Voting from Abroad and Chinese New Year

I could have sworn that I posted this news article up days ago, and here I find on my page that it isn't up. Anyway, I voted for the US democratic primaries a couple days ago...in Hong Kong! That's a first for me, and expats the world over: In an Internet First, Americans Abroad Cast E-Votes in Democratic Primary

We are basically adding another "state" to the primaries, electing 22 delegates, weighing in as much as states like Montana or South Dakota.

Anyway, Chinese New Year was last week. It's hard to really understand the significance of this holiday without being in the heart of the action. When I was young, Chinese New Year usually amounted to the question of whether to take the day off or not from school, and a dinner on the weekend when relatives would give me the lai si (red packets of money given by those who are already married - this really points to the nuclear and economic qualities of a Chinese family I think...the idea that once you're married, you become an economic unit that is producing wealth, so that wealth should be shared with those in the family who aren't at the head of an economic unit yet). Here in Hong Kong though, for the past month they've been playing Chinese New Year music in the subway stations, in supermarkets, on TV, everywhere, it's ubiquitous. The week leading up to New Year day there are flower markets all around Hong Kong where you can buy flowers right for the festive occassion. And then a rare thing happens in Hong Kong on New Year day 1, and day 2, and to some extent day 3 and 4. Everything is closed! I hear things are even more deserted in the Mainland. Traditionally, Hong Kongers visit all their relatives door to door, bringing some gifts, accepting the lai si money, and chatting for a bit. My relatives every year do it much more efficient here, and just have one big gathering to take care of it all at once. Most lai si givers prepare a huge stack that they carry around with them for about a week, to give out to relatives.

There was a parade on New Year day 1, and then Fireworks New Year day 2. As this New Year is the year of the rat, a lot of things have had rat themes, including fireworks in the shape of the Chinese character for rat, swarms of children in rat costume at the parade, rats everywhere!

Pictures in order below:

1 - The flowers (and gourds) most associated with Chinese New Year.
2 - New Year Flower Markets are also the grounds upon which business students try their hand at selling stuff. These wind-wheels (is that what they're called?) are shaped as Mickey, who must be getting a boost in business 'cause its his lunar year.
3 - One of the many rats enjoying advertising fame these past few weeks.

I vote in Hong Kong tomorrow!

- Taken from: http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/02/primary_evote

In an Internet First, Americans Abroad Cast E-Votes in Democratic Primary
By Nicole Martinelli Email 02.05.08 | 4:00 PM

MILAN, Italy -- For the first time, Democrats living abroad from Auckland to Ontario are voting over the internet in a global primary. And a few states may allow expatriate voters to vote online in the general election come November.

For now, expat voters will, in effect, add an extra state to this year's Democratic National Convention. These voters without borders will elect 22 delegates, weighing in with about as much influence as Montana or South Dakota.

Voting is currently open only to Democrats. Republicans Abroad split off from the Republican National Committee and can hold neither in-person nor internet votes in the primaries.

Democrats Abroad declined to reveal how many voters registered for the global primary or the exact cost of the online system (somewhere "under $100,000"), but Meredith Gowan Le Goff, vice chairwoman of Democrats Abroad for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said that membership doubled in the two weeks before the primaries.

The online voting process, explained in a user-friendly cartoon, takes about 10 minutes.

Party members outside the United States who registered for the service through Democrats Abroad by Feb. 1 received an unencrypted e-mail with a 10-digit ballot number and an eight-digit PIN. Latecomers can still vote in person at specified times and places in 34 countries from Feb. 5 to Feb. 12.

After logging on with the ballot number to a secure server at the Democrats Abroad website, users are asked for additional personal information as a security measure, before receiving a certified Java applet.

Once the applet is accepted, the PIN is requested and if correct, the ballot is loaded. After the voter clicks "X" for a candidate, a summary screen pops up asking for confirmation. That's followed by a receipt with the ballot number, while the actual vote speeds back encrypted.

San Diego firm Everyone Counts, which runs the process, said its security procedures are tighter than those at ordinary polling stations.

"We have three forms of information: a piece of personal data, a ballot number and a PIN," said Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele. "Nothing is hack-proof, but we monitor voting as it happens for breaches. So far, so good." The voting system was also used by the Australian military in 2007.

This isn't the first attempt to expand the franchise to overseas U.S. citizens on the internet. After pilot programs, the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) scrapped plans for e-voting in general elections, concluding that "no internet voting system could be 100 percent secure."

Still, imperfect may be good enough for citizens who want to participate in elections far from home.

For the estimated 6 million Americans who live overseas, red tape and the vagaries of far-flung postal systems leave traditional paper absentee ballots with all the accuracy of a message in a bottle.

