Having finished my thesis, I’m back after a long hiatus. Here’s what I want to talk about: deception. Specifically, this article from the Daily a few days ago. As the article notes, somewhat derisively, rumors have been flying around the Internets in the past week that MoonBeans is being closed down. And, as administrators reassure us, nothing could be further from the truth:

“This [panic] is a complete misinterpretation of the facts,” Herkovic said. “I gather that this rumor situation has a lot to do with the fact that Moonbeans put out a survey of its customers. It really has nothing to do with the larger reality.”

“I’m really kind of tickled that the fear of Moonbeans going away created a little commotion,” he continued. “The libraries had to make some effort to get that building approved in the first place . . . and in a sense, it’s really gratifying that the students care enough about it to be worried.”

Oh, that’s reassuring. We’re just overgrown, excitable teenagers who are letting our imaginations run ahead of us. It’s funny. Tickling, even. Oh, wait:

“The libraries and University have every intention of offering a coffee concession in the location currently called Moonbeans,” he added. “Whether it happens to be that company or another I don’t know. It depends on a bidding process . . . but that has nothing to do with the University forcing anything nor does it have anything to do with the continuing service of the coffee operation at that location.”

In other words, MoonBeans, may, indeed, be closing. The rumors were precisely true. Herkovic above claimed that the panic started because MoonBeans put out a survey that was, he implied, purely for customer services purposes. Has he been to their website, where it says,

Please let us know what we can do to make your experience better at  coffee@moonbeans.com   and if you would like to see MoonBean’s stay at Stanford for another 10 years, please send us an email at keepmoonbeans@moonbeans.com

Maybe what we have here is a semantics problem . . . Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I’ve gone through White Plaza, recently, I’ve been barraged by all sorts of young folk yelling and cheering about their student politics and their posters and their what-have-you. It all begs the question of how they give such a damn — or why no one else does.

Given the ease of voting in a Stanford election, let’s assume that the undergraduate turnout rate of 50% (last year, about 2/3 of freshmen and juniors, 1/3 of sophomores and seniors, though why this pattern exists escapes me) isn’t so low because voting is a hassle. I can come up with a couple possible explanations:

1. Stanford has no real problems. Sure, birth control is expensive, you want to room with your opposite-sex friends,  we waste energy, and the OSA is all up in your social manager’s grill. Maybe these are just trivial though. After all, the ASSU could completely fail to act, and most of us would barely notice the difference; that might be because these problems aren’t worth caring about. I’m not saying they are trivial — just that students might ultimately think of them this way.
2. Maybe the problems are real, but we just don’t think the ASSU will be able to solve them, or will even address the ones we care about. This is also a reasonable point of view, given the obvious and complete disregard the university has tended to show for significant student complaints. It’s as if you’re worried about the war in Iraq, but aren’t allowed to vote for anybody over the level of city council.
3. There’s no obvious way of telling which candidates will solve your problems, even if you have them and you think they’re fixable. Candidate platforms are vague, unrealistic, difficult to disseminate, and by and large identical. This is why real-life elections, even for small-time offices, involve political parties. Political parties are heuristics: you may not know who this candidate for local office is, but you do know that they’re a Democrat, and that’s good enough. Stanford, in the past, has had proto-parties: SOCC, and the Review, which have competed over a relatively small set of patronage-related issues. A classic sign of a mature democracy is when politics moves from patronage to public goods: that is, from spoils to ideas. We’re mired in party-less, patronage politics. It’s the difference between elections for City Council of New York in 1890, and  Prime Minister of Britain today. I don’t care what candidates for the ASSU propose — it’s all the same anyway — I want to hear how they think the ASSU operate. What kind of social contract exists in student government?

Anyway, I suspect each of these explanations is a little true, but it’s pretty hard to say confidently. Someone could write a great honors thesis on the ASSU.

Can we please get past the hyperbole around religious leaders loosely connected to candidates?

For a week or so, the huge story coursing through the veins of the mainstream media was Barack Obama’s connection to Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Wright had said some pretty controversial stuff, like “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.” You can read more bombastic Wright excerpts in this article from ABC. Naturally there was all sorts of speculation about what this might do to Obama’s campaign. Now, the furor is generally agreed to be over thanks in no small part to the news cycle’s more recent obsession with Hillary Clinton’s disingenuous Balkans sniper fire remarks.

