An increasingly important methodology, the process of democratizing science makes for more transparent, accessible and accountable scientific policy-making that gets the public involved! Learn about how fair and unbiased science is being attacked, why it must be stopped, and how you can stop it! Classes will be discussion based, with non intense but routine assignments that will challenge your perception of society.
SOME READINGS:
“Deliberative democracy meets democratised science: a deliberative systems approach to global environmental governance”, Berg and Lidskog
“Sciences, politics, and associative democracy: democratizing science and expertizing democracy”, Veit Bader
“Proposals for Reform Volume II: National Task Force on Rule of Law & Democracy”, Brennan Center for Justice
GRADING:
Attendance: 20%
Participation in Discussion: 30%
Weekly Blog Posts: 20%
Final: 30% (One part written test, one part essay 15% each)
When tragedy strikes, it can tear a community apart, or it can bring it together. But reconciliation and/or restoration cannot and will not begin if the tragedy isn’t even seen for what it is. The statements and reports by officials, whether they be the commander in chief or local PD, are a claim; when not made truthfully, they create chasms of confusion and hopelessness across America. But the people that stand to benefit or be endangered the most from these statements aren’t the authorities– it’s the communities that fall into the cracks. Balko and Parker’s frustrations begin with the tragedy, but they truly culminate at the moment when a public official approaches the opportunity to unify, squanders it, and persistently and violently rocks the public into a dark place of ambiguity.
By placing the significance on what’s not said through long blanks, Parker intends to illicit anger and cynicism simultaneously. The reader can feel the anticipation the nation felt. That clawing, climbing up to the hopeful standard, word by word, until you reach for a blank and plummet back down into the reality that too many people live in. When people in power only see “visions” of these events that statistically and historically burden the black community without at least giving them the nation’s ear, they further and further shatter the US and shove it’s citizens into the cracks away from any hope of a solution.
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I liked this blog post because it was not only concise and strong, but with the metaphors and imagery it had a lot more of what I guess you can say is artistic or emotive wording that I usually don’t include in my writing. It also is very emblematic of some of the main new ways of thinking I had gained during this course; a lot of thinking about the historical suffering of marginalized communities, but also specifically about the power of language and how it reveals truths about reality whether it’s meant to or not.
“This statement is remarkable in that we so rarely see anything approaching this level of public accountability in these cases, but the fact that it’s an anomaly is a testament to how low the bar really is.”
Though the situations themselves can hardly be equated, the direction for a remedial response in the case of injustice is much the same for many instances of sexual assault as it is in reparations for African-Americans. Both come down to offenders upholding their end of a social contract and being accountable for their actions.
Amira Davis in a way makes the same case as Coates. They both identify transgressions in society that have not received the adequate responses and recompense, and call for accountability. Considering this, I’m inclined to take make a similar observation for the case of sexual abusers as I did for reparations. Society simply cannot move towards a better future for everyone if it excludes its victims from receiving full benefits as human beings; a status only accomplished with the recognition of wrongdoings, the specific statement of wrongs and the process of healing and reconciliation for victims.
Davis explains that this isn’t being done, and that because so many abusers (especially ones in positions of power) are not held responsible for their actions, the ambiguous and incomplete response made by Kobe that was nearly on track to accountability, is ultimately harmful because it sets a lightweight, simple precedent for for future responses of culpability that must be substantial and complex.
Coates does a fantastic job of reminding all Americans of what success for our society as a whole looks like. For our society to flourish, there must be a coordinated and unified effort to act on our values, values like equality, peace and honor. I believe that Coates was correct in evaluating that the country must atone for instances when we betray these ideals with a supplement of the values themselves.
It is within our power to strategically address these instances with repayment, either in finances or principle, even when it’s not easy. Neglecting the historical accomplishments of African-Americans and omitting the country’s culpability of wrongdoings not only corrupts us morally, but gradually detracts from our nation’s progress and success in the future. In this way, reparations for black citizens in one form or another are not as much commendable for the well-being of America as they are required.
In these three sections, Coates provides substantial historical evidence for his point of why reparations for African-Americans and their families are not only a justifiable idea, but a necessary one for the wholeness of America.
He establishes the concept of “moral debt” through a reconstruction of America’s timeline of abuses and atrocities towards African-Americans. Centuries of slavery, followed by 90 years of Jim Crow, 60 years of “separate but equal” and 35 years of racist housing policy have accumulated an overbearing ledger towards the black community.
