intertribal: (petal to the metal)
2009-02-06 06:42 pm

"i want you on my team." "so does everybody else."

I almost could not find this song on YouTube - then I realized I was searching for the wrong artist.  I always thought it was by the Postal Service (it's by one member of the band on a solo project, Dntel).  It was not I who mislabeled the file. 

Ugh, I assigned this song to a character once.  This song has scared me from the first time I heard it, because I'm terrified that it applies to me, and now I'm pretty sure it does - so I may as well just admit it.  And the video scares/depresses me even more. 

-----

Oh jesus, Bones is using "A Pain That I'm Used To" in their crappy episode, spare me.  Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the television show Bones?  I had to watch it in Surabaya because it was my boss's favorite show (I think she wanted to be the main character).  It is seriously the worst police procedural I've ever seen.  Yes, worse than CSI: Miami, because at least with CSI: Miami you can tell they don't take themselves seriously.  Bones, on the other hand, seems entirely devoted to congratulating its own characters by making every other segment of society live up to its worst stereotypes.  The most horrendous episode I've seen is "Player Under Pressure", about a dead college basketball star. 

Now we all know that I am not a jock.  I can't play any sports.  I can (sort of) run, and that's it.  I mildly enjoyed roller hockey and lacrosse in P.E., but basketball and I, let me tell you, do not agree.  Basketballs have a tendency to zero in on my head (even from half a gym away!), and I don't even watch it for entertainment.  I did not associate with jocks in high school, and there are no jocks worth mentioning at my college.  The ones that exist look disturbingly like skinheads, I'm not sure what's up with that.  I know that from time to time terrible scandals break out about student athletes.  Duke lacrosse, Lawrence Philllips, the University of Colorado and their strip-recruiting.  As a sports fan I know about them all, and as a sports fan I do hold everyone involved in college athletics to a high standard (as is horrifically obvious from my football posts).  And yes, we all hate how the jocks got all the attention in school, and no one cared about the collective us.  I was on a state-championship-caliber speech team that never got recognition within our own building (but we were a bunch of snobs, so I don't really blame the rest of the school), so I know.  Oh, the temptation to tar and feather those jocks now that we're all grown up and "over it"!  Except, you know, you're not over it if you do that, just like Indonesia isn't "over" colonialism if it's still accusing the U.S., a country that never actually colonized them but who sure did look like a colonizer otherwise, of trying to usurp its national sovereignty by having a naval research center in Jakarta, sixty years later. 


Is that a basketball?  Sports are dumb.  Only dumb people like them.  By the way, I'm better at basketball than you.
 
The point of this episode was basically trying to make college athletics look as bad as humanly possible.  Not just via the main female character's snippety remarks.  The dead player's cheerleader girlfriend didn't care who he slept with ("he can have anybody he wants"), as long as he came back to her, made the NBA, and set her up in a mansion.  She actually said this.  All the basketball players were unapologetic manwhores who slept with their (female) T.A.s to pass classes, even the ugly ones, and they all had STDs.  So did all their cheerleader girlfriends, who were all whores too.  It ends up that the cheerleader who was giving him a blow job minutes before his death was engaged to the player that eventually replaced him on the starting line-up (they were the only committed-looking couple in the whole episode, up till then - it was not a ruse on her part, she just "couldn't resist R.J.").  The star was killed by this chick's father.  Why?  The father, now a campus security guard or something, was a failed basketball star himself, and he always "used women like that, under the bleachers".  Now that he sees his own little girl being used that way, well, he just lost it.  

Of course, this is all hysterically preposterous and comes off as nothing more than the producers' sad attempt at Revenge of the Nerds - pushed over the edge with the main character, the "nerdy" female doctor, being considered "hot" by the basketball players and being able to shoot a basket on her one and only try.  Very, you know, cannibalizing the source of power.  It's not the Societeit Concordia, it's the Freedom Building, and it's mine!  Ja ja, Soekarno, sure it is.  So it was funny in a pathetic sense, but also painful to watch.  That sort of sums up Bones.  Let's not get into the time they mocked Chinese arranged marriages and ancestor worship and used it as an opportunity to show that their heroine can speak Chinese on top of everything else (but the Chinese are still a backwards people). 

There is no power, my pretty power.
intertribal: (east indian girl)
2008-11-16 08:31 pm

ew, New York Times. just ew.

