• Lots of great stuff on Ms. Musings (so what else is new?). Start with this post, collecting many good quotes and links about the politics of first ladies. There’s even a good piece from Andrew Sullivan, of all people.

• Also on Ms. Musings, Sepp Blatter (what a name!) has recieved much well-deserved derision for his suggestion that professional women soccer players try to increase their league’s popularity by wearing skimpier uniforms. The sad thing is, this idiot is actually the president of the international soccer federation.
• And again via Ms.Musings, three new (to me) blogs that seem interesting. Bloggers for Choice is pretty much what it sounds like. Rebel Dad is a blog by, and focusing on, stay-at-home fathers. And Respectful of Otters is a very well-reasoned political blog about “politics, HIV, health care, psychology, baseball, feminism, et cetera.”
• In the Village Voice, Richard Goldstein discusses the election, Kerry’s cultivation of macho, and why people made such a big deal of Dean’s “scream” (which to me, watching the clip, seemed like nothing at all).
  Why was Dean’s performance so unsettling? The most common explanation’that it wasn’t presidential’doesn’t get at the gut-level distress even many of his supporters felt. No self-deprecating shtick can overcome this blunder. Dean still has the fans and the funds to be a player, but no matter how well he does in New Hampshire, he’ll be haunted by that manic moment for the rest of his political life.

  Dubya couldn’t remember the names of foreign leaders, but that didn’t ground him. No one ever lost macho points for being stupid. Male hysteria is another story. Most women recoil from it, and most men show contempt, which is why late-night comics (all of them guys) rushed to piss on Dean. In a more relaxed time, his performance might have been regarded as passionate and roguish. But in this anxious age, it tapped into one of the worst nightmares for many men: losing your grip in a clinch. For a wannabe dude-in-chief, that’s not just a sign of instability; it’s a violation of gender expectations.

  Via The Mahablog.

• While I’m quoting Goldstein, this article on male opposition to gay marriage is good. (According to polls, men are more against gay marriage than women - even though women are more likely to be religious than men.)
  Submissive women and downcast gays were once living proof of straight-male supremacy. Now, both groups refuse to accept subordination, and it’s macho that stands to be stigmatized. Straight men still hold the lion’s share of wealth and power, but their prestige has definitely eroded. No wonder they have such strong feelings about gay marriage. It’s not a question of faith or preservation of the family. The real issue here is the “acceptance” of homosexuals, which, for many straight guys, represents yet another blow to their already fragile status.
• Echidne is all over a Washington Post editorial praising the jobless recovery. (Gotta love that liberal media!)
• Quote of the day, from my housemate Phil.
  You know the best part of owning a bubble machine? Setting it up in some not-too-visible place in the living room and then not turning it on until everyone is doing acid. Then, everyone would be like, “Where are all these bubbles coming from? They can’t be coming from the sky, we have a ceiling.” You know what would be even better than a bubble machine? A lizard machine.
• Colorado University is using sex parties to recruit athletes. “They told us, you know, ‘This is what you get when you come to Colorado.” There have been at least two complaints of rape, but the University is going to continue the practice because they don’t want to lose their recruiting edge, according to a local DA. Via Frogblog.
• Matthew Yglesias at (oddly enough) Crescat Sententia and Andrew Sullivan at (not so oddly) AndrewSullivan.com attack the latest anti-gay-marriage meme: that same-sex marriage has somehow caused a decline in straight marriage in Scandinavian countries. One big problem with this theory: They don’t have same-sex marriage in those countries. Whoops!

  Update: Gabriel Rosenberg has written an excellent response, too.

• Arthur Silber correctly points out that the decision to invade Iraq - and to spin intelligence to make Saddam sound as dangerous as possible - were both policy decisions, and shouldn’t be fobbed off on “bad intelligence.” as he points out, the Clintonites had the exact same “bad intelligence” Bush did, yet they didn’t decide to invade Iraq.
• The news from hell on earth - pardon me, I mean Florida:
  Prosecutors in Seminole County say they might ask a veteran judge to be removed from a rape case because of comments the judge made about the victim.

  Court records indicate Circuit Judge Gene Stephenson made the comment earlier this week while looking at a photograph of the victim. The record quotes the judge as saying, “Why would he want to rape her? She doesn’t look like a day at the beach.”

  They might ask him to be removed? Might? Jesus. I’d ask for him to be mauled by bears. Via Trish Wilson.

• “The illiteracy level of our children are appalling.” — George W. Bush. Attacking folks for gaffes like this is pretty unsubstantive, I admit, but he really asks for it, doesn’t he? Via Trish Wilson, whose new woodgrain blog design looks nice.
• Common sense was deported long ago.
  Suarez, now 43, legally entered the United States from Mexico at the age of 16, only to be raped and beaten as the teenage sex slave of a man 55 years her elder. She was convicted of killing the monster, despite her claims of innocence, and finally won her parole last month after battling for years.

