squashed:

After months of watching Obama’s speeches and interviews, I watched part of a Bush interview. It felt like being in second grade. Bush talked in short simple sentences, as if he was explaining something to a child. He seemed to assume that his audience couldn’t handle complex thoughts or anything beyond simple, declarative sentences. By contrast, Obama would offer both sides of an issue and challenge us to think for ourselves.

In my experience, people tend to aspire to or sink to whatever is asked of them.

(emphasis added)

From my school’s philosophy:

Since the quality of expectation is most important, the belief that positive expectations produce positive virtues is fundamental to the practice of the school.

(emphasis added)

mattlanger:

Finally got around to picking up Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus last night, which opens with this brilliant paragraph:

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.

Thinking of this in light of having read this morning yet another commentary on the “online self,” something very striking emerges.

There exists a bizarre inverse relationship between the amount of conscious decision and foresight with which we structure an identity and the ease with which we’re able to recognize when we’re doing so. Because of this arbitrary distinction between the “online” and “offline” self, by means of which we reserve a false authenticity solely for the latter, we’re able to painstakingly draft our Facebook profiles, choose our avatars, and construct our Second Life, all the while remaining fully aware of this process as a production. Yet in the “offline” arena, where every lived moment involves a subconscious and entirely effortless recreation of identity, it remains all but impossible for us to recognize the process in which we’re engaged.

Every tool, if it continues to be used as a tool, eventually becomes a way of thinking.  So, as social tools become normalized, and the online/offline distinction blurs, what will happen?

My hypothesis: on the one hand, our awareness of online identity as an intentionally crafted “production” decrease as it becomes a matter of habit.  On the other hand, the tools we use to design “artificial” online identity will serve as substantive analogies in offline life (“Facebook is the new ‘cheese!’”), introducing new forms of active choice in this “recreation of identity” thing we’re all doing all the time anyway.

The net result (so to speak) being an overall increase in agency?

bunnynico:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. The Fourth Amendment.

Congress is going to retroactively immunize federal crimes (illegal wiretapping) committed by the Bush administration and telecoms in the past by changing the law. The Fourth Amendment is going to be eviscerated tomorrow for political convenience. And Obama voted for the bill as amended back to the original language that the Bush administration demanded. Well done, telecom lobbyists.

Brief recap:

• All spying on Americans with regard to national intelligence is supposed to go through the FISA court.
• During Alberto Gonzales’s tenure, the Bush administration decided that the FISA courts were too slow and too cumbersome for their spying needs. Therefore, they decided to just bypass the court.
• This piece of legislation will (retroactively) authorize that bypass (in theory). Secondly, this piece of legislation offers retroactive immunity to phone companies for all pending lawsuits for unauthorized wiretapping.
• The new law will update FISA pretty significantly. It increases the government’s ability to monitor suspected terrorists. It allows the FISA court more supervision over procedures. In theory, it also goes further than the previous law to protect Americans from wiretaps without a warrant. And it requires agencies inspectors general to investigate 9/11 wiretaps. Only the future will determine whether it will be adhered to.

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON, PEOPLE!?!?