In a Tuesday article, the New York Times asks an astute question: why hasn’t John McCain’s connection to another religious leader who’s said a lot of controversial things drawn the same scrutiny or media frenzy? The article looks at the Rev. John C. Hagee, an evangelist who has drawn criticism for views thought to be hostile to Catholics and Jews, and endorsed McCain earlier this year.

Instead of getting big play on the network news, the NYT writes, McCain has been allowed to largely escape with the following explanation:
“In no way did I intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee’s views, which I obviously do not.” Hagee and McCain have both downplayed anything that could be damaging to the campaign, and focus has been on other issues.

It would be easy to criticize the hypocrisy of the 24 hour news media for jumping on Obama’s pastor but not McCain’s, or the right wing alarmists who criticized Wright but not Hagee, but this is beside the point.

Candidates should not be held responsible for the fringe views of any of their supporters, as long as they do not share those views themselves. Both candidates repudiated the most inflammatory statements, and it would be nice to stick with evaluating how all candidates might perform as president, rather than what a friend or supporter of theirs once said.

In response to today’s Daily editorial, which merely stated the benefits of PWR, one student chose to exhibit the arrogance that crops up occasionally on campus. Basically, s/he believes, s/he is a phenomenal writer with absolutely no need to improve his/her writing. The first part of that may very well be true — some students enter Stanford as published novelists, and many are incredible writers — but the second part of that belief is crap. Everyone can get better. No class will make you worse at something. Maybe this student has a good grasp of the basics of writing — so prove it. Write a stellar final paper, win a Boothe Prize. How can you honestly believe that you cannot benefit at all from writing multiple drafts of a paper and discussing it with your peers and instructors (who are pretty intelligent too, you know)? The poster perhaps has a reasonable point that people should have the option to place out, but provided that they’re placing into a more advanced class dedicated to improving their writing, such as WIM courses. To believe that one can enter Stanford with no room for improvement is arrogant, sad and patently ridiculous.

(Adding to Gabe’s post below on the NYT Magazine student abstinence piece)

I thought that while the the author, Randall Patterson, does try to present the abstinence activists in a credible way, some of the most hilarious parts of the article are the contrasts between the female and male True Love Revolution leaders. In particular, the opposite reactions of abstinence proponents Fredell and Keliher to hormonal lust and masturbation are worth a look.

On dealing with ‘urges’:

The one great difference between them seemed to be in their experience of abstinence. Fredell was unaware of that gap. Whenever sexual urges struck, she told me, she was able to manage them by going on a long run and assumed that everyone should be able to do the same. “The biological drive can be overcome,” she said. “It’s not like it reaches a peak, and you have to go out and have sex.”

“And you don’t go down the street thinking you’d like to have sex with him, him, him and him?” I asked.

“No!” she said, abruptly. “Is that what men do?”

It seemed a good time to talk with her about what else Keliher had told me. He described the act he has never experienced as something “breathtakingly powerful” that “lights all of your body on fire.” He spoke of his lust as “this untamed beast.”

Fredell was incredulous: “Leo said that?”

On masturbation:

“To the matter of masturbation, [Keliher] said, ‘This was really tough for me . . . because when you have a habit that’s so deeply ingrained, it’s hard to stop.’

Fredell, when asked about masturbation, just said, ‘Oh, God, no!’

On this note, I’d be curious to know how Fredell’s disdain for masturbation fits in with the “alternative” feminism she propounds. Is the apparent revulsion connected to something liberating for women? Is it her Catholicism that causes this position? Does the True Love Revolution frown upon masturbation? If so, why? Is it about denial of all sexual pleasure not connected to true love?

I agree with Gabe that a better spelling out of some of the philosophical underpinnings would have really helped the activists seem logical rather than reactionary. Any hardcore abstinence activists/philosophers want to fill in the blanks?

So, much to my surprise, Kevin Joyce — one of the Princeton students in the Times article I mentioned in my previous post — actually somehow came across my post, and responded. I had no idea that this blog actually has readers.