  Now she sits in another prison, awaiting a deportation hearing scheduled for today. Suarez is a permanent legal resident, but not a U.S. citizen, and immigration law says that, with an aggravated felony on her record, she is to be deported.

  “Justice,” Suarez said, “is so hard to understand.”

  The lady has a gift for understatement. Via TalkLeft.

• New Scientist has an interview with Alexandra Aikhenvald, a linguist who specializes in documenting dying languages.
  Why is it important to preserve these languages?

  First, to learn about how people communicate and how the human mind works. What are the categories that are important enough for people to express them in their languages?

  If these so-called “exotic” languages die, we’ll be left with just one world view. This won’t be very interesting, and we’ll have lost a vast amount of information about human nature and how people perceive the world.

  I wish the interview were longer and more detailed, but what little there is, is interesting. Via Boing Boing.

January 30

1888: (Birthday) Ella Cara Deloria, a Dakota Indian (Sioux) anthropologist who studied Dakota Indian life for more than 40 years, was born at White Swan, South Dakota, on the Yankton Sioux Reservation. Deloria always lived at extreme poverty levels as she worked with noted anthropologist Frank Boaz and later Ruth Benedict. For the first time in history, life in the Indian culture was seen from a woman’s perspective.

1958: (A First) The British House of Lords passed law (confirmed by the House of Commons Feb. 13) that seated women in the House of Lords for the first time in its six and one half centuries of existence. The day in now known as Woman Peerage Day.

Ever have some task you had to do, but it’s just so huge that it’s hard to see how to begin? The very prospect of beginning seems too huge, too intimidating.

Which brings me to “Wimps and Barbarians,” by Terrence O. Moore, the Mount Everest of fisking. The essay comes with an unstinting recommendation from Sara at Diotima and appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, so it’s probably not a practical joke.

Then again, maybe Moore is a joker. How else to explain a high school principal who writes this:

I swear, just a handful of paragraphs after expressing a determination not to appear “old and boring,” the man is complaining that those darn young people dress in those damned modern fashions and listen to that awful rock and roll music. Oh, and he makes fun of them for having a teenage vocabulary. (Like, how original.)

Think I’m exaggerating?

Okay, so we’re not going to seem tired or fussy. First step: let’s attack teenage fashion, teenage vocabulary, and teenage music. That sure won’t make us seem old or boring!

Here’s another giggle-worthy bit:

Picture it: you’re a teenager in high school, a bit insecure about masculinity (as nearly all teen boys are). Suddenly, your ex-marine principal Mr. Moore gets in your face and barks “When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?” The question, full of contempt, assumes its own answer; but you can’t return the contempt, because if you do he’ll throw you in detention or worse.

Is it any surprise that teens react to this “simple” question by stammering and looking at the ground? Not to anyone who has any ability to put himself in a teenager’s shoes. But if Principal Moore could put himself in other people’s shoes, he’d know better than to rail against that Awful Music Kids Like.

Moore’s lack of irony isn’t funny (okay, it isn’t just funny); it also reveals a significant intellectual weakness, which is that Moore doesn’t examine himself or his own ideas critically. Obvious self-contradictions go by without comment; necessary premises underlying his essay are simply assumed, rather than supported with facts or even argument.

For example, the central premise of Moore’s article: Manhood is in decline. Over and over, Principal Moore laments “how we as a nation have lost our sense of true manliness.” We must return to the golden age of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, when men were men.

Of course, Principal Moore’s younger students have grandfathers who, back in the day, wore their hair long, smoked pot and listened to Bob Dylan. And the boring, old Principal Moore’s of that day tore their hair out and lamented that young men nowadays lacked all manhood.

This brings up an essential point, one completely ignored by Principal Moore: How does he know manhood is in decline? If Moore wasn’t ignorant of history, he’d know that chicken littles have been declaring “the manhood is failing! The manhood is failing!” for at least a century and probably much longer.

For example, consider this quote from Herman Scheffauer, who wrote in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1908; modernize the language slightly and it could be taken straight from Principal Moore’s article:

Like Principal Moore, Scheffauer is certain that the young men of his day are failing at manhood - so certain that he doesn’t bother providing any evidence to support his thesis. Scheffauer was by no means alone in his concern - on the contrary, that public schools (and woman teachers) were failing to make boys into virtuous men was a major concern of macho intellectuals nationwide (it was partly to address these concerns that the Boy Scouts were created in 1910).

And so it’s been for every generation of Americans. Principle Moore says that young men of today are disappointing compared to their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. But when the grandpas and great-grandpas were young men, they too were criticized for their lack of proper manhood.

