Does Social Networking Breed Social Division? - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/does-social-networking-breed-social-division/

Studies suggest that users of Facebook and MySpace are breaking down along class and racial lines.

"Is the social media revolution bringing us together? Or is it perpetuating divisions by race and class?" (NYT)

Alimentan las redes sociales las divisiones del mundo real? Articulo en el Nwe York Times, basado en la investigacion de Danah Boyd, investigadora del Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society

(2009, NYTimes) Article about recent research suggesting there is classism in the use of social media. The quality of the reporting is very weak - hard to say if I agree with the conclusions.

When you've reached a point of incredible optimization in the current paradigm, sometimes there's a huge amount of room for improvement simply by thinking outside the box.

Search him on youtube to beleive it

Via Coudal

In 1983, a man named Cliff Young showed up at the start of this race. Cliff was 61 years old and wore overalls and work boots. To everyone's shock, Cliff wasn't a spectator. He picked up his race number and joined the other runners.

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

Hurricane Katrina Information

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun.

The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."

One of the most disturbing investigative reports to date. Mob mentality is indeed difficult to understanding during life threatening times. Where does one draw the line between self preservation and compassion. Makes me wonder far too often how any of us would react under the same circumstances.

OMG A BLACK GIRL! Zoe Saldana is a major character in a summer action sci-fi blockbuster. OMG A BLACK GIRL! She is ambitious and intelligent and clever without being a caricature. OMG A BLACK GIRL! She is not forced into asexuality by the inexplicable disinterest of every male character. OMG A BLACK GIRL! She is one half of the principle romance. OMG A BLACK GIRL! She is in love with and desired, romanced, and loved by one of the most iconic figures, not just in all of nerdom, but in all of popular culture. OMG. A black girl is fucking Spock. Nyota Uhura is not a white girl. Her just being there is still worthy of a fuckton of notice. This, right here, is one of the biggest coups in media representation that I've seen in my entire lifetime. Goggle adjustments may be in order. Just saying.

My essay on Nyota Uhura in STXI and holding women of color to white feminist standards.

Nyota Uhura is a black girl and there is no angle from which her actually being allowed to have consensual sexuality, being desired, and being loved (in addition to having her job and intellect, no less) is a fundamental downgrade from what she had before.

"Uhura being single in TOS was not empowering. She was single because the male leads were all white and as a black woman she was less of a person than them, she was less of a person than a white woman, and the fact that this serendipitously ended up meaning that she didn't have to spend all of her time mooning pathetically after dismissive men does not make that any more acceptable."

"Now, in general, I don't like the idea that because a female character has a love interest that is all she is and/or that she is automatically reduced by it. It's not that I don't want female characters to have as wide a range of roles in the story as male ones because I absolutely do. It's that, inkeeping with that, I don't feel the need to restrict or limit female characters any more than they already are. Saying that a female character can't be a strong character if she's in a romance is just as shitty as various alternatives."

A reminder of why Uhura and Spock's romance in XI is just so incredibly awesome...and why the way Uhura is portrayed is one of the best things to happen to mainstream media ever. As one parody/recap says, Uhura has an "MA in Advanced Linguistics, PhD in Badass", and she is all that and so much more.

Meta: Why Uhura being in a relationship in STR is noteworthy.

Simply put: Nyota Uhura is not a white girl.

Since he’s a Pisces and I’m a Virgo, Chris and I of course think the Zodiac is total bullshit, and it was very gratifying to have the data bear this out. Here are the grouped match percentages for a random pool of 500,000 users. Astrological sign has no effect whatsoever on how compatible two people are.

data mining of how people describe themselves on a dating sight

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

about Avatar, District 9, & Dune

A story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers...

Sure, Avatar goes a little bit beyond the basic colonizing story. We are told in no uncertain terms that it's wrong to colonize the lands of native people. Our hero chooses to join the Na'vi rather than abide the racist culture of his own people. But it is nevertheless a story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick or in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels.

"When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group."

Like Dances with Wolves, Last Samurai, and even Dune, tis a story about white guilt.

io9?

"Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers... Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?"

