Why wasn't there MySpace when I was 20?

Here's a news story I saw today that seems to hit kind of an odd conflation of moral panic and contemporary political anxieties. Its a typical "16-year-old girl runs away from home to be with the 20-something "predator" she met online, except that in this case the guy is Palestinian and from the West Bank.

My reactions to all this:

1) Predictable moral panic on the part of the news media about a 16-year-old girl hooking up with a guy in his 20's, especially since she met him online. Some papers are already referring to him as a "predator" and a "pedophile". Having been on both sides of teenager/20-something relationships, I call bullshit on that.

2) That said, secretly leaving your family to fly to another country to be with somebody you met online shows utter lack of common sense.

3) After all of the above negative publicity, dude still has his MySpace page, complete with tracks of his sub-Nine Inch Nails compositions and lots of moony-eyed teenagers commenting on how romantic the whole story is. --sigh--

4) From the Chronicle story, I get the impression he's one of those muslim kids that's embraced both pop modernity AND Islamic traditionalism, without really thinking out the contradictions between the two. (Pretty of the "muslim street" these days, actually.) Which makes me wonder if the two of them had managed to get together whether they'd have a typical teen romance, or whether he'd decide he wanted a traditional muslim wife, and start enforcing seclusion and hijab. Somehow I get the impression they never had that conversation.

5) I also can't help but think of the case about 10 years back of Ofir Rahum, a 16-year-old Israeli boy seduced online by a good-looking 20-something Palestinian woman, Amina Mouna, whom he met for a secret rendezvous, and instead was handed over to Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade gunmen for prompt execution. Places like the West Bank, Iraq, etc aren't exactly the best places to blindly follow your heart.

At this rate....

Its now been, what, over one year since I've last entered anything onto this blog. I think I'm destined not to be very active with it, however, I will try to post periodically.

In the last month, much has been written about The Euston Manifesto, a statement of democratic left politics written by Norm Geras and several other authors, who have been much distressed over the last several years about the increasingly anti-democratic nature of much of the political left, particularly the anti-war movement. The manifesto has been much discussed and debated in the blogosphere (much of this debate is linked to here).

The manifesto has been much reviled by the usual suspects in the hard left, particularly supporters of the British Socialist Worker's Party and the RESPECT coalition. Of course, attacks coming from these quarters only make the manifesto look better from my point of view.

I generally am reluctant to support online petitions and manifestos, even when I agree with them, as they are typically the ultimate in empty gestures, having absolutely zero political impact and in most cases, not even read by anybody except for the signatories. The Euston Manifesto does seem to have some legs to it however (even if I'm not sure how large its impact will actually be), and I decided to sign. I left a mini-manifesto of my own with my signature:

"I have long described my politics as "anti-authoritarian" or "left libertarian". The point of any progressive movement worth supporting is to take traditional liberal rights and freedoms as a starting point and extend them further; to make "individual liberty" available to all, not just those few who's access to wealth and democratic freedoms insulate them from the injustices that are a daily part of life for all too many. Of course, there has always been an authoritarian Left, but since 1989, rather than declining, a kind of fuzzy authoritarianism has metastasized among progressives of all stripes. I'm increasingly told that "collective rights" must counterbalance individual rights, that it is "racist" to criticize religions and political movements in cultures other than my own, and that the worldview and politics that come from my own experience and perspective are merely expressions of "white privilege". I'm told that my views really belong somewhere on the Right; however, the "all the freedom you can buy" ethic of "libertarianism" and the imperialism and hostility to human rights of "neoconservatism" in no way represent my values. I sign this manifesto in a hope to help carve out political space for a libertarian and democratic Left."

While I have no idea how much the Euston Manifesto will catch on outside the blogosphere (or outside of the hothouse of British left/liberal politics), I do think it has potential for solidifying a new political orientation and for distinguishing two very different strains of "left" politics – one based in liberal and democratic values and one that, in its quest to radically purge itself of hegemonic Western values, has become essentially anti-democratic, and in some cases even outright authoritarian. (Though it should be noted that many of the Marxist-Leninist groups who form the backbone of the latter tendency have always been essentially anti-democratic and authoritarian.)

While the hard left critique of the manifesto and the political tendency it comes out of has been essentially variations on, "You're with us or with Bush", the rejection of such polarization and political flatlining is essential. I could care less whether, at the end of the day, Eustonites get to be called "Left" or not – adherence to principles is far more important than adherence to a mere label. What matters is to demonstrate that a democratic, liberal, and humanist politics independent of both hyper-capitalism and neoconservatism, on one hand, and neo-Marxism and extreme multiculturalism on the other, is both possible and desirable.

The Passing of Her Holiness, Andrea Dworkin

This entry is kind of belated, but then I found out about it kind of late. Andrea Dworkin died last week. Blogland is filled with discussions about her, and interestingly, a lot of the commentary is positive. (Even on the Suicide Girls message board, several SG models were vociferously sticking up for Dworkin and were ready to tear a new asshole on the (male) poster who dared to trash her. The fact that girls who quite openly and proudly doing softcore nude modeling have such a soft spot for AD speaks volumes about the weird charisma and reality distortion field that woman had.) Perhaps this can be chalked up to not wanting to speak badly of the dead, and of the feeling that Dworkin took a lot of shit for her ideas and actions and that too much insult had been thrown her way already.