So what’s the deal? Is it possible that manhood has been in a state of tragic decline in every generation for over a century? Maybe, but I doubt it. With hindsight, the men of the 1900s don’t seem vastly manlier than the men of the 1930s, for example. The young men (and women, who Principal Moore ignores) who fought the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s do not, to me, seem less manly and virtuous than their 1920s counterparts. In short, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to think manliness has ever been in crisis, even though we’ve never lacked for chicken littles who tell us otherwise.

But Principal Moore doesn’t address this history - in fact, there’s no reason to think he’s aware of the history of his views.

This isn’t the only case where Moore appears uninformed on his subject. For instance, one of the many villains of Moore’s piece (along with rock music, baseball caps, and female teachers) is the lack of spanking:

It’s the “of course” that amazes me, because it speaks of a self-confidence in one’s own rightness completely unshaken by decades of research finding the opposite. Is Principle Moore so ignorant of the research that it doesn’t even occur to him to attempt to support his “of course” with evidence, or to explain why the last 45 years of research on spanking has all been wrong? From an article on spanking by Murray Straus (a favorite social scientist of anti-feminists, by the way, cited often by Christina Hoff Sommers) in Society (Sept 2001 issue):

Is there an argument for spanking? Perhaps. But Moore doesn’t even bother to make an argument, or to address the fact that opposing views appear considerably more supported by research. It’s as if he believes that his contempt for opposing views, in and of itself, rebuts those views. More likely, Moore is so positive that he must be correct that he couldn’t be bothered researching what peer-reviewed studies have found about spanking. Is doing research - and, indeed, knowing what you’re talking about - too wimpy for a real man like Principal Moore? Maybe.

That’s part one of my climb up Mount Moore. In part two, I’ll get to what I really disliked about this essay.

January 29

1912: (Birthday) Martha Griffiths, U.S. Representative from Michigan, first woman on House Ways and Means Committee, and fighter for equal rights, born in Pierce City, Missouri.

1926: (A First) Violette Neatly Anderson, became the first black female lawyer to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.

1943: (A First) Ruth Cheney Streeter became the first woman to reach the rank of Major with the U.S. Marines. She became a lieutenant colonel in 1943 and a full colonel in 1944.

The New York Times Magazine has an okay article summing up the current conflict over copyright. There’s nothing new here for folks who have been following the issue, but if you’re unfamiliar with the issue the article will provide a decent introduction.

One thing that struck me about the article, though, is who is quoted. Record company executives are quoted. Law professors are quoted. What’s missing, though, are quotes from artists on either side of this issue - although both sides make it clear that they are fighting for artists’ best interests.

Eve Tushnet, discussing the much-lauded superhero comic Watchmen, writes:

Jim Henley responds:

It’s possible to subscribe to both Jim’s and Eve’s interpretations for the pirate comic. However, Eve’s interpretation is very strongly supported by the text; in the final chapter, talking to Jon, Veidt explains that he’s been dreaming of “swimming towards a hideous….” This is a reference to the only other image of swimming in Watchmen; the protagonist of the pirate comic swimming towards the hideous pirate ship after murdering his own family and townsfolk. Veidt, like the main character in the pirate comic, is the destruction he fears.

The superhero as (in Eve’s term) “blood-soaked utopian” was one of Alan Moore’s favorite themes in his 1980s superhero comics; it can be seen not only in Adrien Veidt, but also in the title characters of V for Vendetta and Miracleman. V of V for Vendetta is the closest relative to Adrian Veidt; like Veidt, V is essentially a terrorist, who creates desired political change through visible acts of violence and murder.

Miracleman isn’t such a clear example, because the worse of the carnage happens mostly against Miracleman’s will, as he fights a supervillain in London. Nonetheless, in the battle Miracleman’s hands are far from clean: for example, he picks up an automobile with a terrified family inside and hurls it at his enemy, killing everyone in the car. The fight which leads to Miracleman’s leftist utopia/dictatorship ends when Miracleman murders an eleven year old boy.

To me, the bloody ends of Moore’s political fantasies have always felt like human sacrifice; to create utopia, it is first necessary to make a large-scale human sacrifice. (Similar themes are found in Moore and Campbells Jack the Ripper novel From Hell - although in that case, the sacrifices were not murdered in the name of social improvement).

Moore’s comics seem to imply that real political improvement can happen only with extremes; only violent, shocking death can create real progressive change. Not exactly an inspiring message for leftists. Still, they’re darn good comics.

January 28

1908: (A First) Julia Ward Howe becomes the firest woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

1921: a study by the U.S. House of Representatives was released which showed motherhood was safer in 17 countries than in the United States. The study led to a federal funding for infant and maternity care.
Recent studies during the 1990s shown the U.S. still lagging behind other developed nations.

1986: The first women killed in the U.S. Space program when the Challenger explodes, and astronaut Judith Resnick and Christa McCauliffe died along with five male crew members shortly after launch at Cape Canaveral, FL. They became the first women killed in earth’s space programs.

