At about ten o’clock yesterday evening I decided that I was done. After realizing that it took my computer longer to load Microsoft Word than any other program (with the sole exception of Photoshop, which took the same amount of time), after reading yet another article about Microsoft’s corporate practices, and after reading about yet another major flaw in a major Microsoft product, I decided that I was done with Microsoft.

I’ve made a vow: I’ll not use a Microsoft product again so long as any reasonable alternative exists.
Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Flemming has an interesting post about his use of BlogAds to promote his movie, Nothing So Strange, a fake documentary about the assassination of Bill Gates. One quote from his post stood out to me:

Curiously enough, this wtf-factor was effective with at least one consumer: me. Well, the story’s a bit more convoluted than that. Allow me to indulge myself in a brief divergence, then I’ll get back to BlogAds as a whole.

About six or so months ago, I first read about Nothing So Strange because of an interview at Film Threat. This kicked me over to the Nothing So Strange site, which kicked me to a discussion about BitPass, which kicked me over to Scott McCloud’s site, which inspired me to read Understanding Comics, which in turn introduced me to serious comics, which has in turn lead to the sheets of paper cluttering my desk on which I am drawing a comic. In the midst of all that leading and kicking, I entirely forgot about Nothing So Strange, or, rather, I forgot the title and the director. Until I saw a BlogAd over at Josh Marshall’s site, advertising discussion of “the last major murder of the twentieth century,” or somesuch. Viola! Nothing So Strange.

Anyway, that enigmatic ad, featuring a blurry photograph of a man in a red hat, caught my eye in a way that the other BlogAds hadn’t. (Incidentally, the latest Nothing So Strange ad is equally enigmatic: a police officer in riot gear, and a comment about how the 2000 Democratic Convention was “reality hacked.” The ad leads to this post which is bound to be fascinating to process junkies.) Kevin Drum, of CalPundit, noted recently that all of the BlogAds on his site seem to have become political fundraising ads.

This intrigues me. I’ve said previously that although I dislike Howard Dean as a candidate, I believe that his campaign model is something that we’ll see copied in the future. I think we’re seeing the beginning of that copy-catting with the BlogAds being flooded by political ads. Similarly, Ben Chandler has been in advertising heavily on Eschaton and at the Daily Kos (and possibly others that I haven’t seen) to fundraise for his bid in the Kentucky special election held… Today, I suppose. (I haven’t been to bed yet; it’s three in the morning.)

I’m intrigued to see how much these politicians actually end up getting through their blog-related advertising. But, it seems that the BlogAds are working for filmmakers, and presumably for the coffee-sellers and kitsch-dealers also advertising on the blogs I frequent. I’m still not sure that blogs will last or if they’ll go the way of the CB radio or if they’ll simply be taken-over by corporate sponsors, but… It’s nice to seem them working while they’re here.

Time for another thinking-out-loud post…

My Dad and I have been having a lot of discussions over the course of the past few weeks about that big bad beast we’re faced with this year: the elections. Our general conclusion is that there are some problems with the way that we elect the members of the executive branch.

So, some thoughts, and then I hope that there’s a least a little bit of discussion.

Term Limits

We currently have a law on the books saying that a President can only serve two terms before it’s time for him or her to step aside to let someone else try their hand at running the country. Unfortunately, this means that the fourth year of a sitting President’s first term is an utter waste as he or she focuses more on getting reelected than on doing what they feel needs to get done. How many times have you heard that something is not “an election year issue”?

To that end, I propose that we set a term limit of one term. That takes away the bother of reelection politics so that, one can hope, the President would do his or her job for the entirety of his or her term. Currently terms last four years, which seems a reasonable amount of time to me, but perhaps an easier transition from a two-term limit to a one-term limit would be to effectively split the difference and make the single term last six years.

The Electoral College

Why do we have one? It’s an anachronistic quirk that doesn’t really serve a legitimate purpose any longer. Getting rid of the Electoral College would, of course, change the way that elections were run because a politician could no longer simply do the electoral math straight into the White House. But really, what’s so difficult about “one person, one vote”?

Required Voting

Citizens who take advantage of the benefits of citizenship (so, everyone really, what with our system of law and socialized roads) should be required to participate in the governmental system they take advantage of.

The “No” Vote

One interesting idea that my dad put forth, that I haven’t thought through the implications of, is that when voting for offices there should be a “None of the above” option. If you don’t like the candidates put to you, why can’t you reject them at the ballot box without having to vote for a different, “throwaway” candidate.