I don't know what got into the NY Times' editorial board today. It's truly hilarious that Americans think the U.S. military is like, "critically ill-equipped". Guys: we are really, really not.  We have the most powerful military in the world.  We have the best equipment in the world.  That is part of the quagmire.  That is why it's a quagmire.  Adding troops or money is not going to solve Iraq (just like it didn't solve Vietnam, natch!) - inadequate preparation, or God help us, too small of a force, is really not our problem.

Is this like a particularly Democratic thing? Because Democrats seem to have this fixation with wanting to protect "our boys" over yonder - bring them home, give them more shields, etc. I suppose Republicans want to spend money on missile defense shields and Democrats want to spend money on armor.

Too bad nobody wants to just cut military spending, period. Too bad nobody thinks maybe we should close some of our hundreds of bases and put more effort into building diplomatic relations instead of mil-to-mil relations, especially with countries that are trying to wean themselves off military dictatorships. Too bad nobody thinks maybe the way to fight terrorism isn't through more terrorism, just like fighting guerrilla style didn't do a whole lot against the Viet Cong. Too bad nobody listened to Wayne Wilcox, who's dead now.

"American military power, while formidable beyond belief, cannot always produce intended results because it cannot influence the dead. The willingness of people under siege – London in the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, Bastogne, the Japanese at Iwo Jima, and let it be said, the North Vietnamese – to sacrifice all is quite as impressive as advanced weaponry… how hard small states die and how easily they are reborn, vigorous as before." (1967)

Too goddamn bad.
intertribal: (protein pills)
2008-10-03 01:31 pm

violence and social death

Something I've taken an interest in lately is state-sponsored violence, with a focus not on the state or the victims but the violators.  Most of the time violators are lumped in with the state, but that assumes a level of free will that I think is too optimistic.  Violators don't have power; the state does.  Note that I'm not talking about the Kitty Genovese innocent bystanders (for one, there's no state involved in that); nor am I talking about "Good Germans", who for the most part didn't actively do anything. 

This started because I went to a screening of a documentary about the coup-massacre in Indonesia in 1965 - you know how it goes, it's #9 in terms of deaths of late twentieth-century democides.  This is obviously something that's become much more complicated for me as of late, but I have slowly come to accept that my father was a violator in this case.  I also know that he later became at least somewhat of a victim, by virtue of his own choosing.  I have also heard that people that killed Communists later developed massive psychological problems, hallucinating/ seeing ghosts of their victims, et al.  I used to be very, very bitter toward people with high F-scale scores, probably because I always thought that I would never electrocute people because an authority figure told me to.  But the problem with the Milgram Experiment is that most violators don't violate under sterile conditions - they have already been told by the media and the state that they are in mortal danger, that they must kill or be killed (by the state or by the victims), and they're often in panic mode.  In the case of Indonesia in 1965, it looks pretty certain that what happened is the military, hunting for Communists, basically handed people (especially young men) machetes and told them to kill prisoners to prove that they were not Communists themselves.  The effect of patriotism for a people whose nation was so newly independent and who were being taught constantly to exalt this new nation also can't be understated.  When I asked my aunt about this she just kept saying, "they were a threat to the nation".  My aunt has never really changed her perspective.  I also strongly doubt that she directly hurt anyone except in a riot.  My father, on the other hand, probably did.

Anyway, I have no idea if my father ever had a high F-scale score, or what he would have done in the Milgram Experiment.  I'm not sure I even believe in that method of evaluating people anymore for lack of realism.  But what I wonder about is how being a violator changed him. 

Because, you see, I was reading this article about the correlation between bullying and suicidal thoughts - both for the bullied and the bullies.  And a lot of the comments predictably read like this: "I/ My child was bullied and I want all bullies to commit suicide and spend eternity in the lowest circle of hell."  But I agree with this comment: "Also, bullies are often not popular kids either. They provide entertainment for popular kids (by kicking the victim around - which 'well-adjusted' popular kids often seem to enjoy watching) but are not considered 'one of them' either. When evaluating a victim-bully situation, teachers and school administrators should also ask, 'Who’s eating the popcorn at this show, anyway?' "  Well, this was not a popular comment.  Many people simply did not care; others said that popular kids were the bullies (which may be true in some cases but often is not, for the same reason that the state hands civilians machetes during a democide: to diffuse blame and encourage later complicity, and to keep a moral high ground for future use); they also said that the teachers and administrators were the ones eating popcorn.  I think that may be true, at least as far as administrators go.  But I lump these pathetic administrators together with the popular kids, and together they become "the state".  I think the favoritism shown in high school by authority figures destroys the separation between popular kids and the administration.  Just look at prom.  This alliance between the administration and the popular kids is what makes the popular kids hegemonic (gives them all the power).  It's what makes high school ridiculous.

