In the winter of 2002, with the federal budget stretched thin, President George W. Bush asked Congress to give back money that lawmakers had earmarked for local projects so it could be used instead to fund the Pell grant program, which helps needy students pay for college. One of the local projects that had drawn particularly harsh scrutiny was a $273,000 federal grant that U.S. Rep. Sam Graves had procured to study goth culture in Blue Springs, Missouri. "It's one of those priorities that my constituents asked me to fight for," Graves told an Associated Press reporter at the time.
Ignorant conservative pork barrel bullshit. This is old news, but its worth a look.
Happy slapping is a fad in which an unsuspecting victim is attacked while an accomplice records the assault (commonly with a camera phone or a smartphone). Within the UK, where the term is used much more frequently than in the U.S., it is associated with the ned/chav sub-culture.
Your word of the day is "happy slapping." Apparently Europe has its own sort of irrational moral panic. One of the articles linked here says:
So the first thing to be said about this 'craze sweeping the nation' is that no one can tell even whether it's a craze.
Why do people succeed? Richard St. John compacts seven years of research into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success (Hint: Passion, persistence, and pushy mothers help)
We want our ideas to spread like wildfire, or to have impact that lasts, but we often forget that different ideas spread differently. A quick look at Digg demonstrates that the easiest way to get Dugg is to have a trivial idea.
This is an excellent general principal. Easy ideas spread faster.
Maybe the reason why apparently empty messages like these resonate with my generation is that we don't have any icons of our own.
When someone recently asked me why people my age (I'm 21) listen to bands from our parents' generation, I had to explain that, with a few exceptions, we don't have any real musicians any more. Without massive advertising campaigns, a lot of the "music" you can buy today, like Beyonce, wouldn't exist.
We're a voiceless generation. We have nothing we can point to and say: "This is us, this is where we stand." We're lost and silent and we don't know what to do about it. We're sold a parody of culture that we buy because, well, what choice do we have?
This article really hits the nail on the head. Gold Star.
I've ruminated several times on MemeStreams that music sucks right now. When I go out to MJQ on Wednesdays I don't see a scene. I see an amalgamation. Gangsters, Hipsters, New Wavers, Grungers, Ravers, Punks, all dancing together to a potpourri of music that has no consistant style or era. It means nothing and it says nothing, like those tshirts that are designed to look like advertisements but aren't. Its a fish out of water, flopping around randomly in hopes of landing in a stream.
I'm concerned that this is a byproduct of September 11th. The gravity of the threat of islamic terrorism is so great that any domestic youth cultural movement seems trite in comparison, and so nothing really resonates with people, but unlike previous existential crises there is nothing for most people to do. And so they are left in the lurch, wallowing in echos of previous generations' ideas, waiting for a fight they can get behind or a technological innovation with deeper possibilities than the text message.
It might also be a byproduct of copyright law. We should have seen an explosion in interesting prosumer internet radio shows and art movements. It hasn't happened. We have the tools, but the products are illegal and the RIAA is watching.
ATHF Boston Bomb Analysis - Puritan Remix? Psychology of a Witch Hunt?
Topic: Society
1:25 pm EST, Feb 10, 2007
The Generational Warfare Strategies of a Greying Populace
This remix of Puritanism and the neo-liberal imaginary (obsessed with what Ericson dubs "the myth of certainty and security") is a necessary but not sufficient set of conditions for declaring this peculiar "state of emergency." [6] The remaining variable is demographic. It pits an aging, declining and reactive population (the third or fourth generation descendants of Irish, Italian, German, and English immigrants) straining to secure the slipping remnants of a mid-20th Century state-centered set of expected benefits, against a more vigorous and adaptable creative subculture within the Millennial Generation. Not surprisingly, there's been a steady outflow of educated Millennials from the Bay State to points South and West, where a younger, educated demographic is welcomed and treated with greater public courtesy.
Francis Fukuyama has the cover story in the current issue of Prospect.
National identity continues to be understood and experienced in ways that sometimes make it a barrier for newcomers who do not share the ethnicity and religious background of the native-born. National identity has always been socially constructed; it revolves around history, symbols, heroes and the stories that a community tells about itself. This sense of attachment to a place and a history should not be rubbed out, but it should be made as open as possible to new citizens.
There are some good observations in here. I want to make an observation about his observations about North America though.
He looks to America as the best example of the culture that is rooted in civics rather than heritage. I agree. However, I think thats one of the primary fault lines in American politics today... Whether America is about principals or people, Constitutional rights, or Judeo Christian heritage. Fukuyama argues that liberal positions in American politics represent a kind of multi-culturalism. In some cases I think he is right, but I don't agree with all of his examples. The right of gay people to get married seems an individual right to me, and not a social or collective right. I do, however, see the anti-immigration and cultural conservativism movements as a kind of pseudo-ethnic nationalism that would create a more closed culture here (which would be, by Fukuyama's argument, more vulnerable to domestic terrorism).
Canada may be the source of modern multiculturalism, but I think its simultaneously a model for the sort of national transformations required in Europe. Canada's english majority transformed their country's identity from one that was primarily tied to the British Empire to one which all of it's citizens can connect with. I think there is something to learn from that.
A Piercing Look At Goth Culture And Fashion - washingtonpost.com
Topic: Society
1:35 am EST, Jan 24, 2007
"When most people hear the term 'Goth,' they think of vampires, crushed black velvet, lacy Victorian gowns and pale skin," Jonathan Williams writes in the latest issue of Gothic Beauty. "But recently, Goth fashion has been infiltrated by forward-thinking styles more reminiscent of futuristic science fiction than fantastical images of past eras."
flynn23 wrote: I'd like to see this same graphic overlaid with the murder rate for each sector. "Military" casualties excluded of course. Just capita murder rate. I would expect to see an interesting corollary.
Thats an interesting question. Below I'll post Wikipedia's GDP graph on the left and their murder graph on the right. I'm not sure there is a correlation. One suspects that poorer countries simply aren't able to collect good statistics. There seems to be a relationship between poverty and murders on these charts, but the obvious exception is the United States.