In no particular order:

• I’m writing this before all the votes are in (64%) so I’m not sure by what exact spread Kerry will beat Dean but it looks as though Dean got trounced. It’s hovered at 39%/25% for awhile now with Clark and Edwards flipping back and forth for third.
• I’m not too mavelous with electoral politics, but I’m really not surprised to see Dean lose this one. I actually would have pegged him with a third place finish in New Hampshire before I saw the tracking polls. Unlike some I’m not quite ready to declare that his campaign is totally dead, but if it is it wasn’t New Hampshire that killed him. No, it wasn’t the primal scream, either.

  I think Dean’s campaign toppled when he failed to win the Iowa primary simply because he failed to live up to (outrageous) expectations. When people saw Dean come in third in Iowa I think they started to view his campaign as all hype whether it ever actually was or not.

• I’m as comfortable with a Kerry candidacy as I am with an Edwards candidacy, so whichever goes on to win this thing is okay with me. Actually, they were probably the two of the four frontrunners I was most okay with. Of course, a dark horse could come out of the back and drop someone else into the lead, but I wouldn’t lay money on it.
• A nice thing about Kerry winning in New Hampshire is that some of the blogs that have been yelling “The doctor!” and “The general!” at each other for months have effectively come up a draw.
• The first person that suggests that Kerry is only winning because of rigged Diebold machines needs to get smacked. The issue of transparent electronic voting is too important to slaughter with the “my candidate can beat your candidate up” mud-slinging. Kerry’s just as good as anyone else; each of the candidates has strong points and weak points.

All in all, I’m curious to see how things play out in February.

A hard-to-read New York Times Magazine article describes the sexual slavery industry in the USA today There’s a lot to get pissed off about here, but near the top of the list is that the US could be doing a lot more to halt sexual slavery….

I wish I had some interesting feminist theory to offer here, but really I don’t have anything to say besides: [some] people suck. I recommend reading the entire article, although there’s a lot in there which is sickening.

UPDATE: But then again… It’s unfortunate that I focused on the numbers here, because (as this Slate article, cited in comments by “Patrick O,” argues) the numbers given in the Times article may be badly exaggerated. Slate argues that the real numbers are essentially impossible to know:

On the other hand, I’m don’t find Slate’s primary argument - “if it happened, then the police would be busting slave houses more often” - very convincing. I can see dozens of drug dealers and prostitutes any night by just walking through the right neighborhood, and I’m sure the police know of them. If we accept Slate’s logic, that must mean the dealers and streetwalkers don’t exist. Merely because the police know of something doesn’t mean that they will priortize it. Furthermore, the number of locations suggested by the article - dozens in New York City, hundreds nationwide - is actually not fairly small, compared to the scale of (respectively) NYC and the United States.

Slate is correct to point out that some of the anecdotes in the Times article are hard to buy - in particular the description of prostituted women and girls in Vista, California smacks of overelaboration. From Slate:

As Corwin suggests in my comments, such stories bring the McMartin preschool trials to mind. It would be a much better article had the Times writer ever exhibited skepticism. On the other hand, just because the writer was probably fed some hooey by a California cop doesn’t mean the entire article is junk.

January 27

1900: (Birthday) Georgia Neese Clark, first woman to hold the office of Treasurer of the United States (1949) born in Richland, Kansas.

1964: (A First) Margaret Chase Smith, U.S. senator from Maine, announces her candidacy for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Smith started her policitcal career when she succeeded her husband as U.S. Representative in 1940. After serving 4 terms in the House, she was elected to the U.S. Senate, becoming the first woman elected to both houses of Congress.

Here are a few things to brighten your day…

• South Knox Bubba brings a great John Ashcroft quote to our attention:
  “Weapons of mass destruction including evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community. They were the subject of U.N. resolutions,” Ashcroft said.

  Ashcroft: War Justified Even Without WMD. Ephasis added.

  Just out of curiousity, what is “evil chemistry” and “evil biology”? Perhaps evil biology is Lady Justice’s bared breasts, and evil chemistry is… What? A class at the School of Evil? One of Dr. Evil’s doctoral classes for his degree in evil? If that’s the case, then I propose that John Ashcroft is Dr. Evil, valuable ally to Fratman and Robbin’. “Quick, boy-drunkard, to the Frat Cave!”

• Speaking of evil biology, my significant other and I found a nice book in Walmart that seems as though it could serve as a good summary of the religious far right’s views on women and women’s issues. The book is Lies Women Believe: And the Truth that Sets Them Free by Nancy Leigh DeMoss. Over at Amazon.com you can actually take a look at the book’s table of contents and first few pages. I know you’re all eager to know, “what are some lies that women believe?” Here are the highlights:
  • God is just like my father.
  • God’s ways are too restrictive.
  • I have my rights.
  • I should not have to live with unfulfilled longings.
  • I don’t have time to do everything I’m supposed to do.
  • A career outside the home is more valuable and fulfilling than being a wife and mother.
  • My husband is supposed to serve me.
  • If I submit to my husband, I’ll be miserable
  • Sometimes divorce is a better option than staying in a bad marriage.
  • It’s up to us to determine the size of our family.
  • I shouldn’t have to suffer.

