The unreal life of the internet?

Over at the Poorman, Sifu Tweety has done what I think is a profound post on the Internet as a "fictional" or "unreal" reality:

. . . Every time I’ve seen criticism of communication on the internet it has made the point that people online feel free to say things they wouldn’t in real life. Well, yeah they do: they’re acting! Nobody would expect Carl Weathers to refuse to shoot a man while he was in character as Action Jackson. This is what makes the internet good: a fundamentally imaginative character. When people go online for anything, including work communications, they’re creating a character. They can create multiple different characters, with different timelines, different goals, different qualities. It’s exciting, and novel, for the same reason that creating movies is fun. Actors playing off each other. If I thought for one minute that people wouldn’t somehow hold it against me for being “Sifu Tweety” when I went to do wholly different things, out of character, as [REDACTED], I wouldn’t be so coy about my real name. And if I thought for one minute that community theater would be as intellectually engaging and entertainingly mean-spirited as blogging is, I’d put on a one-man show at the senior center.
Now, you don’t have to do things the way I do. You can create a single character, and attempt to have it hew as closely as possible to your self - goals, history, mores - but just because you do that doesn’t mean making everybody else do things that way won’t be crappy and boring for you, too.
None of this is to say that there aren’t things that can be done with the internet’s facilitation that have real world consequences. There are lots. We learn about more every day . . . the biggest problem: that so many people still don’t understand how the internet works, because they keep seeing it as one thing - an exact one-for-one copy of every person using it, rendered into smileys and cat pictures - when it really is something completely different: an almost infinite collection of anonymously written fiction, continuous, based on real events, with occasional, but very squirrelly, correlations with the “real world.”
It’s a problem pretty directly linked to age, and will hopefully peter out eventually, at which point the law can evolve rationally. Like ordinary literacy, computer literacy is only really possible in those who learn it young. The generation now running things, is in fundamental ways, computer illiterate, no matter how much they’ve used computers. Shit, I’m borderline: the technology just wasn’t there when I was young enough. Why do you think that seventeen year olds put so little thought into whether or not they should put things online? Because they intuitively understand that they aren’t providing a record of a “real life” . . . and they assume that everybody else understands things the same way, because that’s just how the internet is.

I'm going to have to think about this for a bit. I think maybe he's got something here -- maybe this helps to explain that we seem to be chatting with "personas" sometimes, rather than with people.
And yet, I don't feel that the people I have gotten to know from around the world through the comments on my own blog, and through reading other blogs, are "lying" to me or to themselves about who they really are. In fact, sometimes I think we find it less difficult to be the best that we can be on the internet, because on the net we are only our words; we aren't distracted by appearance or class or what kind of car we drive.
Anyone have opinions about this?

And worth every penny?

Mounties paid $25,000 to help Zaccardelli prepare for Arar hearings:

The RCMP paid a communications consultant almost $25,000 in taxpayers' money to help Giuliano Zaccardelli prepare for parliamentary hearings that ultimately led to the commissioner's resignation.

Well, I guess we can conclude that it was money well spent.

Great lines of the day

From Jacob Weisberg in Slate, the four unspeakable truths about Iraq:

. . . the war was a mistake . . . American soldiers being killed, grotesquely maimed, and then treated like whining freeloaders at Walter Reed Hospital are victims as much as "heroes." . . . American lives lost in Iraq have been lives wasted . . . America is losing or has already lost the Iraq war . . .

Emphasis his.

Newt!

Yes, definitely Newt Gingrich should run for President!


This is certainly the guy that represents the true heart of Republicanism today.
Now, the Democrats are going to win in 2008 -- americans are so fed up with Bush and his gang of idiots that the Democrats could run a turnip and still win. But with Newt, the Republicans wouldn't take a single state.
As Digby says -- Run, Newt, Run!

And a good time was had by all

Apparently everyone at Harper's announcement today got a good chuckle about how Harper dissed our premier, Lorne Calvert:

"I know the government of Saskatchewan is not a supporter of our party federally, but I don't think partisan politics should stand in the way of making a good deal for the people of Saskatchewan,” [Harper] said to a round of partisan applause.
Mr. Calvert's government has been pushing Mr. Harper's Tories to live up to their election promise to exclude non-renewable resource revenue from the equalization funding formula.
Mr. Harper said all will be answered in the March 19 budget.
“These will be a series of policies to establish predictable, principled, long-term transfer arrangements between the federal government, the provinces, and other levels of government.
“I'm confident we will fulfill our commitment and Saskatchewan will be a big winner. Whether it will be enough for the NDP is another question,” he said to laughter.