By including these abuses’ direct involvement with African-Americans’ wealth, opportunity, and livelihoods, he makes a solid case for the public and the government’s debt towards this community. White slave owners profited off of free labor, white citizens plundered black schools, churches, homes and places of business without consequence to themselves during and after reconstruction, and white segregated neighborhoods as well as lobbyists and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation raked in the money made off of shunning and intimidating the black community from owning land or a home; “the emblem of American citizenship”.
In this way, Coates makes the case for a not only moral but fiscal debt accrued over centuries of robbery from African Americans of their fortunes, opportunities, families and lives.
Does the media make politics in the USA seem more tribalist than it really is, and if so would/does this have a noticeable effect on morality in our society?
I’m about 76% sure that this is what I’m going to write my paper about, so it may be subject to change, but I will go ahead and use it in this blog post. I’ve been looking into whether or not the media’s (social media as well as articles and cable TV) portrayal of a massive left/right divide is an accurate reflection of reality. Additionally, I hope to use this to dig deeper into how American politics is a perfect manifestation of how cultural and even evolutionary impressions of morality are formed in variable permutations within society.
This research question comes from some interesting topics of normative morality we’ve been talking about in anthropology, as well as personal questions I’ve developed lately about politics and social media. When I looked up if media polarized politics more than it naturally would be, I actually got a lot of specific results back from studies done by Berkeley and even a book written by Ezra Klein from Vox. I think that I can accommodate these resources with anthropological and psychological studies we’ve been skimming the surface of in Anthro. I also think I have an adequate capacity for remaining objective politically for this sake so my research can be made accordingly.
“we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
By beginning the introduction immediately with the example of Jarvious Cotton and his family history, Michelle Alexander compares the modern criminal justice system and its profound effect on the African-American community to past racial caste systems, including Jim Crow.
Mass incarceration is a detrimental process to social control in America. As Alexander puts it, it is striking “not as an independent system but rather as a gateway into a much larger system of racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization” (4). She uses this language of the gateway to visualize the “New Jim Crow” as a mechanism that largely minority criminals are sucked into, a track that carries them to a position of immobility and stigmatization. This description provides similarities between this “new caste system” of mass incarceration and suppression, and the 2 major racial castes in the past (slavery and Jim Crow) that “locked [a stigmatized racial group] into an inferior position by law and custom” (4).
Among this caste system imagery is provided research of studies that show how an overwhelming percentage of the prison population are minorities, and that the US imprisons more than any other country in the world, including a larger percentage of African-Americans imprisoned than blacks in South Africa at the height of apartheid.
Additionally, she provides ample examples of how even after release from prison, African-Americans and other felons lose a key sum of legal rights; “they are often denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence” (2).
Alexander uses precise diction propped up by multiple research and studies to substantiate a legitimate inquiry for the book’s course to investigate.
This fan of the Gorillaz writes a massive comprehensive analysis of the album, digging into multiple layers of meaning and explains things I never understood. Their main claims about what the album has to say and why are super similar to what I observed through the lyrics and organization, though their analysis included much more of the Gorillaz lore which was pretty cool.
The writer, Syed, states that the album’s genre is a spacey-techno sound that is unlike anything they or their many many features have worked with before, but it allows for the seamless introduction of “a truly breathtaking set of feelings and attitudes toward a world that continues to become flashier on the outside and hollower on the inside”. Both Syed and I agree that Plastic Beach amplifies this claim, consistently describing our world as being ravaged by the malfunctions of modern humanity in both the natural sense and in the social, cultural one.
I plan on citing this blog when possible in my paper to reinforce the primary messages and how they are given throughout the tracks.
“As a result of this turn, it became possible to talk about a group’s culture without disavowing any claims about its intrinsic racial nature, although overtly racial claims certainly persisted, as the earlier discussion of civic ostracism demonstrated” (Kim, 117).
As Claire Jean Kim explains the dominating facilitation of the field of racial positions from 1965 to today, she reveals a trick that public opinion-makers often employed in order to continue making racial claims under a guise of colorblind, objective assessments. This quote precedes several examples of how time after time core tenets of different Asian cultures and beliefs were assumed to be held by massive people groups who were praised as the “model minority” by many journalists and scholars. These hardly substantiated talks allowed for the simultaneous racist ostracization and valorization of these Asian Americans, doing so “under the radar” without emulating the style of past racial claims.
The identification of this trope is key to her core argument of the continuation of the field of racial positions in the modern era, as it sorts a chronology of offenses as well as revealing the historical motivations behind them.
