Oh noes, the death of traditional media.

Everyone is always bemoaning the death of traditional media. "Everyone" being mostly the traditional media. The rest of us are quietly destroying them with our clicks and pageviews and facebook posts. Good. They deserve to be destroyed.

My distrust of traditional news media began in the late '90s/early '00s. This was a time when I got most of my news from the Yahoo homepage "News" box, and I actually read the whole articles. Columbine, 9/11, the Patriot Act, the creation of Homeland Security--and all I saw in the "News" was an objective reporting of facts.

I believe traditional American* media's focus on objective reporting is a bug, not a feature.

-The fourth estate relies on insider access to politicians and other public figures in order to get interviews. If they publish material that is too critical of public figures, they could lose this access. They therefore have a very strong incentive not to be overly critical of the powers-that-be. This leads to the press being basically the establishment's lapdog, supporting whoever happens to be in power.

-The media clearly is not actually objective, and we all know it--the New York Times is liberal, the Wall Street Journal is conservative. Before the Internet, people chose what newspaper they wanted to read based on its political stance. It is dishonest and hypocritical to claim to be objective when everyone knows they're not.

-The focus on being "objective" on every story, no matter what, leads to the normalization of fringe viewpoints. Like, "That was so-and-so, director of the new Holocaust exhibit that just opened. We go now to some neo-Nazis for their views on the subject." The media has the ability to determine where the Overton window falls, and they seem to take perverse pleasure in pushing it to the extreme.

-The media's ability to determine "what is news" is impaired by their focus on the bottom line. The more salacious and juicy the news, the more people will buy it. This leads to the over-reporting of crimes, scandals, etc. to sell more papers/airtime. The media also thrives monetarily on creating a climate of fear.

-The media, like any large bureaucratic company, is entrenched in existing systems of power. Straight white middle-class men dominate the journalism scene. Those in minority and marginalized groups have even less representation in the media than we do in politics, because at least we get a vote on our politicians. So what do we get? A lot of news that straight white men care about, and not so much of anything else. I get the sense that the focus on "objective reporting" is just code for focus on "what straight white men care about."

Cherry-picking our news from the Internet solves all of these problems with the traditional news media. Since you can determine the news you read, you can set the limits of your own Overton window. You don't have to hear what the neo-Nazis think if you don't want to. You can listen to the voices of the marginalized in the quantity you desire, permitting more democracy in what gets reported. You don't have to see all the salacious fear-mongering crap if you don't want to.




*The media in other places does not follow this model. In France, each newspaper has a clearly identified political stance.

Methodological problems with NHERI's study on youth and religion

I have a guest post up over at Libby Anne's Love, Joy, Feminism blog today.

The tragedy of Orson Scott Card

The geek blogosphere periodically directs its ire at sf author Orson Scott Card. Most recently, his participation in the Superman comics and the feature film of his book Ender's Game have provoked calls for boycotts.

The furor comes from the fact that Card is

a board member of the National Organization for Marriage, one of the largest and most well funded anti-gay activist groups in America, which works to prevent not only marriage equality but also civil union legislation and to legally prevent LGBTQ couples from adopting.

Card has very conservative political views, a fact which often surprises his readers since his books are about the worth of all people and love and empathy for humanity.

While Card's views on homosexuality--and quite a few other things--are truly execrable, what I feel like a lot of people don't realize is that Card was not always a hateful arch-conservative. Though a member of the conservative Mormon faith, Card once identified as a moderate and a Democrat. He has progressive views on space travel and fossil fuels.

But in the late 90s and early 2000s, his life essentially imploded. In March 1997, his fifth child Erin Louisa died the day she was born. In August 2000, his 17-year-old son Charlie Ben, a lifelong sufferer from cerebral palsy, died and was buried next to Erin Louisa. Card had been expecting his son's death for many years and had written his book Lost Boys, his self-proclaimed most autobiographical work, to cope with it. Then September 2001 occurred, and Card basically lost it.