Americans abroad requested nearly a million ballots in 2006 elections, but only about a third were cast or counted, according to a government report.

Tara Kelly, an American who has lived in Rome since 1996, attempted to vote from the Eternal City exactly once: "The ballot came about three days before the election," she said. "Sending it back would have been useless. It never would have gotten there on time. I never tried again."

The weakest link in today's e-vote? Probably the security requirement to enter additional personal information, which, at least in three cases, wasn't more than what a friend or partner would know.

"For electronic voting to become reliable, you'd need other types of verification," said Francesco Sullo, Kelly's husband and a software architect for online-password-storage tool PassPack. "For instance, a private, personal key not generated by the same system that collects the vote. You've got to be able to be sure it was really me -- and not my neighbor -- voting."

Peripatetic voters have a better chance of casting a ballot online, nonetheless. Deirdré Straughan, a resident of northern Italy since 1991, voted online in the global primary while visiting California.

With online voting, "more people will be able to vote,” she said. “It's been so difficult to do, you had to be very motivated to actually accomplish it."

For those abroad who favor e-voting, returning to the paper-ballot-and-a-prayer system for the November presidential elections may be difficult.

"I do think that's going to change, and it may start changing after this week," Lori Steele said. In fact, her company is in talks with "half a dozen" states that want to make online voting a possibility for overseas voters in time for the general election.

On the Silencing Effect of "Getting It" and the Domination in “The Social Justice Movement” (and other personal and critical feelings)

…(got to thinking about this stuff from reading Asian Am studies stuff for my thesis. I feel that I’m coming full circle in my relation with social justice)…

After the past several years, after taking a much needed breather, a hiatus, from so-called “social justice work” and the ambiguously defined “interest in Asian American ‘issues’,” I’ve finally come to realize what was so alienating and undemocratic about “the community,” and what caused me to distance myself so far away from it for years. It was because even though these counter communities were meant to act as safe havens from the white/male/hetero mainstream society, as well as points from which to resist and counter the dominant discourses in mainstream society, they in fact were very stifling of difference, and simply reproduced the same structure of dominance. For example, there was emphasis on whether he or she “gets it” or not. Saying that someone doesn’t “get it” was the most damning insult you could say behind someone’s back. On the other hand, admitting in emotional outburst that “I finally get it!” (as happened at the leadership training I was a counselor for in Boston over the summer) was a way to valorize yourself by evoking reflectiveness and being a part of the in-group. There was this overall atmosphere and culture of “I’m holier than thou” or “we’re holier than them,” from which I or we are supposed to preach and convert others, almost religiously, to “get it.” But this implicitly controls and stifles anyone who disagrees or sees it differently, since they were excluded for not “getting it.”

Equally problematic and stifling was how stereotypes and positive/negative media representations were understood. According to many Asian American student activists, to counteract stereotypes meant having representations that were just the opposite of Hollywood stereotypes. Hence, you have companies like Black Lava with T-shirts reading “I suck at math” or “I can’t speak Chinese.” I always felt uncomfortable with these, but never understood how to articulate my discomfort. The problem with these is that by taking Hollywood stereotypes as reference points in constructing our own identities, we’re not really challenging the stereotypes, we simply reaffirm them because we’re reinforcing binary possibilities: you’re either the conformist Asian who is really good at math, speaks Chinese, is passive and reserved (read “FOB”) or you’re the “political” Asian who “gets it” and proclaims loud and proud that you suck at math, you suck at Chinese, you’re loud and you’re damned angry. Unfortunately, those who take on the latter identity are still letting stereotypes define and limit who they can be. Not only this, but other problems arise such as being sexist against Asian Am women in order to “counter” stereotypes of Asian Am masculinity; or antagonism against “Asian-Asians” who “don’t get it” and are too FOB-ie, and ignorantly perpetuate stereotypes. And then there’s the incredibly denigrating feeling of being criticized for “being the stereotype” just because I like to teach Chinese (for example tell some white guy that the tattoo on his arm means ‘loyalty’ 忠, and is amazingly poetic because it’s the “center character” 中 above the “heart” character 心 – meaning your heart is centered, hence loyal), or because I see the relative value in non-confrontation when it comes to personal interaction. Restricting the possibility to being someone who “is the stereotype” to someone who is “counter-stereotype” is repressive, and conservative. But these problems aren’t unique to Asian Americans of course, I just reference them because of my familiarity, and out of genuine care for Asian American identities.