  Uh-huh… The first chapter argues that women are more susceptible to deception because Satan tempted Eve first instead of Adam. This means, of course, that Satan will not only tempt women but will also try to drag women’s husbands and children into sin through them. But that’s okay because men are ultimately held responsible for their wives’ misdeeds.

  I just have to keep reminding myself that these people are not representative of all Christians any more than the fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia are representative of all Muslims.

• Kevin Drum over at CalPundit has a good summary of the current economic situation in America. That’ll put a smile on your face, let me tell you.
• In other news, Limp Bizkit has a new single…
• In a speech before the Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in New York, Nixon also said opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single weapon working against the U.S.

  That’s the seven o’clock edition of the news. Goodnight.

If that was a bit too unhappy for you, I can recommend a couple good books:

• Jennifer Government by Max Berry is the only cyberpunk novel I’ve read that seemed just as interested, if not more interested, in developing its characters than in throwing around a bunch of nifty-neato-cool-kickass-studly-dude! ideas. I found the eponymous character and her daughter are particularly well-developed and are a breath of fresh air after the fantasy women of Neuromancer and Snowcrash. A couple of the other characters, I’m afraid, don’t fare as well. Still, it’s worth a couple bucks on the trade paperback or a check-out from the library. (Also, the Amazon.com reviewer compares Max Berry to Chuck Palahniuk. I don’t see it.)
• Uzumaki, Vol. 1 by Junji Ito is a pretty good manga about a town haunted by a shape, specifically the spiral. The art is decent but the ideas are good and the writing is nice (once you get past the first couple pages of exposition). The only real flaw the book has is the same one that most horror stories have: any sane person would have gotten out of town as soon as the first of the spiral’s victims turned up. Then again, I got the sense that this town was… special.

I’ve never felt like I was part of the so-called “blogging revolution.” Perhaps it’s because, being young and having a technophilic father, I’ve never really been without the internet and so find the idea of blogging to be a rather obvious one. The essence of blogging is the same as the essence of the internet: people collect information that is interesting to them and make this information available to anyone with an internet connection, with or without commentary. The only real difference between blogging and the rest of the internet, as near as I can tell, is the frequency with which the information is updated. Perhaps this is why I don’t feel like I’m part of the blogging revolution: because I feel that people who refer to a blogging revolution think that the internet revolution has already come and gone having been charted by the dot-com boom and bust. To me, the blogging revolution is a small part of the larger, on-going internet revolution that we haven’t really begun to see the full impact of, yet.

So when I read that the World Economic Forum had a session this past weekend on blogging (specifically, the session is titled “Will Mainstream Media Co-Opt Blogs and the Internet?”) I couldn’t help but chuckle a little bit. I don’t think that the mainstream media will ever be able to co-opt the internet entirely because the internet is, by its nature, a decentralized medium. New servers and new sites can always be created and connected to the internet, allowing for ways around the mainstream media’s servers and sites. I can conceive of only two impediments to the decentralized nature of the internet. On impediment is corporate regulation in two forms: by means of software that cannot go to sites that haven’t been certified by the company or companies producing the operating system and web browser, or by means of search engines that won’t register sites that haven’t been certified by the search engine’s founders and funders, either of which would create a monopoly and prevent customers from finding viable alternatives. The other impediment is government regulation along the lines of the FCC’s regulation of television and radio. Thankfully the first impediment can be conquered by open source software and its infinite, easy mutability (unless the operating system begin to be hardwired into the computer systems themselves, in which case alternative chip manufacturers, be they companies or pirates, would pop up). The second impediment is not currently an issue as the range of the internet is theoretically infinite, meaning that a server that is illegal in the United States can be moved to a friendlier country without much problem.

Blogging as a method of communication can’t be co-opted by the mainstream media any more than the internet can be because of the server issue I just mentioned. I do think, though, that the line between blogs and the mainstream media is going to become fuzzier. Right now blogs are defined largely by their small size, their independence, the frequency with which they update, and (in many cases) their degree of interactivity. In other words, if the New York Times were run like a blog Paul Krugman could write a new column every day instead of just on Tuesdays, his Wednesday column on economics could be significantly longer than his Thursday column on his dissatisfaction with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD sets, and you could comment on his articles directly without having to go through him or an editor. (Unless, of course, he runs his column like Andrew Sullivan or Josh Marshall in which case you can’t comment; personally, I think this is rather arrogant but that could just be me.)