My read on it is that Card, driven to the edge by sadness, got pushed over it by fear, somehow conflating the deaths of his children with the attacks on his country. Something similar happened to Zell Miller, who did a 180 on his politics in response to 9/11.

I don't think any of this excuses Card's views, and as an LBGTQ ally I'm still considering whether or not to boycott the Ender's Game film. I'm just Speaking for the dead, really. To me it's very tragic that a man who could create such beautiful works of art has been driven mad by grief.

Historical female characters

I make it a point to collect interesting stories about women from history, not ever having learned about too many of them who weren't queens.

Here is my latest haul.

Molly Ockett was a Native American healer of the Wabanaki people (part of the Algonquian alliance) of Maine and New Hampshire. She is remembered for her singular sense of humor and her ethics. The story I like best about her is that one day she went and gathered berries and brought them to a white friend of hers, a minister's wife. The minister's wife chided her for working on the sabbath. Molly Ockett rebuked her by saying that she had taken joy from gathering the berries as a gift, and that that was her way of being closest to God. Annoyingly, there is not a historical biography of Molly Ockett, just some amateur biographies collecting all the primary sources about her without any critical analysis and cultural context. One author, Bunny McBride, has written an interesting series of biographies of Native American women of the northeast. Partner and I were pretty bummed that basically the only information about Native Americans in Maine was in the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, which is lovely, but small.

Mary Kingsley was a Victorian British ethnographer and solo explorer of West Africa. She benefited from her status as a woman to gain anthropological insights her male colleagues could not.

Phyllis Greenacre was an early American pscyhiatrist, a student of Henry Cotton, one of those mad scientists they make horror movies about. She believed in his field, "surgical bacteriology", until she did a study on the patients who were being tortured and butchered and discovered that in fact this did not help them. Her teacher buried her work and expelled her from the clinic. Happily, she became a well-respected scientist in her field, with many publications.

Deborah Moody was the first woman to lead a European colony in the Americas. An Anabaptist, she abandoned Britain due to religious persecution and sought refuge at the Puritans' colony. Like Anne Hutchinson, though, she was horrified by the Puritans' puritanism. She left with a bunch of her followers and set up an independent colony, Gravesend, in Long Island where complete religious freedom was practiced. It eventually became a Quaker stronghold.

Anne Lister was a privileged British tomboy intent on finding a wife. Her lesbian marriage was eventually performed by a clergyman in England in 1834.

Planned Parenthood protestors provoke perverse ponderings

I have been volunteering as an escort at Planned Parenthood in my midwestern town. My job is to stand in the parking lot and walk over to cars as they drive in, walk up to the windows, and warn the people in the cars that there are protestors and that they shouldn't listen to what they are shouting. Then I try to talk over the protestors' shouts as I walk the people into the building--I inquire where they are coming from, whether they are going to have lunch in town, tell them I really like their hair, etc.

There are two groups of protestors: the ones who just stand there silently and pray, and the ones who shout and carry signs. Here's a sampling of their comments.

To the women:
"Don't kill your son or daughter! You'll just be the parent of a dead child!"
"We can offer you real help! We have someone who will adopt your baby!"
"They are profiting off the blood of innocents!" (This one makes me lol, because fundies think PP is some moneymaking scam.)

To the men:
"It's your job to protect her! Be a man and stand up for your child!" (Problematic in so many patriarchal ways.)

To me and my colleagues:
"I hope you can't sleep when you lie down on your pillow tonight because of all the innocent children you've led to their deaths!"
"You're no different than Hitler!" (Of course they have to follow Godwin's rule. They are basically the original trolls.)

PP's official policy is to not engage them, so I restrain myself while I'm wearing my official vest. But gosh, I really wish I could talk to them. It's fun to give fundies a taste of their own medicine and respond to them in ways that throw them off their game.

Here's some of the things I would say.

"Hi, how are you this morning?" *offers to shake hands "I'm Apodosis. What's your name? Good to see you again today. It's nice to have an opportunity to help others, and I wouldn't have that without you."

