Setting the World To Rights one Sock Puppet at a Time

My notes on what I have learned in the last two weeks for future use:

1. To adopt an opaque mask ("sock puppet") on line may be considered misrepresentation or even fraud.
2. Sockpuppetting and other norm violations may be exposed and punished by the norm police. Such punishment may, like any other group activity that feeds on itself, be taken to excess.
3. Cyberstalking is a crime in most states.
4. Voluntary site policies on harassment may be a good idea.
5. Moderation in line with site policies is a good idea.
6. In improving the morals of people other than yourself it is important to be earnest.
7. Satire with sockpuppets is a Fool's errand. Oscar Wilde, one of the best ever at our noble trade, ended up doing time in Reading Goal. So, Tutor, you either behave yourself, or you are going right back into that dusty toybox where I found you.

As Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families I am now off to Washington, DC, our nation's capital, where I will be speaking at Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, on "Advising Benefactors: Giving Well,Doing Good." That is no laughing matter. There will be no sockuppets at Hudson. They don't allow it.

Comments

[Slim]

psst

[Antoine Möeller]

Shelby Steele on Masks and Inflections:

BILL MOYERS: And you write that, "the black identity Obama longs for means that you must join a politics that keeps alive the idea of white obligation to blacks." You think that's Obama's mission, to keep alive the white obligation to blacks?

SHELBY STEELE: I think that that's what he tells blacks. I think that when he speaks as he did in Selma, as he did in Harlem not too long ago, he puts on the challenger's mask. And--

BILL MOYERS: He also, and when he spoke at Selma, I remember seeing that on television, he used that inflection of the southern-

SHELBY STEELE: Yes, he did.

BILL MOYERS: Of the southern dialect that you don't hear in the rest of his speeches.

SHELBY STEELE: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: Hillary Clinton did the same thing by the way. She tried to.

SHELBY STEELE: Yeah, she was-- it was not pleasant to listen to. Sometimes, Barack Obama is John F. Kennedy. Sometimes, he's Martin Luther King. Sometimes, he's Stokely Carmichael in 1968. He has these different masks that are tailored to the audience that he's in front of. And he does it with such facility that you, one, can not help but wonder who's the real-- what's his voice? What's his inflection?

BILL MOYERS: What do you see ten years from now with race relations in this country? Are e we going to deepen the American dream?

SHELBY STEELE: I think so. I think that these paradigms I'm talking about exhaust themselves. We just get tired of them. We begin to see through them. If I could see what's the difference between bargaining and challenging, it's only because it's so vivid. We've done it so long that we're-- it has a familiarity, a recognizability. And so, I think at some point we do become exhausted. But we've played this game so long. And masking is something that comes inevitably to minority groups who use it to survive. It was a survival mechanism in slavery and segregation. And we're still using it. We're still entering the mainstream using it. We will get tired of that. Our children will and their children will get-- will be even more tired of it. And will understand I think that the challenge of the collective is to produce individuals.

Mr. Steele is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution

[Gerry]

Authenticity and identity coming around again.

I don't quite understand the tone of critique here. W, a Connecticut yankee doing a bad job playing a southern hick, and the press has almost nothing to say about it. What is the expectation?

[phil]

Clinton played the Arkansas good ole boy one day and the Rhodes Scholar the next. No one can be elected unless they appeal to several constituencies and speak to those groups within their language and folkways. This search for an essential essence of self that is always present and never changes, that is not context-dependent, is the search for the soul; it will remain elusive.

[Josh Millard]

This search for an essential essence of self that is always present and never changes, that is not context-dependent, is the search for the soul; it will remain elusive.

Differing opinions about the online communications aside, I can't argue with that.

And, needless to say (and is it sad that that's so?) it goes twice for politicians during an election year. The essential self not just elusive but packed away in the trunk of the campaign bus.

[JJ Commoner]

For what it's worth, I once wrote as the final paragraph in the final chapter in a book proposal for a tome on wirearchy ...

More than ever, the ancient nostrums “know yourself” and “to thine own self be true” will occupy a central place in the life of every individual worker.

Being connected to oneself … will be the core competency in a completely interconnected, always-on and fluid workplace and world"

[phil]

Can I be myself as I "really am" when in close connection and interchange with others who would despise me for what I am? (For being a Yankee, or educated, or secular, or a satirist, or irreverent, or a white male, or whatever?) We adopt a persona to make social interchange easier, when not among our closest homies. "Know yourself", is one maxim. "Watch yourself," is another.