I'm not sure I'm so inclined to be quite so charitable, though I'm past the age where I'd get any great pleasure dancing on somebody's grave, either. There's much talk about what a maligned figure Dworkin was, but the fact is, when it came to attacks, she certainly gave as good as she got.

Many of us remember all-too-well the laws that Dworkin and MacKinnon tried to enact back in the '80s. These broadly-written ordinances would have opened to crippling lawsuits anybody who produced any work of sexual expression that fell short of MacKinnon and Dworkin's narrow ideas on politically correct sexuality. And that's not to mention the frequent bitter attacks and even death threats toward other feminists who dared disagree with the idea that sexuality wasn't 100% male-dominated evil.

Dworkin's protestations about her supposed victimization was just so much posturing – she lost vicious fights that she clearly started and then complained when she took some hits. What's left out is that if her side had won, they would have beat down their opponents at least as severely. Its all too easy to posit Dworkin as a victim – if you totally ignore the way she treated others.

There's a lot of commentary about how Dworkin really didn't hate men, but this really seems to be disingenuous. In practice, the only men she didn't seem to positively loath were men like her partner, John Stoltenberg, who were really little more than a loyal poodles. She deeply hated male sexuality in any form that actually existed. If the situation had been altered – if a straight man said that he didn't hate all women, just the ones that weren't deferent to him and didn't hate gays, just gay sex, he'd rightly be seen as clearly sexist and homophobic. Dworkin's says the same things about men and she gets treated like she was some great egalitarian! Gotta' love double standards.

It's kind of ironic how her death followed just a week after Il Papa JPII. In some ways, Dworkin was kind of the Pope of a certain brand of radical feminism. Her writings on sexuality were quoted as dogma by some, much the way some Catholics treat Humanae Vitae as the last word on sex. Dworkinistas may or may not treat her writings as infallible, but they certainly treat it as holy writ that's not to be trifled with by the uninitiated, commonly complaining that unless you've read her entire body of work "with an open mind", you have no business criticizing her ideas at all. Never mind that these people want everybody to be subject to laws inspired by Dworkin's ideas, whether we've actually read them or not.

On another note, though, one thing I've been impressed by from several blog commentaries is that Dworkin isn't taught much in Womens' Studies courses, which surprises the hell out of me, since anti-porn authors pretty much monopolized feminist scholarship around sexuality up through the early '90s. It seems there was a backlash within feminism against that perspective just as there was in much of the rest of society. Womens' Studies can be very cliquish and exclusive and when the next generation of sex-positive/queer/pomo/third-wave types made their way up in that discipline, I guess many of them turned the tables and excluded Dworkin and company. This is unfortunate in that Dworkin is now getting a reputation as this great suppressed feminist thinker and sex-positive feminism is increasingly being seen as a sell-out status-quo.

If feminist and left blogs are any indication, there's a real backlash brewing against sex-positive ideas. Perhaps this is because sex-positive feminists are seen, wrongly in my opinion, of offering a blanket apology for the entire porn industry no matter how badly all-too-many pornographers treat their talent. This gets back to one of the more lucid points I've seen raised by Camille Paglia concerning political correctness, that if leftists or liberals shut down discussion of certain ideas, those ideas will be taken up and used by the Right. If we take anti-porn feminism to be a kind of right-wing within the feminist movement, we can certainly see this – progressive sex-positive feminists don't deal effectively with some of the more problematic aspects of the sex industry, so anti-porn feminists come out looking to some like only ones offering an effective solution.

Anyway, some very disconnected thoughts on the matter. I'll attempt to revise this soon to add some links, though I suspect out in blogland the whole subject is already as dead as AD.

This New Thing

I've been meaning to start a blog for the past year at least - I finally felt inspired to do so today. Susie Bright's blog has been a big inspiration. I'm still not good enough with html to fix the rather generic-looking backdrop, unfortunately. I tried altering the background color and got nowhere with it.

What to post about? I'll probably be discussing a fair amount of political stuff and might come across as having a libertarian or even conservative bent. (I'll cop to the former, but not to the latter - I think of myself as more left libertarian - in other words, I consider personal freedom and autonomy to be critical, but actually do give a shit about something other than my pocketbook, a quality lacking in all too many 'libertarians'.) That has more to do with the fact that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which means I come across poorly thought-out, ignorant, and hypocritial examples of left/liberal/progressive ideas on almost a daily basis. If I lived in the Bible Belt, I'd be more focused on that variety of bullshit.

Other than that, science, photography, cinema, and comics are all things I'll probably be posting about, and probably should, as these are least things about which I have much more positive things to say than about the political issues of the day.

A point of departure - is blogging even a worthwhile activity, at least for those of us who aren't well-known authors with an audience hanging on our every word? Do our opinions contribute to the discorse of a democratic society or just add to the cacophany of a media-saturated culture? Is a blog the Pet Rock of the Millenium? Is anybody even reading this?