Peter Vajda has written Robert Fuller to point out that several bloggers in the professional world have recently taken up the subject of negativity, and he has written his own essay on how this negativity is manifested in the blogosphere.

I’m curious as to whether there’s a widespread belief that the blogosphere is inherently negative since I personally have never had that impression. Therefore, I’m posting the Vajda essay here, and I invite everyone who reads this blog or otherwise deals with meta-analysis on the blogosphere to offer their views on whether there is a preponderance of negativity.

Here’s the first paragraph of the Vajda essay to give everyone a taste of the argument:

Social scientists, socioeconomists, and social psychologists are increasingly pointing to the fact that the social mood in the United States, and across the world’s culture and civilization is turning bad and that overall social mood is going to get a lot worse before improving. Research graphs and diagrams, such as the Elliot Wave Principle, underscore the finding that there is a natural ebb and flow of social mood (positive vs. negative) and that darker times, socially and politically, lie ahead of us, creating increased tension and negativity. Nowhere is this negative mood more evident than in the blogosphere where incivility, disrespect, meanness, bullying, and demeaning behavior rule the day, and the posts. What is it that accounts for this negativity among bloggers and what can be done to perhaps soothe and diminish their high degree of vitriol, rancor, meanness, incivility and disrespect?

Read the rest of the Vajda essay here.

I just met Raines a few months ago, but it didn’t take long to discover he’s almost a Berkeley institution unto himself. There’s only one thing to say to a Quaker-Jewish-Pastafarian-Pirate wedding - that was precisely the thing for Raines and his bride Betsy. I wish them luck and much love in their marriage.

Check out the pictures from Robert Fuller’s tour of Australia and New Zealand! I like the little spiky echidna.

A friend of mine, Fabrice Florin, has been putting together his new user-rated news site called NewsTrust for over a year. I participated in the beta, and I have to admit it gave me a special thrill to vote on whether I thought particular news sources were trustworthy and otherwise doing a good job. This is one way to defeat the rankism of a few pundits telling everyone else what they should read. Now you can see an aggregation of what average readers *really* think. NewsTrust is now online for the general public, so check them out!

Welcome to the third edition of the Carnival of Democracy and Dignity!

I apologize for producing this edition very late - it’s backdated to November 20th. I’m just going to post everything that was submitted, so here is what the bloggers themselves thought pertained to the topic of Democracy and Dignity:

Intrepid Liberal presents Tears for the Once and Future King posted at Intrepid Liberal Journal, saying, “Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?”

Thor presents Iceland Hunting Whales — Damn Right! posted at Hypocracy in Democracy.

Cliff Notes presents A Prayer for Owen Meany & The Draft posted at Business Travel Hillbillyk.

Wenchypoo presents The Destructive-Thinking Orchestra, the Non-Supportive Choir, and the “I Can’t” Dancers posted at Mental Wastebasket, saying, “While not solely a political writer or blog, this does qualify as “promoting human dignity” by telling a tale of avoiding success and opportunity by choosing to stick to the familiar and the “safe.”"

Ashok presents Rethink.: The Unity of Justice and Fraternity: On Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural” posted at Rethink., saying, “This can be considered right or left wing, I don’t really care. I do want to show that Lincoln was concerned with the problem of human dignity at the highest level, and not afraid to speak of it in speeches.”

Bill Losapio presents Will He Appoint His Favorite Cow to Pro Tempore? posted at Bill Losapio.

Danny Simkin presents Make every inch Amona posted at Samson Blinded.

Wenchypoo presents Affordable Health Care on Every Corner posted at Mental Wastebasket.

John Buehler presents Rebuilding Eden - The 3rd Channel; So, You Want a Better Government. posted at Rebuilding Eden.

John presents The WASP Nests: How the Biggest Terrorist Caches Ever Found Were Buried posted at The Largest Minority, saying, “Krar and Konopka, two US citizens, are accountable for possessing a great deal more chemical weapons than have ever been found in Iraq since the US-led invasion.”

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Rush Limbaugh Verse posted at Mad Kane’s Political Madness.

Deb Serani presents Map of School Violence posted at Dr. Deborah Serani, saying, “This post looks at the growing trend in school violence.”

Rey Thomas presents The Thomas Political Report: Kerry’s Finished: That’s No Joke posted at Rey Thomas.