It's not a perfect correlation to state-sponsored violence, granted.  But there are some similarities.  Especially when you look at bullies who are physical tormentors rather than psychological mean girls - a lot of psychologists have spent a lot of time saying there's no difference between them (and there may not be in terms of the effect on the victims), but different types of kids bully in different ways.  Words aren't traceable; bruises are.  Anybody can spit toxin, but it takes a lot more to physically assault someone.  Mean girls don't often grow up to become social delinquents because I think verbal predation is a kind of abuse society condones, especially for girls.  Same goes for the ostracizers - that's just society spitting out the parts it doesn't like, to quote The Lost World - and the state does the same thing all the time, through laws, and has no bones about it.  No one has any bones about ostracization.  Obviously, ostracizers don't fall off the tracks.  They're the ones setting the tracks.

But children who are physical abusers do fall off the tracks, and they're not part of the state.  They're violators, acting on behalf of "the state" by committing socially "unacceptable" wrongdoing.  If perchance there are any negative repercussions, the state can withdraw without evidence of harm and throw the violators under the bus.  Ask an Indonesian Army official who killed 1 million Communists in 1965 and they will invariably tell you that "the masses" did, out of self-birthed anger and chaos.  Popular kids don't commit suicide - bullies commit suicide, concentration camp guards commit suicide, U.S. soldiers coming back from tours commit suicide, at very high rates.  Simply saying that they all should have committed suicide is missing the point in my opinion.  As I think the same commenter later added, "We as society should not be grateful or feel justified that anyone would feel they should take their own, or anyone else’s, life. That means that as a society we have failed (emphasis mine)." 

Of course, in the case of something like 1965 in Indonesia, social destruction seems to have been the aim of the state, which wanted to "re-order" everyone - which is insane, but there you go.  Some leaders really seem to think the best way to change society is to destroy it.  Suharto, as I'm sure I've written, was pathologically afraid of "the people", that amorphous mass.  And wow, getting half of them to kill the other half, that's pretty damn ingenious.  It certainly does mean that he ended up with, in the '70s and '80s, a population of the silent and the guilt-wracked (and the poor).  And as most people are the types to cling to security and plans and God, I'm not surprised that most people were willing to sacrifice political freedom for economic gain and a blurry, altered nationalist history - creature comforts, so to speak.  Such a compromise is in Indonesia's case better worded as a "contract of silence" between the state than the surviving population.  The state made it enormously difficult for people who felt betrayed by the state, like my father.  It's hard not to notice that the graduate students at the forefront of the anti-government Malari incident of 1975 were of the perfect age to have been anti-Communist teenagers in 1965 - eager to help a nation that was just as old as they were, eager to be just like the revolutionaries (because that's what the state told them they were, revolutionaries - and the Communists were the counter-revolutionaries) they'd been told to worship all through school, eager to defend Indonesia and Islam - not to mention younger and weaker and more afraid than the soldiers who gave them these orders.  My father would have been eighteen in 1965.  He would have been an ambitious and fiercely patriotic student, Muslim, and Javanese: a native son, and perfect for the job.  The children of Communists would have been too ostracized to become leaders of any student movement in 1975.  Those student protesters were native sons.  And I deeply believe that they felt betrayed.  Suharto and ABRI had promised them a better state than the one Sukarno was building; what they ended up with was something worse.  The fact is, my father was helping the military kill Communists in 1965 and he was a staunchly Socialist (code word for Communism, which you cannot explicitly say in Indonesia to this day) student protester by 1975 - he's known as a Socialist political theorist to this day.  But of course this being the Suharto era, anyone that wanted to renege on the "contract" that was the 1965 killings was going to get royally fucked. 