Things like what I described with Paul Krugman are already happening in the mainstream media. The print and digital political magazines are starting to have blogs, either written anonymously or written by specific pundits. Usually these are single-topic blogs, but not all of them are. Slate has a more or less free-for-all comment system called the Fray (although it’s obvious from comments made in their articles that the writers for Slate consider themselves quite above the Fray).

Meanwhile some blogs seem to be becoming more like interactive, free-form versions of online magazines with the posters writing what are essentially articles (rather than two or three sentence link posts) and usually, gasp, entering into the comment threads to discuss their works. A precious few blogs, like the Daily Kos are becoming hybrids between the aforementioned interactive magazines and a community with blogs within the blog.

(An aside: I’ve noticed that when it comes to write political blogs, bloggers who had established themselves previously through opinion pieces in news papers and magazines are significantly less likely to allow comment threads or to respond to comments in the comment threads than those who were not established pundits when they started blogging. Compare Atrios and Josh Marshall on the left or Andrew Sullivan and Tacitus on the right and you may see what I’m talking about.)

Billmon, who is attending the World Economic Forum for his day job, attended the session on blogs and posted his thoughts on the subject. In addition to a number of good comments and observations, he said:

This is true. The concept of buying up blogs is ludicrous because blogging is a way of using the written word. It’d be as futile as trying to buy up novel-writing or buy up the medium of the short story or, like Billmon said, like trying to catch snowflakes.

I don’t think that this is what Billmon was getting at, though. He seems to be saying that trying to buy up blogs would be like trying to catch snowflakes because the corporate touch would liquidate the blog’s audience by changing its content, thus corporations would be flailing about, buying up blogs, and being frustrated in their efforts as they chased readers away to new blogs. I think that Billmon has a point and yet could still be wrong. I don’t think that corporate contact would be the touch of death for blogs because any smart corporation would begin its relationship with bloggers not by trying to take over control of the blog but through simple sponsorship. “We like what you’re doing and we’d like to pay you $X a year to just keep doing what you’re doing.” The quality of the blog wouldn’t immediately suffer, I don’t think, but it would begin the slow creep of corporate control into the blogsphere. I wouldn’t be surprised if, given a few more years, all of the major blogs were corporate-sponsored, if not outright corporate-owned, with a relatively constant number of unpaid, unknown bloggers. There may be a few big independent bloggers, and while I think they’ll be as well-written I don’t think they’ll be as big as the corporate-sponsored ones.

So far I’ve talked about “blogs” while actually meaning “political blogs.” I’m not sure what the future is for other types of blogs like personal blogs (online diaries) and non-political commentary blogs (like for movies, games, and the like). I keep thinking that we’ll see a rise in the number of personal blogs as more teenagers (not to stereotype, but you know) grow up with the internet and use the internet to communicate with their friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if blogs slowly took over the job of e-mail forwards to share articles with friends and family. (I can see it now: You MUST post this story on your blog within five minutes of reading it or you will never have a girlfriend again! And all the gay men say, “So?”) Then again, forwarding, like spamming, forces your views into a location that people are checking for their own gain whereas a blog requires effort on the part of other people to come to you.

So while I recognize that futurists are almost inevitably full of it, and amateur futurists are even more full of it, I’ll make a prediction on the future of blogging: We’ll see fewer and smaller independent blogs as large, corporate-sponsored blogs eat up the readership, and in some cases the writers, of smaller blogs. And that’s all I’ll commit to. I think that, as Billmon fears later in his aforementioned post, the Golden Age of free-for-all blogging is just about up.

January 26

1944: (Birthday) Angela Davis, black militant teacher, lecturer, activist, and author born in Birmingham, Alabama. She wrote Women, Race and Class in 1980; was tried and acquitted of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy (1971) stemming out of a shoot-out at the Marin Country Courthouse (1970), and ran for Vice President on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984.

1951: (A First) Paula Ackerman, becomes the first woman in the United States to serve as spiritual leader with rabbinical duties and authority.

Alas, a Blog is a finalist in two categories in this year’s Koufax Awards over at Wampum. My post, “A Comment on Rape and ‘She Asked For It’” is a finalist for Best Post; Ampersand’s work on the look here at Alas is a finalist for Best Site Design.

Have a look-see at all the categories, cast a couple votes, and discover a lot of great stuff out there in the left-leaning blogsphere.

From The Age:

Full article.

The movie based on Molly Kelly’s great escape, Rabbit-Proof Fence, is one of my all-time favorite adventure movies. Go rent it, if you haven’t already seen it.

January 25

1882: (Birthday) Virginia Woolf, British novelist, essayist, and critic born in London. Woolf made an original contribution to the form of the novel with her stream of consciousness. She wrote subjectively rather than objectively. Her A Room of One’s Own (1929), a classic feminist essay, as well as Orlando, dedicated to Vita Sackville-West which is considered one of the world’s longest love letter. She and her husband, Leonard, formed Hogarth Press and were the mainstays of the noted Bloomsbury movement.