Wenchypoo presents Elements of Character posted at Mental Wastebasket, saying, “We cannot have dignity in democracy until we’ve restored character and what it means to HAVE some!”

Jon Swift presents Rush Limbaugh Takes on the Wheelchair Lobby posted at Jon Swift, saying, “You would think handicapped people would be satisfied when we gave them all of the good parking spaces. Finally, Rush Limbaugh stepped up to the plate and said enough is enough.”

David presents After Six Long Years…..Bush no more. posted at The Good Human.

Rey Thomas presents The Thomas Political Report: Baker Panel Should Recommend a Federalized Iraq posted at Rey Thomas.

Angela Randall presents Fences and Windows - Naomi Klein posted at AngelaRandall.com, saying, “Review of Naomi Klein’s book: Fences and Windows”

John presents A message for all you yellow-ribbon people posted at Hell’s Handmaiden.

Abu Sahajj presents Arab Criticism of Democracy; Wa Salaam posted at Wa Salaam.

Wenchypoo presents Utopia Crashes to Earth posted at Mental Wastebasket.

DWSUWF presents 2008 Election Prologue - Check your assumptions. posted at Divided We Stand United We Fall, saying, “I understand the inherent risk of stripping dignity by imposing artificial hierarchies or “ranking” , but is it ok to rank those who aggresively pursue the highest rank on the political hierarchy?”

Jason Thomas presents Faliure posted at Empires Fall, saying, “Faliure of the Bush administration. Sunset on a failed regime.”

Last but not least, my Democracy and Dignity co-host Judith Schwartz submitted Diving into Democracy from her blog Liberty and Justice for All, saying, “If you’re one of the lucky ones at the top, you may not even realize that the hold of millions of middle class people on their comfortable lives is becoming more tenuous every day.”.

Carnival of Democracy and Dignity #4 will be posted on December 20th. Submit your favorite blog posts to the next edition of Democracy and Dignity using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

This weekend I’m attending the LaborTech conference in San Francisco. I’ve been excited about this all week. The goal of this conference is to put social media, video, web, and cellphone training into the hands of the people who most need it: the workers who are trying to contest the “key messages” put out by corporations and the mainstream media.

I can’t believe how much I’ve learned in just a few hours. LaborTech is an International conference, so there are workers and organizers from all over the world.

One of the things I learned about was how Samsung, the most powerful corporation in South Korea (and prominent on a world scale as well), has been spying on its workers and using unbelievable union-busting tactics. For instance, Samsung management used the “Friend-Finding” GPS service to track workers and pinpoint  where worker’s gathered to attempt to unionize. One of the first things I’m going to do when I get home this evening is write Engadget and other gadger review blogs to let them know how Samsung treats its workers: anyone who wants to put their consumer behavior behind upholding human rights should avoid buying anything from Samsung. I’m going to try to get a clip of the Samsung labor movement video to put on YouTube.

This conference is really focusing on video. There was an excellent video by Vivian Price on female construction workers in Japan. There was also a video on the months of labor revolution in Oaxaca, which includes the worker takeover of local radio and TV stations. There was a great sign that showed the LAW radio station being renamed LAW OF THE PEOPLE.

Mark Libkuman, an open source development planner who is speaking as I type this, lost a good friend in Oaxaca.

Here’s a pic of Steve Zeltzer, the Bay Area labor leader who was kind enough to invite me to LaborTech:

I have more pictures here.   In the ongoing adventure in irony that is my life, my camera batteries just died. :-p Hopefully I can pick up some batteries over lunch and there will be more pictures tonight.

There’s no question that labor is where the netroots will be happening next simply because of the sheer failure of the media to report their perspective or the facts they have to contest corporate propaganda.

Update: Nancy Bupp, a labor educator, reviewed the current state of employer surveillance technology. SCARY!!!

The right to die with dignity is widely accepted. Can the right to live with dignity be far behind?

I’m shaking with anger right now.

After a week of storm and stress, the Board of Trustees of the California State Univeristy system has vote to merely scale back the one-year-of-pay-for-no-work golden parachute for top Univesity administrators. Why do these scions of the super-privileged think they are entitled to a public subsidy of hundreds of thousands of dollars?

