A list of shame
A list of shame: the MPs who avoided Parliament yesterday when the Prime Minister formally apologised to the Stolen Generation. May their names ever be blighted.
Lib MP denies Stolen Generations exist | The Australian
(Via Larvatus Prodeo.)
The fragility and permanence of the digital self
I found this post — a google horror story by danah boyd — to be interesting reading in light of Jean’s recent post about leaving Facebook. [more]
Warren Ellis on Lifestreaming
Lifestreaming seems to be making a comeback. It’s “hot” at various trend sites right now. I wonder where people draw the line. Do people take a photo of every meal they have and upload it to a public site? I think the old Nokia Lifeblog sites were private, weren’t they? I guess some people would consider that kind of record valuable regardless, even though it holds no information for anyone else. Unless you’re eating at an interesting restaurant every night, I suppose. And even then, it’s not much more than a top-slice and a record of plates that have been shoved in front of you. Unless you consider the massive aggregation of feeds from online services that represents the bulk of lifestreaming as digital entrails that meaning can be divined from.
Class in the USA
Kevin Drum reports on the decline of labour reporting in US newspapers. The discussion thread has some interesting gems, too:
I’m still playing my one-note tune: The disappearance of “working class” from the American vocabulay forty years ago, and the substiution of “middle class” to placate the Cold War gods, bears its tasteless fruit. As an autoworker I was amused at this effort to blunt class consciousness. I am no longer amused.
It begins with perception. I remember my eleven-year-old daughter coming home from school: “We’re middle class, aren’t we, Daddy?” They got to the kids first, equating the working class with street sweepers and welfare mothers. Everybody else was middle class in the best of all possible worlds.
It’s a lie, of course. If you live off a paycheck you’re working class — no matter how much you may hate it. How can there be labor reporters if there’s no such thing as a laboring class? They disappeared us.