So maybe a good question is who becomes and remains the violator and who gets to join the state.  Some violators certainly do move up in the ranks, if they perform well: General Wiranto, for one.  The U.S. Ambassador and the UN are not on speaking terms with him because of his human rights violations in East Timor but he is nonetheless running for President of Indonesia next year (and has his own political party, Hanura - the People's Conscience Party).  It doesn't say so on his wikipedia page but the biography distributed at the Independence Day concert he sang at (he sang a song about worshipping God as well as "When I Fall in Love") blatantly said that he was head of some paramilitary youth group that fought Communists in 1965.  My father would be the same age as General Wiranto, if he were alive.  He wasn't the head of a paramilitary youth group, but he was part of, and perhaps head of, the local chapter of KAPPI, the high school students' action front that was formed to "fight the Communist threat".  I know that he did not want my mother or me to know about his actions in 1965 (which is why I had to ask his younger siblings) but I also feel that knowing his history has helped me understand the depth of the conviction of his beliefs later in life.  

And for that matter, can we all become violators, under the right stress?  I don't think there's any way to reproduce an experiment that would accurately test this without violating all sorts of international laws and moral codes. 

There's a great story by Robert Coover that I wish I had access to but don't (I read it in Harper's years ago, and their archives are not freely available online) called "Stick Man".  Basically it's about a literal stick man who's brought into our world "to represent officially for us the human condition, as we understand it. We feel somehow you can encapsulate it in economical ways difficult to achieve for those of us with a, what can one say, more complex personal architecture."  But one of the things that the humans have Stick Man do - more for their own voyeurism than any kind of deep introspection - is hurt his newly invented companion, Stick Woman.  And that's a good representation of state-sponsored violence.

Anyway, I leave you with the song "Murderer" by Low, which puts a nice religious spin on things (and the band members are Mormons, if that helps):

One more thing before I go, one more thing I'll ask you, Lord
You may need a murderer, someone to do your dirty work
Don't act so innocent - I've seen you pound your fist into the Earth
and I've read your books - seems that you could use another fool
Well I'm cruel, and I look right through...
You must have more important things to do, so if you need a murderer, someone to do your dirty work...
intertribal: (Default)
2007-04-27 02:53 pm

fraternities are for never

I discovered this via Facebook.  Isn't it funny how Facebook provides a public opinion gauge. 

Phi Kappa Tau, a national fraternity, has a chapter called Upsilon, at Nebraska Wesleyan (the second biggest university after the state schools).  This chapter has a Facebook group called "Phi Tau Upsilon Forever" (link only available if you're on Facebook), which says:
If you believe that Phi Kappa Tau Upsilon builds men of character this is your group. If you know doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants, or any other prominent alumni of this house join this group. We have to band together and support these men. We all love these men "and know they are amazing people and will be major idols in our society someday. Join if you believe in Phi Kappa Tau Upsilon, know these are men of character, and are confident they all will rise above situations they are faced with.
It later goes on to tell people to call the Phi Kappa Tau national CEO to "express your disgust with how nationals has proceeded with thier investigation and punishment!" in the hopes that with enough calls, "This should show them just how prominent these guys are!"

Curious as to what exactly happened at Phi Tau Upsilon, I of course turned to my good friend Google.  It turns out that there was a fire at the Phi Tau Upsilon house in November 2006, which killed one 19-year-old and injured several others.  Three (presumably fraternity brothers) have been arrested with charges of arson, hazing, illegal use of fireworks, etc.  The National HQ of Phi Kappa Tau subsequently suspended the Upsilon chapter for four years for violating their risk-management policy, and basically, to save face.  Hence the Facebook group. 

Needless to say, I don't buy the whole future doctors and architects spiel.  I'm actually of the opinion that while some former fraternity brothers may go on to become doctors and architects, they will probably be worse human beings for having been in a fraternity.  And anybody who thinks frats are basically good should realize that these incidents are not too far out of the norm.  I'm sure that hazing exists everywhere.  With new explicit rules, frats come up with new ways to haze - we can't beat them, fine, we'll make them stand in the cold.  I also find it very interesting that in order to reinstate the Upsilon chapter, this Facebook group hopes to prove that the Upsilon chapter's members are "prominent".  That word is thrown around a couple times, actually.  Prominent men.  What prominent really means to me is staggering, having influence over the community, coming from good families with fingers in a dozen pies, able to pull strings if need be.  It means powerful.  And that is not the same thing as character. 

The same goes for sororities, but as it's like in high school, of course the girls aren't as violent as the boys and get less flak.
intertribal: (no one driving)
2007-04-20 06:34 pm

political science primer

I turned in my research paper draft (that was really fairly final, in all truth) today.  It sits at 34.5 pages, with 1 inch margins and "tiny font", as Professor Cooley said.  We'll see how it looks after I get it back, riddled with corrections and cross-outs and "this is incoherent" and of course, the worst, "this is not good enough for my class", and I have to rewrite it in a week. 

