the First Amendment.

Prior history

Under the common law rule that prevailed before Roth, articulated most famously in the 1868 English case Hicklin v. Regina, any material that tended to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences” was deemed “obscene” and could be banned on that basis. Thus, works by Balzac, Flaubert, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence were banned based on isolated passages and the effect they might have on children.

Samuel Roth, who ran a literary business in New York City, was convicted under a federal statute criminalizing the sending of “obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy” materials through the mail for advertising and selling a publication called American Aphrodite (“A Quarterly for the Fancy-Free”) containing literary erotica and nude photography. David Alberts, who ran a mail-order business from Los Angeles, was convicted under a California statute for publishing pictures of “nude and scantily-clad women.” The Court granted a writ of certiorari and affirmed both convictions.

The case

Roth came down as a 6-3 decision, with the opinion of the Court authored by William J. Brennan, Jr.. The Court repudiated the Hicklin test and defined obscenity more strictly, as material whose “dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest” to the “average person, applying contemporary community standards.” Only material meeting this test could be banned as “obscene.” However, Brennan reaffirmed that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment and thus upheld the convictions of Roth and Alberts for publishing and sending obscene material over the mail.

Congress could ban material, “utterly without redeeming social importance,” or in other words, “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest.”

With the Court unable to agree as to what constituted obscenity, the Justices were put in the position of having to personally review almost every obscenity prosecution in the United States, with the Justices gathering for weekly screenings of “obscene” motion pictures (Black and Douglas pointedly refused to participate, believing all the material protected). Meanwhile, pornography and sexually oriented publications proliferated as a result of the Warren Court’s holdings, the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s flowered, and pressure increasingly came to the Court to allow leeway for state and local governments to crack down on obscenity. During his ill-fated bid to become Chief Justice, Justice Abe Fortas was attacked vigorously in Congress by conservatives such as Strom Thurmond for siding with the Warren Court majority in liberalizing protection for pornography. In his 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon campaigned against the Warren Court, pledging to appoint “strict constructionists” to the Supreme Court.

The demise of Roth

In Miller v. California (1973), a five-person majority agreed for the first time since Roth as to a test for determining constitutionally unprotected obscenity, superseding the Roth test. By the time Miller was considered in 1973, Brennan had abandoned the Roth test and argued that all obscenity was constitutionally protected, unless distributed to minors or unwilling third-parties.

Six In The Morning

On Sunday

 Egypt awaits presidential election results

   Egyptians are awaiting the delayed results of the presidential run-off election held last weekend.

The BBC’s Jon Leyne in Cairo

The results are due in the coming hours, after the election commission heard appeals by the two candidates.

Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood and former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq have both claimed victory and vowed to form unity governments.

Thousands of their supporters spent the night in the centre of Cairo amid increasing political polarisation.

Correspondents say the atmosphere has been peaceful, but tense.

Many people are still apprehensive about the intentions of the ruling generals, who gave themselves sweeping new powers last week after the Supreme Constitutional Court ruled that the Islamist-dominated parliament should be dissolved.




Sunday’s Headlines:

When teenage pregnancy is a death sentence

Bloody Saturday: more than 100 reportedly killed in Syria

Viewpoint: Election leaves Greece deeply split

Paraguay’s Lugo denounces ouster as president, asks backers to keep peace, in Paraguay protest

Modern city rises up out of Siberia’s oil-rich peat bogs

Knitters 1; USOC 0

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The US Olympic Committee learned this week that you should never insult 2 million people from around the world who have very sharp objects in their hands. As was reported here, the US Olympic Committee sent an insulting cease and desist letter to Ravelry, a knitting-based social network for hosting a knitting “olympics” called “Ravelympics.” Needless to say the worldwide protests came in faster than you can knit one, purl one. The USOC seeing the error in their thinking issued an apology to the knitters. The initial apology from Patrick Sandusky, USOC Chief Communications and Public Affairs Officer, was somewhat unapologetic, excusing the letter, as their “standard form”

“Thanks to all of you who have posted, tweeted, emailed and called regarding the letter sent to the organizers of the Ravelympics.

Like you, we are extremely passionate about what we do. And, as  you may know, the United States Olympic Committee is a non-profit entity, and our Olympic team receives no government funding. We are totally dependent on our sponsors, who pay for the right to associate with the Olympic Movement, as well as our generous donors to bring Team USA to the Games.

The letter sent to the organizers of the Ravelympics was a standard-form cease and desist letter that explained why we need to protect our trademarks in legal terms. Rest assured, as an organization that has many passionate knitters, we never intended to make this a personal attack on the knitting community or to suggest that knitters are not supportive of Team USA.

We apologize for any insult and appreciate your support. We embrace hand-crafted American goods as we currently have the Annin Flagmakers of New Jersey stitching a custom-made American flag to accompany our team to the Olympic Games in London. To show our support of the Ravelry community, we would welcome any handmade items that you would like to create to travel with, and motivate, our team at the 2012 Games.”

Many of the knitters felt that this was a rather halfhearted and continued to express their annoyance, leaving messages like this on the USOC Facebook page:

“Patrick Sandusky, your apology falls well short of any real acknowledgement of any wrong doing on your part. Your clerk’s language was insulting and inflammatory, and not any part of any cease and desist or form letter I have ever seen. T…o follow it up saying “while you’re knitting, send us some of those things we didn’t want you knitting in support of us in the first place” is just adding fuel to the fire. Do yourself a favour the next time you try to protect the Olympic brand and the interest of your sponsors – do a little bit of research about the efforts you are trying to quash before sending threatening letters. If you had, you’d find that you just stopped the US members of a MASSIVE group of people from watching NBC and all of the sponsors’ ads because of your lack of judgement and your poor representation of the Olympic brand. Sincerely, Lisa Roman, Ravelry member since 2008″

I think the lady is quite miffed. Good! It’s about time someone told these arrogant jackanapes to get their heads out of their rectums.

Mr. Sandusky realizing that these folks were serious and not gong away easily, issued this up date:

“As a follow-up to our previous statement on this subject, we would again like to apologize to the members of the Ravelry community. While we stand by our obligation to protect the marks and terms associated with the Olympic and Paralympic Movements in the United States, we sincerely regret the use of insensitive terms in relation to the actions of a group that was clearly not intending to denigrate or disrespect the Olympic Movement. We hope you’ll accept this apology and continue to support the Olympic Games.”

Now that is the way activists get it done. Thank you, Ravelry. Knit on!

What We Now Know

Now We Know: Rhode Island raises state minimum wage

Up host Chris Hayes shares what we now know that we didn’t last week, including news that Rhode Island’s governor signed the state’s first increase in the minimum wage since before the recession. Guests Joy Willaims, co-host of This Week in Blackness; Ross Douthat, columnist, The New York Times; Jose Antonio Vargas, journalist and author; and Michael Ian Black, comedian share what they have learned this week.

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