…the perk is vital because it allows “a dignified way” for CSU executives, including campus presidents, to step down from their well-compensated positions.

Well, I have a thing or two to say, nay SCREAM, about treating dignity as a perk of the executive lifestyle.

First, you’d think the dignity that comes with raking in a salary 35x the minimum wage (or more) would be enough. When you earn several hundred thousand dollars a year, you get a nice house, nice clothes, nice gadgets, a nice car. All those status symbols encourage others to defer to you. You don’t have to approach people for favors - people approach you because doing you favors might get them into the crony circle.

And there’s not much need for a golden parachute when one executive job is likely to lead to another one. So you don’t get to be SVP of Lockheed for a while? On $300,000 you could live like retiree on Social Security for 15-20 years and enjoy the fishing. But why even use that principle when your time in the executive suite stuffed your pension stocking?

And let’s not forget how the UC executives acquired their positional power in the first place: most of them dined off the tall white male advantage all their lives.

For the love of Mike, Pete, and the Magdalen! Wrong, wrong, wrong…

Now let’s talk about who the salary-padded UC executive is STEALING from. The U.C. graduate schools are extremely poorly endowed. In the humanities, where time to dissertation can run over ten years, most students are lured in with a year of fellowship funding and then forced to to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans (on top of work that may or may not be related to their academic progress) in order to get their Ph.D. When I was in graduate school, I took out these loans and worked for several years as an eldercare assistant - and I still didn’t end up with my doctorate because a powerful department administrator sneakily transferred a fellowship I had been nominated for to a student he preferred: and by the time I found out, it was too late to make other arrangements. I was in such a precarious position that I couldn’t cope with the months of bureaucracy once my department wouldn’t immediately correct the situation. My hair was already gray from several starvation periods. My life had been reduced to an eternal round of humiliating and hopeless meetings with profs who had already decided the current was against me. Was there a plan in place to transition out of grad school in a DIGNIFIED way? No, I left grad school to temp around, and generally fail at the rest of my life.

No doubt this story can be echoed by many graduate students chewed up and spit out by the UC system.

And let’s talk about the working poor, whose underpay subsidizes the lifestyle of the self-absorbed jet set. Does America give a fig about the dignity of the millions of people who sweep their floors, wash their clothes, change the diapers on their babies, and harvest their food? No - we’re all freaked out that our taxes might go toward the janitor’s entitlements. Oh the horror!

Well if entitlements for the poor are a moral hazard, then entitlements for the rich are the crying shame of our times. Dignity isn’t a perk of celebrity and attention: it’s a universal human right, and we need to start restoring it from the bottom up.

***

More info on the California State University situation:

Chancellor fights for the Perks

Faculty Sues CSU over Perks

I confess: I broke my vow to never, ever watch John Stossel last night in order to see all my worst fears confirmed about the way things really work. I watched Privilege in America, or yet another Nip/Tuck Ugly Betty Devil Wore Prada HOWL about how pretty rich people have it better. Stossel hit all the highlights of the brewing revolt of the fairly rich (usually posing as the “middle class”), though he carefully avoided talking about the 35.9 million Americans living in poverty whose underpaid labor has long subsidized the middle class lifestyle.

I haven’t been around for a few weeks because I’m really tired. But let me offer this twist: I’m tired because of the efforts of well-meaning people who care about me. As usually, the conversation finally came around to why a bright, highly-skilled, and very nice person like me can’t get work in a booming economy. Since no one feels they can do anything about BushCo’s rigged numbers, the diagnosis was it’s all my fault: I don’t try hard enough, I’m not putting enough time and money to make myself attractive, and I’m not making a major effort to socialize.

After looking longingly at my various unfinished creative projects, my only source of happiness, I subordinated myself to the outlook of my friends who “know better” in that truthiness kind of way.

I made an effort to go out more and meet people. This is inevitably pretty painful for me, because bar-hopping is expensive for someone who has no regular income, and the historical record shows that the investment will be futile. I make very few friends this way - but I do get to go through a lot of rejection, a lot of people overtly leaving me off their lists for group gatherings even when I finally stop hoping to be embraced and ask to be included, and occasionally a few people who take serious advantage of my needy position.  