Apparently Calvert wasn't invited to the announcement, nor even informed that it was happening.
I guess it just doesn't matter that this isn't Conservative money he's handing out, it's Canadian money -- some of which may actually have been collected from me and from a few other people in Saskatchewan who have been known to vote NDP in the past.
And note how the spin is already underway about how the NDP are just a bunch of whiners and complainers.
Why do I get the feeling that we're not going to be seeing the resource revenue Harper promised?

The Meaning of American Pie

International Women's Day

I always thought it was so clever of my mother to give birth to my sister and I on International Women's Day! Here are some International Women's Day photos from around the world:

Mexico


Columbia


Congo


Guatemala


Peru


Afghanistan


Turkey


India


Sri Lanka


Phillipines


Iran




Algerian police women


Pakistan


Working Women Organization (WWO) activists in Pakistan


Israeli and Palestinian women rally together

The song has ended . . .

. . . but the melody lingers on:

Happy happy joy joy

So how did I feel when I heard the news?

Great line of the day

Digby writes about the Incompetence Dodge:

. . . The problem is not that the Bushes are unusually bad at governance, although they are. It's that the Republicans seem to have created a con game in which they take power, steal the country blind, allow their craziest ideologues to wildly experiment with theories that only radical fringers think have a remote possibility of success and basically run amuck until they are forced to stop. Then they harrass the Democrats as they clean up the mess, setting themselves up for a resurgence by making it very clear that unless they are given another chance to mess things up they will make the political system even more ugly than it already is.
It's the political equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum in the grocery store. You get to the point where you give them the candy bar just to shut them up. . .

Emphasis mine.

Problems with comments?

Allison noted in an email that she is having problems sometimes commenting on this site. Anybody else? If so, leave a comment .... oops! ... send me an email at
cfornssler-at-yahoo.com
and I'll ask Haloscan what is going on. (I haven't switched to the new blogger yet, so maybe there is some support issue with the old blogger that is a problem now.)

I read the news today oh boy

I meant to mention this before, but Scotian has a great post up about the first, and hopefully last, year of the Harper government. It ain't pretty.

This is amazingly stupid -- does Obama think he's running for president of the senior class? Or is he actually serious about winning, first, the nomination, and second, the election? He will be battling an entrenched Republican machine AND a society where racism will be a significant factor limiting his vote-getting potential. So he'll have to out-fundraise and out-spend the Republican candidate by millions and millions, and certainly he'll have to run a 50-state campaign to create the "unstoppable rock-star landslide" impression -- which is the only way a Democratic president has been elected in the United States in the last, oh, 50 years. The last dull Democratic president was Johnson in 1964 -- and he won against Goldwater!

Ouch! I can see the campaign ads already. But I am very glad to see Dion is travelling the country introducing himself to Canadians -- once they get to know him, I expect they'll like him -- he has no where to go but up. RossK wrote an extremely perceptive piece about Harper's success, so far at least, in "KarlRoving" Stephan Dion. In passing, Ross mentioned the Ontario gas shortage, which led MyBlagh's Robert to share this this anecdote in the Comments:

While I was getting gas today, another person pulled up behind me, got out of their car, read the sign on the pump that said "Due to a shortage at this station there is a limit of 50 litres per fill up" and remarked, "Fucking Albertans are hoarding their gasoline." This gas shortage is going to be a ticking timebomb for Harper if it continues for very long; especially once the summer driving season arrives.

Though the Ontario gas shortage has nothing to do with Alberta, I've been wondering if Ontarians are remembering Ralph Klein's "Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark" insult. And yes, yes they are.

Alison notes that Multiculturalism minister Jason Kenney still hasn't qualified for the Certificate of Hitlertude, but he is making progress. Keep up the fair work, JK!

And the New York Times reports in tomorrow's paper that American airstrikes north of Baghdad have killed "insurgents with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia", a terminology I have never heard before. They are also described as "key terrorists" and "Sunni insurgents". So I guess now the American military is fighting Sunni Al Qaeda Mesopotamian insurgent terrorists -- well, that includes just about everyone, doesn't it?