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Don't you think there are better ways you could show Christ's love than yelling at people? Why don't you go feed the homeless or something?"

(To the woman with the 'I regret my abortion' sign) "Would you like to tell me about it? How long ago? Under what circumstances? It seems like you are still carrying around a lot of baggage from that. Have you seen a therapist?"

"What church do y'all go to? I go to the UCC church on the east side of town. Do you guys have a mailing list or something? How do you always arrange to be here? Do you carpool?"

*raising my hands in prayer "Lord, bless us all here today. Grant us the wisdom to understand the reasons behind other people's choices, even if we do not agree. Grant us the faith to trust women's ability to make the most ethical decision available in a set of bad options. Grant that we may abandon our attempts to control others' bodies and instead turn our wills towards freeing ourselves from the blindness of our privilege. Grant us the compassion to pity all your children, not just the ones who die before they are born. In Your name, Amen."

Fantasy books and fundamentalism

Libby Anne's post on fantasy books and fundamentalism today got me thinking. Responding to a reader question about why fundamentalists love Narnia and Lord of the Rings, but hate Harry Potter, she argues that there really is no internally consistent reason for it.

I've been wondering about this too. There was a fundie family at my parents' church growing up who had the same restrictions--Harry Potter evil, LOTR good. I enjoyed bringing my HP to church to torment them.

Just sitting here pondering, I wonder if it could have something to do with semantics and gender--"witch" vs. "wizard" definitely have different connotations. [Note: I'm leaving out more contemporary deconstructions of magic, as in SF/F mid-century and all its descendants.]

"Witches", in the common understanding, are evil. They worship the devil in medieval Christian lore, and more than 40,000 people (men and women) were executed as witches between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. (Incidentally, I wonder how modern-day fundamentalists view these events.) In popular culture, witches are evil too. The Wicked Witch of the West, Baba Yaga, Morgan le Fay; witches in fairy stories like Hansel and Gretl and Rapunzel, in Disney movies like The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. My mom didn't become a Christian until she was in her teens, but she is afraid of witches and dark magic. She told me as a kid that I should stay away from Ouija boards and Wicca because they were filled with forces of evil, and I was afraid to watch Buffy when it was on TV. Note how most of these examples associate witches with femininity.

"Wizards", on the other hand, have a completely different connotation in popular culture. They are wise old men, gifted in alchemy, healing, and lore, like Nicolas Flamel, Agrippa, and Paracelsus. There is Merlin, generally viewed as a hero of the King Arthur stories, and definitely a Good Guy in Disney's A Sword in the Stone. There's Prospero, a complicated protagonist but a protagonist nonetheless. The Wizard of Oz, again, not evil, just weak. Of course there's some bad ones, like Aleister Crowley, but in general wizarding is something you learn to do, a tool you can use for good or evil, rather than something you are. And, the word "wizard" is uniquely used for men.

And then we have the fantasy stories we're talking about here. The only witch in LOTR is the Witch-King of Angmar, the king of the Nazgul (whose masculinity, interestingly, has to be specified with the "-king" modifier). The White Witch and the Emerald Witch in Narnia, both female, are evil. On the other hand, Coriakin and other (male) wizards like Ramandu in Narnia are Good Guys (although Lewis takes pains only to refer to them as "magicians"). Andrew Ketterley, the Magician of The Magician's Nephew, is a villain, although not the major one. LOTR's wizards Gandalf and Radagast the Brown are, of course, heroes, and Saruman was a good wizard until he was led astray. Again we have witches/women=bad, wizards/men=good (mostly).

Now let us turn to Harry Potter. In Harry Potter, "witch" and "wizard" are just synonyms for "female magical person" and "male magical person". Both witches and wizards can be good or evil or just complicatedly human, and it has nothing to do with their gender. The wizarding world is pretty good on gender equality as well. The workforce, Hogwarts' students and staff, the Order of the Phoenix and Dumbledore's Army--all seem pretty evenly split between men and women. We have strong herione witches and strong hero wizards, and (one?) evil witch and a bunch of evil wizards. In other words, Harry Potter upends the traditional conception of magic--that is, power--as evil when wielded by women and good when wielded by men. And I can totally understand why fundies would be scared of that.