[His Chits at a Nadir]

Three cheers for the always present! Don't be representin' - our politics are transparently non-representable. The internet does that. They should rename Congress "The House of Presentatives" and only allow beautiful souls to legislate. I'd like to run, in more ways than one. How do I connect to myself, which port do I use, and who wrote the protocol?

[matrullo]

Why should it not be possible for a "politician" - i.e., an outmoded careerist in the DC marketplace - to allude, inflect, mime the great voices of the past much in the way a masterful singer (e.g., Dylan) will seem to be singing not so much in imitation of, say, Billie Holiday, as ringing her bell in passing, enriching the moment with the justified presence of one who did that thing well. Politicians might do well to emulate singers like that - it gives them something to do with all that electric oxygen.

[Gerry]

Maybe the trick is the express the essential self while wearing one or masks in sequence.

Isn't part of the point of satire to get beneath the mask, to communicate to one constituency from behind a mask so as not to trigger the hot button issues in another? I guess Bush is able to do it badly because one of his constituencies is tone deaf. He can speak to the fundies, do for the corporations and both groups are happy. As it turns out, one of them is completely deceived.

I think one of the things that makes Obama the most dangerous candidate in this context is that he can authentically claim the heritage for each of these masks. He really is a member of a Christian congregation, and not just a spokesman for the moral majority. When he recalls the tropes and style of great black leaders we don't get the feeling of someone thumping a style but of a lived experience.

Can't a person have more than one authentic voice?

[Gerry]

I would also claim that Bush isn't even good for the corporatists. He's good for the kelptocracy, but when are main street American businesspeople and the well run multinationals going to realize that theft and corruption aren't good for the economy?

[Gerry]

Michael M. sent me a link to a video on story and narrative. The story about Truth and Story really struck me. Most people don't want the Naked Truth, so to get elected, you have to cloak Truth in narrative and inflected speech directed to the audience. The most powerful stories connect with each listener personally, and each will have a singular take on the story. She may tell it again in her way, and another in his making the story tree thicker and stronger.

What we may observe is that the Arts of this multi-level communication can be used for good and bad ends. It is up to us as moral actors to stand up for which is which.

[phil]

We either speak "as one of us" to a tightly bound community, our backs turned to other audiences, or we try for a voice that carries across diverse constituencies. Allusion, little details, diction, there are many ways to talk to one audience with a straight face while conveying to a second another meaning, a more ample self.

[Hapless Caulfield Namesake]

"The vindictiveness and disproportionate influence of the blogosphere is a particularly sore subject. Who is it that “rewrote history, made anonymous accusations, hired and elevated hacks and phonies, ruined reputations at will, and airbrushed suddenly unwanted associates out of documents and photographs”? Mr. Siegel’s immediate answer is Stalin. But he alleges that the new power players of the blogosphere have appropriated similar powers.

Mr. Siegel himself became a great big blog-attack casualty when, in what he wishfully calls “my rollicking misadventure in the online world,” he was caught pseudonymously praising himself on the Web site of The New Republic, where he had been a particularly savage and reckless blogger."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/books/17masl.html?pagewanted=print

[Alejandro H. Fukit (Speaking as a Private Citizen)]

Why should it not be possible for a "politician" - i.e., an outmoded careerist in the DC marketplace - to allude, inflect, mime the great voices of the past much in the way a masterful singer (e.g., Dylan) will seem to be singing not so much in imitation of, say, Billie Holiday, as ringing her bell in passing, enriching the moment with the justified presence of one who did that thing well. Politicians might do well to emulate singers like that - it gives them something to do with all that electric oxygen.

Hey, matrullo, lemme know if you ever get your topia off the ground. An inch or two would be plenty, a single day would be fine!

[matrullo]

Five minutes could be bliss. You have my word on it, AHF.

[phil]

A small circle of friends, talking among themselves, laughing and passing along links, and maybe some sake, or wine, with many kindred spirits watching silently from the shadows, but laughing to themselves. And yes, the demons hover seeking their opening. What is that the image of? H-o-p-e. Maybe. Good fellowship may yet prevail.