mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

chart abbreviation or not?

MSM
acronym, noun 1. man who has sex with other men 2. mainstream media
posted by Author's profile picture mahiwaga

institutionalized racism in the 21st century

Disturbing blog post about how white blue-collar workers supposedly won’t vote for Obama if HRC doesn’t get the nomination.

There is absolutely no reason for white blue-collar workers to vote for McCain except for the fact that he’s white and Obama isn’t. Since McCain is simply going to be a continuation of W’s failed policies that will continue to foster economic decay, voting Republican is tantamount to economic suicide.

The sad fact of the matter is that, if we keep outsourcing their jobs to India and China, white blue-collar workers will eventually disappear.


We should really learn a lesson from the Republican Party this election. They know the jig is up, and that they’ve got to retrench if they don’t want to become completely irrelevant and go the way of the Whigs. So what do they do? They select the candidate that has the best chance—however remote—of appealing to independents and conservative Democrats. As a result, this move basically repudiates a significant segment of their base. Make no mistake, selecting McCain is a big middle-finger to the religious right.

I would argue that McCain will have a much harder time getting the religious right to back him up than Obama will getting white blue-collar workers to back him up. After all, McCain’s record shows that he really doesn’t care too much about the religious right’s agenda. McCain takes a libertarian stance to things like abortion, gay marriage, sex ed in schools, and the teaching of evolution. In contrast, Obama has been an organizer, for God’s sake. This is the precise demographics that he cares about: the worker that is getting shafted by corporate greed and uncontrolled globalization. Remember that he is of a new generation that simply doesn’t care about race the way that the older generations do.


As a person-of-color, it’s really hard to see the supposed appeal to the white blue-collar worker of HRC as someone who has their best interests in mind. All I can see is a call to white solidarity.

posted by Author's profile picture mahiwaga

web 2.0 and disintermediation

Now, Amanda Chapel’s agenda is pretty transparent. She (or, more precisely, the anonymous people that created her) is trying to keep her job relevant.

So @brampitoyo retweets this:

Retweet @amandachapel: When press releases start with 'cause I'm friendz with @chrisbrogan' the market economy is over.

Which just smacks of complete ignorance about the processes that create a market economy.

This is how the market works. Someone you trust—your friend, your sibling, your co-worker—buys something of interest, and if they really like it, they’ll probably talk about it a lot. Depending on how much you trust them, you’ll probably find yourself compelled to get one, too.

This is how it worked in the medieval burghs. There wasn’t any advertising, or PR, or demographic research. It was all word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth spread faster if you trusted where the words were coming from.

Skip ahead about 500 years, and the mass media has subverted this word-of-mouth trust system. We’re just expected to believe that the media has our best interests in mind. Ads replace word-of-mouth. Professional reviewers replace recommendations from your cousin or your mom. We’re trained to trust the system. And the market is being gamed.

And then the World Wide Web came into play.

Now we’re moving back towards the word-of-mouth network. Even though you’ll probably never actually meet the people you’ve met on the web, the ones you trust the most are actual real people. Not bots, not sock-puppets, not corporate-controlled personas. Believe it or not, the human brain actually has great capacity for weeding out bullshit, it’s just that most of us, for some stupid reason or another, refuse to actually activate it.

So you learn which sources to trust. It’s still not easy to eradicate the corporate party line, but it’s easier for someone to get their voice out there.

There will always people who will continue to game the system. But the returns will continue to diminish.

What corporations will discover is that people will come to demand actual quality, and not the mere promise of it. Look at what happened to the music industry. Look at what is happening to the movie industry. You can’t just make a single product and clone it repeatedly ad nauseam and expect the people to lap it up. You’ve actually got to make something.


I wish I could credit where I got the word from, but it does describe part of what Web 2.0 has accomplished. Disintermediation. Getting rid of the middle man. Both seller and buyer can only benefit.

posted by Author's profile picture mahiwaga