Alias and the disappointing ending

My partner and I just got through watching Alias. Yes, I know we're a little late to the game. We loved the first three seasons, but thought the show headed downhill in the fourth and the fifth. The show was cancelled unexpectedly in the middle of the fifth season, giving the writers just enough time to wrap up the story arc in a way that was faithful to their original vision. Unfortunately, the last eight episodes read more like a Cliff's Notes version of the finale rather than the finale itself.

The bones of a good story were there, but we feel the writers really neglected a lot of the potential they had going in. So we came up with a different ending. SPOILERS.

Rather than Nadia dying randomly from a collision with a glass table, Prophet Five's 'cure' should have made her awaken as a fervent Rambaldi acolyte and convince Arvin to take up his obsession again. The two of them should have gone together to Prophet Five. Then, during Sydney's confrontation with Arvin in the snow cave, she should have killed Nadia, cementing Arvin's drive to follow Rambaldi.

In Alias, Renée Rienne's 'father' has been in suspended animation for 30 years; when he awakens, APO discovers that his brain has been replaced by that of an evil scientist, Desantis. He is summarily executed by Renée and Jack in 'The Horizon'. This is a lot of effort put into a storyline that went nowhere. Instead of having Desantis's brain inside Renée's father's body, it should have been Rambaldi's brain. The whole thing should have been part of Rambaldi's plan for world domination by putting himself in hypersleep for 500 years while he waited for one of his plans to come to fruition--a plan involving the assembling of all the Rambaldi devices together into a giant weapon or something. Then, Prophet Five would actually be thralls of Rambaldi, his 'twelve apostles', trying to bring about his Second Coming. And Arvin would be his deluded prophet. It would all have a sense of symbolism and symmetry.

Rambaldi in Renée's father should escape from Jack and come back in the final episode. The final boss, who in Alias turns out to be Irina trying to destroy the world with nukes, should in fact be Rambaldi. What motivation does Irina have to blow up the world? None. That's silly. So, Renée should not have been killed ignominiously in an alley by Anna Espinosa; instead she should be killed nobly while helping stop Rambaldi's evil plan of blowing up the world with nukes. (These scenes figure Irina and Sydney, respectively, in Alias). They could still find the microchip in her body while she was still alive.

Meanwhile, Irina should not be evil. We have established that she's not trustworthy and that she's a really bad mom, and she cares more about her job than her family. But she's not evil. After Sydney left Jack to die in that touching scene, Irina should have showed up to help Jack defeat Arvin. Instead of Jack blowing himself up to stop Arvin, it should have been Irina sacrificing herself to save Jack. She has always loved Jack even though she betrays him time and time again. And this seems like it should have been her endgame all along, trying to stop Rambaldi even as Arvin tries to resuscitate him. This leaves Jack alive to be a part of Sydney's family--and especially her kids' family--in a way he was never able to be for Sydney, and would bring him redemption. He deserved a better end than he got, as did Irina. Arvin's end was fine though.

Finally, Sydney and Vaughn and the rest of the APO team should have been responsible for stopping Rambaldi, with Renée dying along the way to fulfill some vital function in a noble way. Sydney should be the one to finally bring him down, what with the prophecy and all, using a really great operation with disguises and hand-to-hand combat. Then, in the final confrontation where it's just her and Rambaldi, Sydney should beat him by using some final device given to her by Irina--maybe the Horizon?--to destroy one of Rambaldi's red energy ball things right when he's using it, blowing him up. Hooray! They ride off into the sunset, the end.

That would have been a better ending.

Oh, and torturing Kelly with snakes? Lame. Have her change her mind because of her former friend's persuasion, or because she has a change of heart when Rambaldi's evil plan is revealed, or something other than snake torture.