The reason this happens is that I’m seen as someone who has nothing to offer. This isn’t about my confidence or paranoia or any other psychological trickiness. It’s about the cold fact that I’m not that attractive, I don’t have money or other forms of class access, I don’t have many social connections or any influence, and whatever talent, skills, or intelligence I have don’t matter because they aren’t expressed in a social context. This isn’t the distorted perceptions of someone who lacks confidence. This isn’t paranoia. It’s the plain truth, and frankly it hurts me more when people try to pretend that this is something I can overcome with a little extra effort and a makeover.  

This reject-status doesn’t just mean I’m not invited to the party - it means I don’t even get the benefit of the relationships I pay for. I spent seven years of graduate school trying to get an advisor for my dissertation. I would go into professor’s office hours with a raft full of questions and potential contributions and avid interest in their work…to be met with icy silence - and the experience of listening to the next student be treated very differently while I gathered my books out in the hall. It wasn’t because I lacked merit or was deficient in my academic work - it was because I couldn’t bring the fellowships, connections, or any other sign of a “bright future” to those professors. I wore myself down trying to fight the administrator of my department who did everything in his power to make me drop out (and he eventually succeeded).

In fact, my harrowing experience with graduate school is why my hair was prematurely gray before I hit thirty. It’s from nutritional deficiencies related to several starvation periods because I didn’t have an advisor to sponsor me for work in my own department. This gray hair is now one of my “social deficits” that well-meaning people insist that I have to “fix” - i.e., though I’m usually out of work, I should be paying to have my hair professionally dyed and styled on a regular basis. Dishing out blame isn’t going to help anything - I just need to accept the fact that poor people who have had their looks hijacked by society have to pay more to meet society’s standards of attractiveness.

So after seeing my attempts at socializing weren’t really working, and just draining the little IRA I started while working and attempting to be a good citizen, my friends started getting antsy about what else I should do…i.e. my hair, my nails, my weight, my teeth, better-fitting clothes. When all their hinting didn’t lead to a shopping spree and a makeover, the hints became a “birthday present”. I got my hair professionally done, and now I have to put up with the constant pressure to keep paying to “keep it up”. I bet the “present” to get my nails done is just around the corner.

My hair does look better…but it’s not doing anything to change my life. It’s not getting me “over the top” in job interviews. The people who were repulsing me from their social circles are still repulsing me.

The thing is, I could have told my well-meaning friends this wouldn’t work in advance. I know because I’ve been through this over, and over, and over again. Everytime I meet someone new, they look at my sorry condition in life and try to figure out what I can do to help myself. This usually involves a regimen of (expensive) self-improvement and socialization. These people project what worked for them onto me. This usually comes with an urban legend about how a poor thirty-fourth cousin invested their last dollar in a nice suit, talked themselves up, engaged in some telephone-rounds scam where they told each person that someone else “wanted them” or “already agreed to it”, and ended up with a plum job/promotion/book deal/angel investor/etc.

Worst of all, these friends are demanding that I shut down my ability to learn from the past. As much as the U.S. has promoted a society of continuous learning, our dirty secret is we don’t want anyone learning anything if their experience tells them to stop jumping through the social hoops that work for the top ten percent. All of that good advice doled out to people to be confident, to network, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and not let the bastards get them down…that’s all about defying the record of experience. Repressing your memories and functioning as if you haven’t experienced rejection doing the same thing ten times over is really, really hard work. It’s draining. I’d even propose this is a root cause of major depression.

However, I go through the motions because the well-meaning self-appointed life coach will be my friend as long as I do what they say. Pointing out the truth will be end of that relationship.

In sum, emulating privilege is not going to make me privileged. Not everyone can be privileged. Everyone is trying to optimize their social networks and maximize their filters for a good reason: the current social scenario is that you have to be privileged just to survive. However, the privileged cannot exist, by definition, without the not-privileged. And there’s not a virtuous circulation of privilege that gives everyone a turn, either. Privilege breeds more privilege and lack of privilege accumulates the problems that keep you down.

As the Victorians used to say, the Poor Will Always Be With Us.

Some people like me get filtered out. Automatically. It’s time to DEAL WITH IT.      

Everyone wants to be communicators and visionaries, to “raise awareness” of problems that everyone already knows about. All of this is tap-dancing around the core issue: redistribution of wealth. No one wants to talk about solutions because it involves dirty words like taxes and the image of Big Brother reaching into your wallet to filch your hard-earned money.