Still, I am relieved and happy with it, and I am in a let's-celebrate-poli-sci! mood... not that I'm not frequently enough in these moods as it is... and decided to list my favorite political science readings of the past two years.  And because I am a medium social scientist, I will actually put them in order, starting with the best.

Classics
1.  Rousseau - The Social Contract
2.  Machiavelli - The Discourses

Modern (Books)
1.  Jagdish Bhagwati - In Defense of Globalization
2.  Joseph Stiglitz - Globalization and Its Discontents
3.  Mark Juergensmeyer - Terror in the Mind of God

Modern (Articles - Specific)
1.  Robert Wade - "The Asian Debt-and-Development Crisis of 1997: Causes and Consequences"
2.  Michael Mousseau - "Market Civilization and its Clash with Terror"
3.  Robert Wade - "What Strategies are Viable for Developing Countries Today?  The World Trade Organization and the Shrinking of the 'Development Space'"
4.  Thad Dunning - "Condiitoning the Effects of Aid: Cold War Politics, Donor Credibility and Democracy in Africa"
5.  David Laitin - "Hegemony and Religious Conflict: British Imperial Control and Political Cleavages in Yorubaland"
6.  Inis Claude Jr. - "Collective Legitimization as a Poliitcal Function of the UN"
7.  Deborah Avant - "Conserving Nature in the State of Nature: The Politics of INGO Policy Implementation"
8.  Clifford Bob - "Merchants of Morality"
9.  Michael Webb - "Defining the Boundaries of Legitimate State Practice: Norms, Transnational Actors and the OECD's Project on Harmful Tax Competition"
10.  Peter Ekeh - "Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa"
11.  Elizabeth Economy - "China's Environmental Challenge"
12.  Robert Wade - "US Hegemony and the World Bank: The Fight Over People and Ideas"
13.  Robert Pape - "Soft-Balancing Against the United States"
14.  Peter Singer - "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry and its Ramifications for International Security"
15.  Michael Barnett - "Humanitarianism Transformed"
16.  Sheri Berman - "Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic"
17.  Atul Kohli - "State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery"

Modern (Articles - Theory)
1.  John Ruggie - "International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order"
2.  Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink - "International Norm Dynamics and Political Change"
3.  Sinisa Malesevic - "Rational Choice Theory and the Sociology of Ethnic Relations: A Critique"
4.  Anthony Marx - "The Nation State and Its Exclusions"
5.  David Brown - "Are There Good and Bad Nationalisms?"
6.  Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi - "Modernization: Theories and Facts"
7.  Peter Evans - "The State as Problem and Solution: Predation, Embedded Autonomy, and Structural Change"
8.  Robert Dahl - "Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition"
9.  Grant and Keohane - "Accountability and Abuses of Power in World Politics"
10.  Juan Linz - "The Perils of Presidentialism"
11.  John Rapley - "Development Theory in the Postwar Period"
intertribal: (Default)
2007-04-13 03:58 am
Entry tags:

dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount

Above quote by Winston Churchill.

I came to the sudden realization that this amazing Muse song, "Hate This and I'll Love You", totally applies to Ilium - the relationships, in particular, between humans and the reformed daimones, the animae slaves.  Clearly this song is told from the point of view of the latter.  Yet I can also see it applying it to different interpersonal relationships.  Ah, the joys I get of power dynamics... I cannot even begin to describe.  I have definitely silent-screamed the chorus of this song in the elevator going up to the poli sci department.  It's so empassioned. 

Oh I am growing tired
of allowing you to steal
everything I have
you're making me feel

like I was born to service you
but I am growing by the hour


You left us far behind
so we all discard our souls
and blaze through your skies
so unafraid to die

cuz I was born to destroy you
and I am growing by the hour

I'm getting strong in every way

you lead me on, you lead me on...


That over there, by the way, is the painting.  The one that has made my adolescence, that has made my obsession with colonialism, power dynamics, violence.  "Sensations of an Infant Heart" by Walton Ford.  This painting struck the Harper's staff so much that whoever responded to my frenetic email asking if they knew the title and maker of a work that featured a chained monkey choking a parrot immediately knew what I was talking about.  I cannot overstate how much this painting has affected me and how much I love it from the bottom of my soul.