0:40 Our buddy Matty strolls in from a dreary and rainy world into “Mindshower” for a digital detox and steps into a bright and shiny (simulated) reality after lobbing his phone into a box
1:28 Pretty soon we meet the people Matty shares his time with: Avatars whose faces are common internet memes, but the environment is all nature. Matty’s now wearing a comfortable tunic thingy now
2:36 Matty frolics and dances in this digital paradise. He now approaches a small secluded pond, but right when he looks to see his reflection, the pond turns into the familiar blue error screen that is displayed on Windows computers following a fatal system error or crash. But once he puts both hands on it, the blue screen flickers and glitches until he’s sucked into it.
3:15 Matty’s now back in the nature, but his digital skin begins to decay and de-materialize, one of many translucent effects that has happened to his skin so far in the video. All the while he keeps dancing foolishly without paying any notice to it.
3:55 As Matty takes a moment to reflect on his thoughts, for a few seconds we see a dark, contorted version of his avatar flailing in front of some code, possibly a quick look behind the code that is the foundation of this simulation, where Matty’s body is being manipulated and bent in anatomically impossible forms to make him dance. This visual is not unlike the bare-bones of animation software where a controller moves joints and limbs to construct movement. It then just as quickly cuts back to Matty floaitng in a sunset sky dancing in a complex yet lazy way.
4:40 Now we see Matty again in the dark back room of the simulation, as he cautiously and slowly approaches another person… himself. Once he is close, both Mattyies reluctantly embrace one another and kiss, then walk away.
5:32 At the very end of the video, as Matty dances away into the infinite digital plane, it pans over to find “The Virgin” and… who I think is the girl from Danny Phantom? sitting beside each other on a log. The screen fades to black.
Analysis:
The genre of “The Birthday Party” is Alternative/Indie. Much of the 1975’s music is either this genre or is rock or pop. The band’s audience has for the most part always been Gen Z and some younger millennials. This video came out in February of this year, 2020. It serves as an artistic description of the lead singer and main character in the video, Matty Healy, and his current life off of drugs. He has to find new ways of dealing with how boring and awkward life is now, so he turns to the Internet to supply any leads on fulfillment.
However, a greater theme emerges from the context of the video. The “digital detox” is still a virtual simulation. Matty’s avatar is a facsimile of himself– in the same way, the other avatars in the simulation are societal archetypes created from the ground up on the internet, each symbolizing characters in society that people play. The message is truly nihilistic and difficult, but ends with the possibility of escape.
Identity, Connection, and Hopelessness
Like all humans since the dawn of self-awareness, the next generation longs for the discovery of identity and genuine connection to others.
Matty turns to the simulation, a system designed to make you feel wholesome about something that isn’t real. As a new generation raised online, it’s hardwired into us to subconsciously take into account the preferences of others to achieve wholeness, rather than the preferences of oneself. This subversive hijacking of identity leads to manipulation; we allow society to tell us who we are, and it all starts with an inherent need to connect to the world at large. The memes don’t only signify a fleeting distraction disguised as happiness, but the trap into loneliness and ego death that is losing your sense of identity, and losing the opportunity to discover it for yourself.
Another byproduct of living in a sea of connectivity never before attained in human history is the lack of it. TV shows, Twitter, our parents, Snapchat, and society have lowered Generation Z’s expectations of what genuine connection with other humans and with the world looks like, and has bamboozled all of us into nabbing the first imitation of connection we can get our hands on immediately. The only reason they’re getting away with it is because we let them, by playing by the rules of the social media game and emulating what we see online.
What the video ultimately conveys is that as a result society is a ton of living memes hopping around now unable and unwilling to fashion a unique identity, regulating surface level relationships that don’t amount to much more than the social equivalent of emojis and Instagram stories.
We’re nothing more than unrecognizable, digitized facsimiles of our true selves. The brief glimpse into the contorted “Matty” being made to dance among the bare bones of the computer code embody that through the dimness of our lives we are manipulated constantly.
And yet
there’s hope.
Matty walks up to the small pool, but when he attempts to see himself, the error flashes in the way. This is an effect to convey the unnaturalness of the simulation, but also proves that the system does not encourage self reflection. But in the end, there’s an attempt made to reach out to the only thing he knows is real, himself (Cogito, ergo sum). Through self-love, Matty kisses himself and achieves an identity beyond the perceptions of others and beyond the bounds of the simulation.
The 1975 has often times confronted the problems of our age, such as in their provocative “Love it if We Made It” and “I like America and America Likes Me”, as well as speaking about the newest generation’s challenges in rectifying their goals and desires to meet these challenges. Therefore it isn’t out of bounds to assume that the message at the end is that there is hope in preserving a unique identity while living in this hyper-reality, and that we can use the web as a tool for self-discovery and connection, as well as to conquer the obstacles facing us in the future. It all just starts with facing it and facing yourself.
+++sorry that this was so long, or if it doesn’t make sense, but I had to+++