"Go fuck yourself" is their creed

"Go fuck yourself" was said by Dick Cheney three years ago as he passed a Democratic Senator in the hallway of Congress.
It's an ugly phrase for an ugly sentiment.
And its now clear that its much more than just a singular insult from one man to another. Cheney was leading the way for the American conservative movement -- "go fuck yourself" has become their creed. Its their response to anyone and everyone who disagrees with what they say or do.
While the actual words may not be said, it is a sentiment you will find even in our own House of Commons these days.
Here is Glenn Greenwald talking about why the Conservative Political Action Conference wildly cheered Ann Coulter for calling John Edwards a faggot in her speech yesterday:

This is a movement propelled by an insatiable hunger for more slaughter and more wars. It is centrally dependent upon hatred of an Enemy, foreign or domestic -- the Terrorist, the Immigrant, the Faggot, the Raghead, and most of all, the Liberal. As John Dean brilliantly documented, that is the only real feature that binds the "conservative" movement at this point, the only attribute that gives it identity and purpose. It does not have any affirmative ideas, only a sense of that which it hates and wants to destroy. So to watch as the crowd wildly cheers an unapologetic hatemonger is perfectly natural and not at all surprising . . .
This is a movement driven by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity -- who, along with Bill O'Reilly, are by far the most popular and successful right-wing pundits. Shouldn't every rational and decent person convulse with anger or at least scornful laughter whenever this movement claims to find offensive or upsetting indecent remarks coming from others or when they accuse others of being angry and hateful?

All this conservative pearl-clutching over Librull "swearing" is just another example of the Karl Rove Principle in action -- always attack your opponent for whatever is your own greatest weakness.

Crash humour

Reading Wolcott, I came across this anecdote about a white-knuckle airplane trip:

In the Seventies we flew together in a commuter prop plane to visit Pauline Kael in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, hit major storm turbulence, the plane bouncing and rocking so hard in the air that teeth began to hurt, and, as we descended toward the air strip, we could see people sitting on a nearby hillside, as if picnicking. What do you think they're doing? I asked, to which Clive [James] replied, "Waiting to see if we crash."

And it reminded me of Ron White's great stand-up routine:

So I flew in here to Phoenix from Flagstaff because my manager doesn't own a globe. He chartered one of those small private jets. I flew here on a plane this big, it was like a pack of gum with eight people in it.We were putzing along. We were going half the speed of *smell!* We got passed by a kite! There was a goose behind us and the pilot was yelling "Go around!" So about halfway through the trip, we start losing oil pressure in one of the engines, and the pilot says we have to turn around. It was a nine minute flight. Couldn't make it with that equipment. . . . The guy next to me is *losing his mind*. I guess he must have had something to live for. He says, "Hey man, if one of the engines goes out, how far will the other one take us?" I look at him. "All the way to the scene of the crash! Which is pretty lucky, because that's where we're headed! I bet we beat the paramedics by a good half hour!"

Google is your friend! When I googled "all the way to the scene of the crash" which is all I could remember of Ron White's joke, I also found this page from Dave Barry's blog -- first, his post:

ATLANTA AIRPORT UPDATE So I'm waiting to get on the plane, and the pilots arrive at the gate, and
as they walk past, one of them says to the other -- this is a direct quote -- "Hey, it flew in, it'll fly out."

Then, some of the comments:

Dave, Weren't those Amelia Earharts' last words?

Oh wait, those were her second to last words.....followed by "Well, shit."

Yikes! I once flew a small (8 seat)to Dallas. Sitting over the wing, I noticed oil streaming out of the engine. ISIANMTU [I Swear I Am Not Making This Up]...The guy in front of me, returning from a short trip said "Don't worry, it was doin' that yesterday too"

Once I was trying to get out of Minneapolis in a snowstorm. I had a hotel room reserved just in case and I needed to release the room by 6 or get charged for it. The gate agent was insisting that I would get a flight, but the pilot, standing nearby, looked me in the eye and said, "Keep that room." 45 minutes later they announced we were boarding and I overheard the same pilot say, "Holy S*?t! We're flying in this?" I lived to tell the tale...

Once, I was conversing with an older gentleman who was a friend of mine. Someone mentioned skydiving, and I stated that I could see no reason for EVER jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. My elderly friend, who had considerable aviation experience, said, "Honey, any pilot in the world will tell you there ain't no such thing as a 'perfectly good airplane'."

And check out this site for more airplane humour.

Home Sweet Home

Two views of the T.Don Hutto Centre where a 9-year-old Canadian boy is incarcerated with his Iranian family.
Edie's Daily Kos story gives us the background.
While I keep reading about how this isn't a jail, the Corrections Corporation of America's website for the facility describes the Centre's manager as a "warden". And here's a story from the San Antonio Current about the facility which also gives us more information about how the US immigration system is operating:

Last year Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that the U.S. would end its “catch and release” policy regarding aliens from countries other than Mexico. DHS increased detention funding. According to DHS data, they’re detaining 99 percent of the other-than-Mexico undocumented immigrants they catch, up from 34 percent.
What Chertoff didn’t say is they’d be replacing “catch and release” with a new “catch, charge, and release” policy.
Once a detainee family is placed in the Hutto facility they can apply for asylum. This involves pleading their case to an asylum officer at the Houston office of the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. If the officer decides that a case is credible, detainees can get a hearing with a federal judge in San Antonio. This judge can grant freedom, for a price.
I met immigration lawyer Griselda Ponce in the prison’s lobby. She has served about 100 clients at the Hutto facility, and only about six have been deported or denied asylum. Nearly all her clients at Hutto are asylum seekers, and 80 percent have been released on bond. The average bond, she says, is $7,000, with $1,500 extra per child. Bonds can get as high as $50,000. The judges rarely use the other options, which include electronic monitoring and intensive supervision, Ponce says.
“The problem with ‘catch and release’ was not so much that people were fleeing and never coming back, but they had a very poor process of explaining to these families what they had to do after they were released,” Ponce said. “A lot of families would come into my office, and the client would say, ‘I have this permiso, but I’m wondering if it expired. I want to know how I renew it.’ That was their notice to appear in court. Nobody explained it to them.”

So maybe Canadians concerned about this boy should just start raising money to buy his way out -- sounds like it would be about $16,500 for the boy and his parents.
Mother Jones describes one family's experience:

Inmate Faten Ibrahim was unlikely to escape. She lived at a compound built as a prison for Texas' worst criminals, within a perimeter of razor wire. Her eight-by-eight-foot cell offered only a thin sliver of window, her toilet in an open corner left no cover for stashing break-out tools, and, at any rate, cracking the cell's thick steel door at night would have tripped an alarm. She certainly wasn't going to try bolting, especially since Faten, who lived in the cell with her mother for three months, is five years old.
. . . a typical prison routine still exists there: all children who are big enough must wear scrubs akin to prison uniforms, and there's little to occupy their time besides lounging in the "pod," the communal space walled off by prison cells. When not hanging out there, children receive a single hour of physical recreation each day and, at the time Brané visited, a single hour of schooling in the form of an all-ages English class (The classes were upped to four hours recently, and are expanding to the seven hours required in Texas public schools). Brané was not impressed by efforts to brighten the pod with carpet and a mural depicting an ocean scene: "It's definitely a penal environment."
Faten, the five-year-old detainee, suffered from nightmares and often sobbed uncontrollably at T. Don Hutto, according to a lawsuit seeking her family's release that was filed late last month by a private attorney. In one instance she was "yelled at and threatened with 'punishment' for her failure to 'stand still'" during the prison's daily population count, the suit said. Her mother, Hanan, who is now five months pregnant, complained of being too tired to join daily showers at 5:30 a.m., but was told that if she didn't she could be put in solitary confinement, according to the suit. To see a gynecologist, according to the lawsuit, Hanan had to travel two hours away, bound in leg irons the entire time, for each prenatal appointment. Her absence from the pod so upset Faten and her siblings, aged eight and 14, that their mother stopped seeking medical treatment rather than leave them alone. The suit also claimed that the family, who are Palestinian, was denied halal food at the prison cafeteria, prenatal vitamins for Hanan, and psychological counseling. "They were treated as inmates," said attorney Joshua Bardavid, "rather than a family being held for immigration reasons."
. . . The Ibrahims are far from the only residents to complain of ill-treatment at T. Don Hutto, where operations are run by the controversial prison staffing company Corrections Corporation of America. Lawyers with the University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic, which has represented some 25 of the inmates, say several have reported weight loss and frequent vomiting, and parents have been unable to tend to sick children at night because rules ban them from leaving their cells after curfew. Other women have also complained of a lack of prenatal and mental health care. "I'm not a psychologist, but I go talk to these people, and they are just in shambles," said law fellow Frances Valdez. "I mean, they are losing their humanity." UT law professor and clinic director Barbara Hines believes imprisoning children is on its face unethical. "I've been doing this for thirty years," she said, "and I haven't been this upset about something in a very long time. It's just heartbreaking to go in there." . . . Human rights investigators said access to the gym and playground is limited to a total of one hour a day, during the allotted recreation time. Many of the children kill most of their time fighting over a Sony Playstation in the pod, Brané said. She said the center was most lacking in developmental toys for younger children, especially soft toys such as stuffed animals that would be important to children experiencing trauma.
. . . when Brané recently interviewed detainees there, nearly every person she spoke with cried. She will release a report of her findings later this month and doesn't believe that T. Don Hutto can ever be made into a place that would be suitable for minors. Before she left the facility that day, a child ran up and pressed a folded piece of paper into her hand. "Help us," the note said, "ask questions."