Rich, Black, Flunking Cal Professor John Ogbu thinks he knows why rich black kids are failing in school. Nobody wants to hear it. By Susan Goldsmith May 21, 2003 Chris Duffey John Ogbu has been compared to Clarence Thomas, denounced by the Urban League, and criticized in The New York Times. Amy Weiser It wasn’t socioeconomics, school funding, or racism that accounted for the students' poor performance, Ogbu says; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents. Chris Duffey Lionel Fluker John McWhorter believes academia too readily blames white people. The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, stand

John Ogbu attributes more of the responsibility for the achievement gap to Black people than other academics do.

Ogbu's work on the black middle class in Shaker Heights OH

How do racists, anti-Semites and all-purpose hate-mongers view the possibility of America’s first black president? Not necessarily the way you think they would.

WTF o_O

"In an informal Esquire survey, three out of four white supremacists prefer Obama, while McCain is the clear favorite among black nationalists. (Sure, our methodology suffered from an extraordinarily low sample size--limited to four white supremacists and one black nationalist--but just because it wouldn’t fly with Gallup doesn’t mean there ain't a kernel of truth in there.)"

interesting article

"White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro.

Then, we have a black man, who loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married to a black women--when usually negroes who have 'made it' immediately land a white spouse as a kind of prize--that’s the kind of negro that I can respect. Any time that a prominent person embraces their racial heritage in a positive manner, it’s good for all racially minded folks

Probably one of the most ironic things in the history of irony.

I'll up the ante. What if they were Muslim? @laughingwoman Tim Wise: What if Tea Partiers were black? http://bit.ly/cZzE8K

Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

RT @CarriBugbee: Ephphatha Poetry: "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise ""Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise" htt ...

"Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. . . . // And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis." (avoid the comments)

Excellent article on white privilege

"In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?" Via Debbie.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

When Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave a gloved Black Power salute on the Olympic podium in October 1968 it sent a shockwave through sport. But what happened to the other man on the platform?

In case you ever wondered who the white guy on the podium was.

As the US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, both the Republican and Democratic candidates are hitting the swing states. But misconceptions and rumours abound and many voters have thei... As the US presidential campaign enters its final weeks, both the Republican and Democratic candidates are hitting the swing states. But misconceptions and rumours abound and many voters have their facts about the candidates all wrong. Some believe that Democrat Barack Obama is a Muslim, for instance. Casey Kauffman talked to some Republican supporters after a rally by Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, in Ohio.

I know I shouldn't discount Republicans as being bad or dumb or crazy. I know that. But these are the ones that specifically concern me as being ridiculous. I am trying, but they make it hard!

Al Jazeera's 2 minute view of Ohio's battleground state.

Al Jazeera news video

"...the black will take over", "when you got a nigger running for president...", "...he's related to a known terrorist", "just the whole muslim thing...9/11", "...he thinks us white people are trash".....LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE!! THESE ARE MCCAIN SUPPORTERS....But I honestly can say that McCain allowed Sarah Palin to feed these people, then he had to start cleaning up her mess. Their campaign is resorting to fear-mongering to win this election.

Fulbright and Hogan & Hartson

"John Roberts: The Supreme Court’s stealth hard-liner." (by Jeffrey Toobin)

John Roberts and conservative activism

No More Mr. Nice Guy The Supreme Court’s stealth hard-liner. by Jeffrey Toobin

So much for candor at confirmation hearings.

When John G. Roberts, Jr., emerges from behind the red curtains and takes his place in the middle of the Supreme Court bench, he usually wears a pair of reading glasses, which he peers over to see the lawyers arguing before him. It’s an old-fashioned look for the Chief Justice of the United States, who is fifty-four, but, even with the glasses, there’s no mistaking that Roberts is the youngest person on the Court. (John Paul Stevens, the senior Associate Justice, who sits to Roberts’s right, is thirty-five years older.) Roberts’s face is unlined, his shoulders are broad and athletic, and only a few wisps of gray hair mark him as changed in any way from the judge who charmed the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing, in 2005.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Freporting%2F2009%2F05%2F25%2F090525fa_fact_toobin

"In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."