First, then, I should thank Kevin for the thoughtfulness and good faith of his comment, as well as the opportunity it affords me to tighten up some admittedly sloppily-made points in the earlier post. However he found this blog the first time, I hope he does again, because I want to address his points, but certainly stand by my original argument.
This is going to be a long-ish post, so above the jump, I’ll just say that I’m not sure why I kept using words like “abstinencers” and so on, when there is in fact, a perfectly good word — “abstainers.” One other point — I’m unsure how to refer to Kevin, so I’m going with first name, because he’s a college student like me, and I feel weird calling him “Joyce.” Kevin, call me Gabe. On the other side of the jump, I’ll get into more substantive stuff for those interested. Read the rest of this entry »

(Adding to Gabe’s post below on the NYT Magazine student abstinence piece)

I thought that while the the author, Randall Patterson, does try to present the abstinence activists in a credible way, some of the most hilarious parts of the article are the contrasts between the female and male True Love Revolution leaders. In particular, the opposite reactions of abstinence proponents Fredell and Keliher to hormonal lust and masturbation are worth a look.

On dealing with ‘urges’:

The one great difference between them seemed to be in their experience of abstinence. Fredell was unaware of that gap. Whenever sexual urges struck, she told me, she was able to manage them by going on a long run and assumed that everyone should be able to do the same. “The biological drive can be overcome,” she said. “It’s not like it reaches a peak, and you have to go out and have sex.”

“And you don’t go down the street thinking you’d like to have sex with him, him, him and him?” I asked.

“No!” she said, abruptly. “Is that what men do?”

It seemed a good time to talk with her about what else Keliher had told me. He described the act he has never experienced as something “breathtakingly powerful” that “lights all of your body on fire.” He spoke of his lust as “this untamed beast.”

Fredell was incredulous: “Leo said that?”

On masturbation:

“To the matter of masturbation, [Keliher] said, ‘This was really tough for me . . . because when you have a habit that’s so deeply ingrained, it’s hard to stop.’

Fredell, when asked about masturbation, just said, ‘Oh, God, no!’

On this note, I’d be curious to know how Fredell’s disdain for masturbation fits in with the “alternative” feminism she propounds. Is the apparent revulsion connected to something liberating for women? Is it her Catholicism that causes this position? Does the True Love Revolution frown upon masturbation? If so, why? Is it about denial of all sexual pleasure not connected to true love?

I agree with Gabe that a better spelling out of some of the philosophical underpinnings would have really helped the activists seem logical rather than reactionary. Any hardcore abstinence activists/philosophers want to fill in the blanks?

Today, the New York Times runs a piece in its magazine on abstinent Ivy Leaguers that tries desperately to make them seem more sophisticated than knee-jerk fundamentalist abstinencers. Hence, the article caption:

In the Ivy League, abstinence is a) philosophical, b) research-based, c) an outgrowth of feminism, d) sexy and fun, e) all of the above.

The writer, Randall Patterson, has to strain pretty hard to make the case. He quotes Kevin Joyce, the former head of Princeton’s abstinence club, saying, “Every position we take as a group can be confirmed by rational thought,” and then proceeds to spend thousands of words profiling a group of people who make no real arguments whatsoever. All the abstinence activists Patterson talks to operate under the basic premise that sex is dirty, bad, and wrong. The assumption drips from the page. Here’s a section on Princeton’s conservative Catholic group, the Anscombe Society:

Anscombe’s arguments against premarital sex are as impressive as they are difficult to summarize, and the students so admired her logic, they named their society after her. Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, is one of the Anscombe Society’s informal faculty advisers. Himself a Catholic thinker, George says that society members employ “philosophical-ethical arguments” to support their belief that promiscuity “deeply compromises human dignity,” and psychological and sociological rationale to justify the claim that casual sex leads to “personal unhappiness and social harm.” The students are some of Princeton’s most gifted, George says, and “even people who don’t accept their conclusions recognize that the arguments being advanced by the Anscombe students are serious and cannot be easily dismissed.”