1970: (Court Decision) In Phillips v. Martin Marietta, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that women cannot be denied jobs on the basis of their having small children unless men are also subject to this constraint.

Former Daily Kos co-blogger now solo-blogger Steve Gilliard is in the hospital with a bad heart valve. Surgery on said valve is supposed to take place some time next week.

While I don’t always agree with Steve I think he’s a great blogger and enjoy reading his views on things. Stop by and leave a note on his comment thread, or buy something through one of his Amazon links as I imagine that being hospitalized has cut into his ability to work.

Here’s hoping for a successful surgery and a full recovery.

Before I got on my graphic novel kick, I was reading a lot of classic works of literature. The majority of it was stuff from the European canon (so things like Don Quixote, Hamlet, the Divine Comedy, the Illiad, Life Is a Dream, Medea, and so forth) although I also read a good portion of works from India, China, and Japan with a few Native American and traditional African pieces thrown in for good measure. Some of it was good, some of it bad, some of it entirely incomprehensible because of vast cultural differences between myself and the author or authors. A lot of it, though, pissed me off.

One thing that has always bothered me–even when I still thought that the free market could solve everything and that white, male Protestants were an oppressed minority–is the way that some people view women as being fundamentally different from and less than men. This was something I thought was abundantly obvious to everyone capable of stringing thoughts together into comprehension: all people, regardless of race, gender, belief, or sexual orientation are equally capable and should be afforded equal respect and treatment in all situations. Unfortunately, this isn’t obvious to everyone else (as I discovered one year at church camp when I got into a shouting match with the youth minister who was leading my group in a devotional about what women’s roles should be in life, particularly in relation to their husbands, and ended up causing a scandal; most of the authority figures, a fair number of the males, and an unexpected number of the females at the camp sided with the minister). Unfortunately, it also wasn’t obvious to many of the writers whose work I was reading.

So I found myself in a curious position. While I recognize that Shakespeare is one of the best writers who has ever lived with any language in any culture, I have a hard time reading his plays for all the references to womanly tears, female weaknesses, and girlish fantasies. When Laertes says that he must stay the weeping woman inside of him until he can take his revenge on Hamlet for the death of Polonius and Ophelia I don’t think, “wow, that was an impassioned speech,” I think, “well, fuck you, too.”

This isn’t something peculiar to Shakespeare, though. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight contains numerous repetitions of the line that is part of this post’s title: “And I, like a woman…” Like a woman he wept; like a woman he felt fear; like a woman he was picky; like a woman he was this or that. Greek mythology is filled with fickle, fawning females; The Tale of Genji is the story of a man who runs around marrying on a whim and screwing anything that moves while the women are supposed to be polite and constrained. And don’t even get me started on the goddamn cat in the rain…

I have a problem, though: these are good stories and they are well-written (um, well, except for a few). They’re also the foundation for not only my culture, which makes them of debatable value because it’s already obvious to me that many aspects of the culture need an overhaul, but of my chosen profession. As a writer, I feel that it is necessary for me to not only know how to construct a story in theory but also how it has been done in practice over the course of the history of the written word. But by reading these works and by commenting on them as being fine examples of writing, am I not also condoning the views held therein? Do I need to preface every conversation I have about stories with the clause, “well, the writer was a misogynist pig, but…”

Some have reconciled this debate within themselves by saying that those writers of classic literature were writing from the point of view of another, less enlightened culture, and so while a speech about holding back the weeping woman inside wouldn’t be acceptable today (unless you write three hundred issues of a comic, then it’s okay) it’s acceptable for the same speech to have been written five hundred years ago. That doesn’t sit well with me; that’s not acceptable. I mean, let’s be frank for a moment: viewing feminism as some sort of modern invention akin to the internal combustion engine that couldn’t have occurred to cultures of the past is ridiculous. Human rights is not engineering; it is not math or chemistry or biology. I can understand a person thinking that the world is flat, but I don’t see how it could have occurred to someone, anyone, in any age, that one human being was less than themselves because of a difference in complexion or sexual organs. Is it so difficult to think that a man could stir a pot of beans and look after the kids while their mother went out to discuss philosophy?

Now, I know all about how in prehistoric times women stayed behind to watch the kids and gather grain and berries while the menfolk went to hunt (or at least that’s the current theory; take a quick browse through ancient history books from the last twenty years and you’ll see how this theory shifts and mutates as new evidence is found and old evidence is reexamined with women having sometimes more and sometimes less to do in prehistoric times) and how this prehistoric division of labor was accepted as normal when civilizations started sprouting up, but I still don’t see how someone wouldn’t get the idea that that might not be the best way of doing things. It occurred to our ancient counterparts that staying in one place and farming might be a better idea than wandering around hoping to find some berries.