The only way to solve problems like mine, though, is to guarantee a minimum survival kit, including either the right to work or the right to be subsidized when you’re denied work. This is the point where people’s eyes usually glaze over and they start talking about Magical Macroeconomics. And that’s where the people who have not only fallen through the cracks, but are being held down there, start to hear nothing but, “Blah, blah, blah…” There is no dodging the ultimate truth: if there’s no work and no subsidy for not working, then people starve and die. All other options besides guaranteeing work or subsidies for no work make us a country of murderers. Dropping dead of stress and preventable disease is just as bad as holding a gun up to them and shooting them. Diffusing responsibility throughout  society changes nothing for a dead person.

Redistribution of wealth is not about ideology, it’s about fairness. It’s about giving back some of the hay you made out of your privileges, and doing it in a way that hits everyone’s pockets in a fair way. It’s about recognizing that our social system runs on privilege and filtering. And it’s about realizing that trying to force people to adjust their attitudes to compensate for homelessness or hunger is a form of mental torture. Let’s strive to be a better country than that, and vote for the political representatives who want us to be a better country than that.

I was following up on exsimo2’s Daily Kos diary on the pressure tactics the RIAA has been using against the soccer mom who fought back, and I realized there are some horrifying implications for privacy. This destruction of privacy has the power to reach out and touch YOU and YOUR FAMILY, since the strategy involved can be used by any large organization with a raft of lawyers and a PR team. This strategy hinges on the fact that it’s too expensive for regular people to defend themselves, and the press and the court system have been actively helping corporations succeed in this mode of attack.

First, read these two articles about how the RIAA told the press about a new lawsuits against the Defendant’s children before they even served the papers: press manipulation and gathering private info. The Press Manipulation article explains why the RIAA would go through the trouble and expense of filing a fake lawsuit for PR purposes:

Is the supposed court document the RIAA leaked to the media no more than blatant flim-flam - a way to once again manipulate mainstream reporters to act as Big Four threat bearers to intimidate defendants before they’ve been anywhere near a court?

And does it also mean that, having served its purpose to publicly harrass and humiliate the defendants in the on- and offline print and electronic media, it need never be submitted to a court?

The article, however, does not cover the Privacy loophole. And I want to make sure that every individual with an interest in preserving the U.S. as a country built on civil rights understands the danger here.

When someone files a lawsuit, the name of the person sued becomes part of the public record. That means that the press , which may have previously been respecting someone’s wish to remain anonymous, is now free to publish the names of anyone involved. The lawsuit can be filed for any bogus reason, and the victim will be followed around forever by Googleable headlines that say something like, “Jane Smith Sued For Heinous Act.”

Let me repeat: the victim of this PR strategy hasn’t necessarily done anything illegal. They may have just been making anonymous complaints about customer service in Internet forums. There is nothing stopping an organization from filing a lawsuit against you or your family, and it may be worth the money for them to do it if they think you’re a thorn in their side and they calculate that you don’t have the resources to defend yourself. Hey, if they make the accusation heinous enough, no pro bono lawyer or political representative will help you because they don’t want to be caught up in bad press. They may even actively help the company if the accusation relates to one of their hot button issues, and they know soapboxing will get the media’s attention.

There have now been successful precedents - companies KNOW this tactic will work if they strike quickly.

You may wonder how the company gets a person’s name if they’ve acted anonymously. Well, the Hewlett-Packard situation has shown the lengths corporate investigators are willing to go. However, if you file a complaint with a federal agency about a company, they might give your name to the company as part of their investigation process. Or the company just might pick a name from a list of malcontents and guess.

Companies can file a lawsuit against any person for any reason. YOU can be NAMED and SMEARED all over the press and the Internet just because the accusation itself makes a good story. And if the victim can’t afford an attorney, they might actually end up going through months of court process, at their own expense, because Judges apparently don’t yet get the fact the court system is being used this way.  

The thing people have to realize is that this tactic isn’t limited to the RIAA. The RIAA may have even taken their cue from other corporations who have successfully used the lawsuit-as-PR-tactic to discredit whistleblowers.

This privacy loophole must be closed and soon, because it’s a form of domestic terrorism wielded by corporations and a major stepping stone toward a fascist state.