Note Patterson trying to give Anscombe and its allies the benefit of the doubt, without actually bothering to include the content of their claims, beyond the assertion that sex “deeply compromises human dignity.” People are obviously welcome to believe that, but if they want to make the case to me, I’d sort of like to hear why.

This kind of stuff is sexual Intelligent Design Theory. It’s pseudoscientific — full of claims like “safe sex is not safe” and “[abstinence will give you] better sex in your future marriage” — and relies on that pseudoscientific veneer to mask a fundamentally religious agenda. I’m glad that this seems to have some sort of relationship with feminism for some, like Janie Fredell, the main subject of the article, who expresses deep and obviously genuine concern about equality, female genital mutilation, etc.

I want to reiterate again here that people are of course entitled to their own beliefs about how personally damaging sex is, but calm the agenda down, guys:

By the time I met her in December, Janie Fredell had grown used to explaining to strange men why she won’t have sex. Only 21 years old, she had spoken with a number of reporters and been on CNN. “It’s such an incredible thing to have the power to influence people for the better,”

Despite Fredell’s clear concern for important women’s issues, one can’t help but get the sense that this is a sad, 19th-century style feminism, in which frail, pure women must be protected from the bestial, carnal desires of men. She denies this avidly, but neither she nor Patterson doesn’t bother to explain how her feminism differs from this “protect-the-weak-women” attitude, except to assert flatly that it does differ. Here’s one of Fredell’s co-abstinents:

Keliher quoted to me what an abstinence speaker said — that the real meaning of masculinity is “being able to deny yourself for the sake of the woman.”

It’s another example of the ironic postmodernism of the contemporary American right, which is willing to tolerate such dissonance as the cooption of its arch-enemy, feminism, if that means pushing its fundamentally anti-modern agenda.  Present, of course, is the classic victimology trope of those who are pushing for a basically regressive agenda. The group calls itself “True Love Revolution,” and Fredell’s clear comparison of herself to heroes of people who were actually, forcefully repressed:  “To bolster herself, she often thought of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.”

I don’t know why sex seems so unhappy and unpleasurable to people like Fredell and Keliher. I’m sorry that it does, and I’ll happily concede their right not to have it if they don’t want to. But it’s offensive to suggest that people who enjoy having sex are demeaning themselves and their bodies, and it’s a completely indefensible argument when its religious underpinnings are knocked away.

Thomas Jefferson once declared, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Sadly, one can no longer espouse such faith in this country’s media. The media have become complicit in the mudslinging and the lack of focus on issues, and they are having a serious impact. Having just researched a 20-page PWR paper on media influence, and learned about the media’s impact in my political science class, it is astounding how much of an effect Wolf Blitzer, Rush Limbaugh, The New York Times and others can have.

The media can tell its audience what to think about and what standards they should use to judge an issue, but it seems to be spending more time relating the life story of the prostitute linked to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer than focusing on issues of substance. The irresponsible and distorted reporting is especially prominent in coverage of the presidential election, where, for instance, they misattribute statements to Barack Obama’s pastor and comb 17,481 pages of Hillary Clinton’s First Lady schedules to establish the fact that she was in the White House on the day of Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky and the infamous stained blue dress. All this coverage ranges from falsehood to distortion, to trashy.

One of my classmates recently lampooned CNN’s “best political team on television,” by dubbing them “CNNenemies” of truth. This is sad (albeit hilarious satire), and with the tremendous power of the media, scary. The media are supposed to be the Fourth Estate. Yes, they’re for-profit businesses, and are basically giving their audience what they’re asking for in order to boost their ratings. Which is why we the readers/viewers should stop demanding sex and scandal and soundbites. I, for one, would like to have Thomas Jefferson’s faith in the media once again.

Josh Kuempel comments on my article below, clarifying that the article in the Daily was edited and lost some of its main argument:

Our main argument is that Stanford is getting run more and more like a for-profit business rather than a non-profit dedicated to the student experience. I posted the full text in a facebook note: (http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=209615) If you have time between or after finals, I hope you will get a chance to read it.

I just wanted to post this, and note that I couldn’t agree more. It should be the main emphasis of campus politics and student organizing, and instead it’s totally ignored. If anything is making Stanford worse, it’s this.