Can I even say that? I just argued that human rights wasn’t a science to be discovered and yet agriculture is just that. I guess I find the issue of human rights to be so obvious, so basic, so completely fucking simple that I don’t understand how great minds like Valmiki and Homer could have not gotten it. Homer could write sympathetic characters from two sides of a war, but he and his culture couldn’t view people with different genitalia with empathy?

… I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how to solve this dilemma except to, as I said, be careful with my praise and quick to acknowledge that there are things in the classics that aren’t worth absorbing.

The only other way I can think to counter this glut of misogynistic and racist literature is to produce great works of my own that value all people equally. Even there, though, I have a problem: at what point does an individual character cease to be an individual and instead becomes a symbol for a group? Or, to put it in the way that I’m thinking it, at what point in time does a female character of mine become representative of all women? At what point does an African-American character of mine become a symbol for black men and women around the world? If I write a character who is weak-willed and this character happens to be female, am I perpetuating a stereotype or am I not white-washing human nature by creating a balanced character?

I’m working on a story right now that has a lesbian as one of the main characters. She is the only lead character who is a homosexual; the only other homosexuals in the story are a gay male couple who don’t play a very large role in what happens. By having a lesbian main character and by not having a gay male as a main character am I continuing that grand tradition of male authors everywhere of having women who like to have sex with and fall in love with other women while not giving attention to, or ignoring entirely, men who like to have sex with and fall in love with other men? Or, on the other hand, am I doing the right thing by having a homosexual character in the first place and not sticking to safe territory by having all straight characters?

Elsewhere in the story is a female character who thinks about sex a lot. Am I striking a blow for women’s right to claim their own sexuality by being frank about a woman and the ways in which she thinks about sex? Or am I continuing to force women to be sexualized? Does this change if she’s not pretty? Will a conventionally unattractive woman who thinks about sex be viewed and analyzed in a different light than a woman who thinks about sex who is conventionally attractive? Am I doing something bold or am I just picking up where Sex and the City left off? Will the character be viewed in a different light if she likes to use sex toys than if she doesn’t? Do I have to create a story, as in The Hours, where women aren’t allowed to enjoy sexual contact unless it’s with another woman? (In which case, see the previous paragraph.)

I’ve noticed that some authors attempt to circumvent this problem by simply inverting the stereotypes. I think that this has mixed results. In the hands of a good writer, an intelligent and articulate woman can be a deep, nuanced character; unfortunately, too many writers create implausibly perfect female characters in an effort to make up for Shakespeare’s crap. Let me be clear, though: I don’t think that most writers are engaging in a sort of self-censorship in order to avoid some platoon of PC Police. I think that writers who try to create strong characters who are women and/or minorities are trying to create a new type of art that escapes the rampant stereotypes present in older works (and, alas, too many modern ones). I just feel that a number of these writers in turn create caricatures instead of characters. Not to pick on the movie, having not read the book, but I feel that The Hours is a good example of this type of fuck-up. I don’t doubt that the author/screenwriter was trying to create women that were nuanced and interesting but I feel that he instead created a collection of flat, boring characters whose only emotion was despair. I do not doubt that women feel despair just as keenly as men do, but The Hours seemed to me to be doing to women what all those old stories did in a different way: allowing women to only have one dimension, one emotion. If not loving devotion, then depressive disconnect. Why can’t we have both contained in a single character in a single story?

So what can be done to step out of the tradition of the writers of the past? Do we have to keep lauding their flawed works? How far does their shadow reach?

Hey, remember that zany American Family Association poll about gay marriage? After getting results overwhelmingly in favor of same-sex marriage, the AFA has decided not to send the results of the poll to Congress, after all.

Hee hee.

Amber Marlowe, a Pennsylvania woman, reviewed the risks and decided she’d rather not have a C-section. A friend of hers had died from a C-section gone bad, leaving Marlowe understandably nervous about the procedure. (Doctors also claimed that she and her husband had religious objections to surgery, but the Marlowes have said that isn’t true).

So the doctors presented options to the patient. The patient chose an option the doctor didn’t like. That’s the end of it, right?

Wrong. The hospital, Wilkes-Barre General, went to a judge and got a secret order, subjecting Marlowe to a C-section by force, regardless of her wishes.

Fortunately, the Marlowes were able to reach another hospital to give birth and - despite the doomsday predictions of the first hospital’s doctors - gave vaginal birth to a healthy baby.

I thought this quote, from a pro-life activist, was particularly good at illustrating the pro-life position.

(Okay, I took that quote a bit out of context - but not much.)

If this were a man refusing to have surgery - even surgery his doctors felt was essential - there’d be no question of forcing him to undergo the surgery. Even if the surgery were for a kidney transplant for his son - without which, the man’s son would die - no one would even suggest surgery against his will.

Yet somehow, get a woman pregnant and too many people believe she’s lost all rights. This sort of case is why pro-lifers have a reputation for thinking of women as holding tanks for babies.