Blogs

For an experiment in networking and subjectivity, Johndan Johnson-Eilola has decided to go offline for a month, and he has asked me to be one of his guest bloggers. I can't imagine going offline for a month, but I await the results of his study with great interest. He says he feels happy and acknowledged when he receives email, blog comments, etc., and I agree; in fact, if a day goes by and no one calls me, emails, or leaves comments here, I'm engulfed in malaise.

Johndan said I may blog about anything I want at datacloud. It looks like about six people total will be guest blogging, and I'm curious to see what datacloud will sound like, if it will become cacophonous, if we'll talk to each other. I might try to be faithful to Johndan's interests, at least at first.

Here is the last essay of my Ph.D. coursework, a take-home final exam. I chose the following question, which allowed me to build upon a shorter piece I wrote about compelling/arbitrary. I wrote it at breakneck speed, trying to get it in before going out of town, so it should have that entertaining frenzied quality. :lol:

Blogging will be light for the next few days as I am at iLaw. I'm having a marvelous time! Much more later. :)

I've had to write one 15-page paper, one 8-page paper, and one 8-page take-home final in the space of 10 days. I had topics and outlines planned out in advance, but still ended up being rushed. Actually, I'm not done with the final exam yet; I have to turn it in tomorrow, early afternoon, before I leave to go out of town (it's due the 15th). Here's the question I've chosen out of the four options, and believe me, it was preferable to the others, since I have thought about this a little before:

Or do I not know the whole story? I ask this sincerely. It doesn't seem fair to me:

Specialist Jeremy Sivits, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company, a reserve unit, faces three charges in the court-martial, including the maltreatment of detainees at the prison, conspiracy to maltreat detainees and negligently failing to protect detainees from abuse and cruelty, the Army statement said. If convicted of all charges, Specialist Sivits could face a combination of penalties including as much as a year in prison, reduction in rank to private, forfeiture of two-thirds of his pay for a year, a fine and a bad conduct discharge, military officials said.

As much as a year in prison? This is the man who is thought to have taken the photographs of the tortured Iraqi prisoners. I agree that the higher-ups are equally responsible, but for the people who were right there...a year? Simply possessing 5 grams of crack would put a person in prison longer.



Edited to add, for clarity, because someone emailed and asked: I'm not saying the penalty for Sivits is too harsh. On the contrary. My point is that I think it's too lenient in light of other crimes, but I'm guessing the crack example isn't a valid comparison; is the as-much-as-a-year penalty standard for the terms they're following in the courtmartial? The Geneva conventions? See this New Yorker article for more on the torture, including the fact that the British are implicated in similar treatment of prisoners and details of John Walker Lindh's humiliation as a prisoner.

My brain is gold, just like my heart.


What Color is Your Brain?
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Via Mamageek.

Blackfeminism.org is a community blog about race and gender issues, which looks to be powered by Drupal. It's very new and smart, and I hope they get a lot of uptake. I look forward to the possibility that there will be some good discussion of race online; I've had a post gestating in my mind about race and blogging for a couple of days now, but I'm still working out what I want to say. I had a gobsmacking epiphany after reading Ann DuCille's article "The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies" for the second time for the paper I recently wrote for my Women's Studies class, and now race is going to figure into my dissertation project a lot more than I previously thought, as well it should.

I'm about to call my mom to wish her a happy Mother's Day. And I'm glad there's a day to honor this axis of her subject, this fraction of all that she is, and there's so much more: She's a breast cancer survivor, a watchdog when it comes to local politics (always getting mad when yet another person embezzles money from the city), a quick thinker, and she does right by everyone she knows. I can't think of anyone who knows her and doesn't respect and love her. But I'd be remiss if I didn't point out today that motherhood is revered in rhetoric and reviled in policy, to paraphrase Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels. The discursive construction of motherhood is damaging to so many women; I'm reminded of one of flea's posts, which sticks with me:

I'm angry that so many of us live our lives with that nagging fear that we could lose our children if we fuck up in front of the wrong person, or even if the wrong person misinterprets what they're seeing. I am angry that baseball players get paid millions of dollars for only doing their job well 33% of the time but mothers don't get paid dick and are vilified for not batting a thousand. I'm angry that I've internalized all this Martha Stewart/Baby Einstein/Perfect Celebrity Mom bullshit, even though I'm fighting it as hard as I can.



I wish it were different. I wish we could detail our fuckups without fear, because God knows we're all in the same leaky boat. But as long as the burden of parenthood falls 90% on the mother, 10% on the father (regardless of how often he co-parents) and 0% on the government, we're going to have to keep whispering our failures to each other while pasting on the "we're all fine here!" smiles.

Douglas writes:

We mothers have no paid maternity leave, no universal healthcare so that all our kids are covered, no comprehensive after-school programs, no genuine, truly revolutionary new support of our public schools that would revive them (No Child Left Behind already has become a massive joke). Too many workplaces have no onsite or nearby daycare, no flexible time, no job sharing. The right to control our own reproductive lives is under total siege.



Mothers feel they have been sold a bill of goods: We're supposed to be eternally nurturing, supportive and ecstatic about child rearing 24/7. We are never supposed to get angry, because the words "mom" and "angry" aren't supposed to go together. But if mothers in this country never got angry about how they and the nation's children were being treated, we'd still have child labor and laws discriminating against married women in the labor force. Mothers' voices have not been heard, especially during this presidential campaign season. It's about time they were. Check out two Web sites, www.mothersandmore.org and www.mothersmovement.org. And remember: Motherhood remains the unfinished business of the women's movement.

I know some of that isn't true for some women; sure, many do have paid maternity leave, comprehensive after-school programs. Some even have on-site daycare at work. That's great, but these women are the exceptions, and as long as that's the case, I consider it a problem.