On a public level then, it seems to me that the definition of “social justice” in America has been too rigidly defined, and therefore is an exclusive community with low tolerance for conflicting views. In my opinion, any organization that labels itself as a general “social justice” organization has to be inherently open and allowing of multiple conflicting views. A commitment for a more just society that seeks to resist dominant systems should be the only unifying principle. Anything more specific should have their own interest group (which of course would always interact with the broader social justice public). Social justice, then, would be a “movement of movements,” rather than “the movement,” which is too homogenizing and silencing of difference. A “movement of movements” in the Asian American communities would cause less alienation against Asian adoptees, GLBT Asian Ams, Hapas, Asian Ams with disabilities, South Asian Americans, even Asian Am women who date white men, and all sorts of outsiders of the outsiders. Not only would people feel more included, but the movement of movements would be fuller; the process of understanding systems of oppression would never stop (since the moment it does stop, the radical political nature of the movement ceases in my opinion). So instead of thinking of a pan-ethnic umbrella, we should think of pan-ethnic umbrellas.

On a more personal level, I think it’s more radical to simply be yourself (taking influence from all and everyone that is around you), without regard to what the stereotypes are, or how to be their opposites. Being yourself might overlap with Hollywood stereotypes, it might overlap with their opposites, in the end, your identity should overlap with several commons (Asian, women, Asian women, women of color, lesbian, classical music enthusiasts, salsa dancers, social justice agitators, educators, student), but taken as a whole is also uniquely you. This is the only way to truly resist the violence of stereotypes, cultural oppression, and domination.

The Assault on Reason

"Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving senator, Rober Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This Chamber is, for the most part, silent - ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."

This is the opening of Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason." He goes on to explain that the US made the mistake of invading Iraq not entirely because of George W. Bush, but because the American public sphere has changed. TV no longer broadcasts congressional debates about important policy decisions like it used to in order to inform, debate, and make the right decisions. Instead, to win the votes of the American public a politician needs to be rich (ie donations from special interest groups), and buy precisely crafted TV ads:

"I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent...was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a long and detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent's campaign and the planned response to the response, my campaign advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we perchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5 percent in your lead in the polls." I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5 percent."

Democracy is failing because, according to Al Gore and I would agree with him, because of the dominance of television in the way our society thinks. It's a one-way medium, there is no involvement by the audience in the "exchange" of information, which means that whoever is in control is free to put their ideas in the sphere, and this is mostly determined by who's got the most money. In fact, watching TV stimulates a certain section of the brain, whereas reading stimulates a different section that is more involved with reasoning and logic. People who watch several hours of TV in a day have fundamentally different brain processes than those who read several hours a day because they're exercising different parts of the brain. When reading, words are merely symbols with no inherent meaning...as readers we take part in the creation process when we string together the symbols and make meaning out of them. Our TV generation of people have brains hardwired with different thought processes. And it's for this reason that the majority of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and the reason why democracy does not exist in America.

Thoughts on Al Gore

"If I do my job right, all the candidates will be talking about the climate crisis. And I'm not convinced the presidency is the highest and best role I could play. The path I see is a path that builds a consensus - to the point where it doesn't matter as much who's running." - Gore, cited in Time magazine issue May 28th, 2007

Gore, scathed after his year-2000 defeat which he seems internally embittered by, has turned away from politics, which is why he refuses to run, and has become a man trying to work the public sphere. The public sphere was a term introduced to me by a theorist in the canon of sociology, Jurgen Habermas, who says that the public sphere is that part of public life that is the inter-flow of ideas, thoughts, and opinions, especially for political policy. In Europe, the printing press as well as coffee-shop-type establishments - where the educated could gather over a cup of coffee or tea and read newspapers and discuss current events - were things that supported a stronger public sphere. But Gore, in his recently published book, The Assault on Reason, blames television for the decline of the public sphere: "The world of television...makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation." He puts hope in the internet to strengthen the public sphere.

Apparently, many are trying to pursuade Gore to return to politics and run for president next year, but the confident charismatic Al Gore that we now know is only possible because he didn't become president in 2000. It was politics that stifled who he really was. Apparently his global warming slideshow was something he'd already put together in 1989, but tv-media never reported on his environmental side. Gore expresses in his interviews with Time that being out of politics lets him be more free and true to himself, and thus has made a big impact on the minds of many.

Ron Paul

There's a lot of hum and buzz about Democratic candidates Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, but surprisingly it's a Texan Republican candidate that caught my attention back about a month ago at the Republican debate. He was the only one at that debate who had anything intelligent to say while idiots like Gulliani and Romney were the epitome of American arrogance. He was the only one there who had any idea about American foreign policy and how it's created anti-American "terrorism".





Now this is a guy who's actually got any character and intelligence, unlike most one-dimensional ignorant politicians.