As I understand it, in some places this is a ballot option.

Alternative Forms of Voting

There’s instant run-off voting, there’s a prime minister system as used in Britain, there’s other options. What do you think? Or is our electoral system not in need of any changes??

A few things caught my eye today. Enjoy.

• By way of Josh Marshall, this UPI report suggests that the Valerie Plame case may be heating up a bit more. Here’s the relevant quote:
  Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer’s identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

  According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, were the two Cheney employees. “We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,” one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president’s office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

  The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah “that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time” as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.

• Over at her lovely blog, Echidne of the Snakes takes on the claim that marriage, in and of itself, is sacred.
• Speaking of Echidne, she responds to the Janet Jackson thing, as does Lauren at Feministe, here and here.
• Scott McCloud directs us to this incidiously adorable Flash animation, although asks that we not blame him for the consequences.
• Looks like Diebold’s systems are perfectly secure. So, take that you lefty conspiracy theorists. (via Pandagon.)

That’s it for today. I may come back later to expand on my comments about Charlize Theron (most-likely) winning the Oscar for Best Actress, and why I think this is a bad thing, but I’ll most likely hold off on that until tomorrow.

In the comments to my post from earlier today Ananna asked me, in not quite the same words, what my beef was with Howard Dean and the Deaniacs and why I’ve taken a few swipes at them in the last couple weeks. It’s a fair question, so I thought I’d take some time to answer it. I should note that my views are just mine and that Amp and bean could have entirely different opinions of Dean and his followers, so don’t smear Alas as a whole because of my views. (Incidentally, with apologies to Dave Barry, Howard Dean and the Deaniacs would be a great name for a band.)

Part One: My Problem with Dean

First of all, I should make it clear that Dean would never have been my favorite candidate unless his platform were significantly different, but neither would he have been my last pick. On a policy level Dean is too conservative for my tastes, but he’s not significantly more or less conservative than any of his major rivals in the primary. This lack of attachment on an ideological level means that, to me, the only difference between the major Democratic candidates is their personality and presentation. It’s on this level, the personal, that my problem with Dean originates.

I’ve watched or listened to many, but not all, of the primary debates and I’ve listened to some of Dean’s speeches and watched some of Dean’s interviews and my impression has always been the same: that he’s arrogant and tactless, neither of which is a trait that I think is a good thing for a world leader to have. I feel that I need to make it clear that I don’t think that Dean is “too angry” or the dreaded U-word, “unelectable,” but that he displays traits that I don’t think it’s in the nation’s best interests for the President to have especially at a time when the United States is going to have to work very hard at rebuilding international relationships. To be frank, we already have an arrogant, tactless President and this has not gone well. And no, to state another disclaimer, I don’t think that Dean is Bush-lite or a closet Republican just because I made a comparison between his demeanor and Bush’s demeanor.

So why do I think he’s arrogant and tactless? One, he routinely talks down to members of the press when being interviewed (at least on television, I haven’t noticed this propensity in print). I have the same amount of distaste for the press corps as a lot of people do, but when Dean treats the press poorly it shows he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care a.) how to deal with people he doesn’t like, or b.) that people are actively developing their relationship to him based on how they see him treating other people, the press being the most common “other people” that the populace will see him interacting with. Since I don’t think that Dean is an idiot (in fact I think he’s quite the opposite) I can’t help but think that he doesn’t care what people think of him, this being the definition of arrogance. Again, this isn’t the attitude I want the President to have when trying to repair the international relations damage that Bush has wrought.

Another way in which I feel that Dean’s arrogance manifests itself is in his speaking style. When giving a speech Dean doesn’t frame his positions or himself in a way that would appeal to someone who doesn’t already agree with him. He gives a laundry list of assertions, apparently assuming that anyone listening agrees with him and already thinks that he should be the President. This plays well to people who see this sort of thing as being confidence, but to others, like myself, it looks as though Dean can’t be bothered to say why his particular take on a policy is better than one of his rivals, or why people who find him too conservative should pick him instead of Clark, Edwards, or Kerry.

One could argue that he accomplishes the task of saying why he’s better than other candidates by way of his attacks on those candidates, but that’s where his tactlessness trips him up. Regardless of how Dean issues an attack (although the rhetorical bludgeon appears to be his weapon of choice), he doesn’t respond well to them, at least not in a debate or interview setting. He tends to sputter, say the equivalent of “Yeah, well…”, and bring back out the bludgeon. He hits back hard, but he does this gracelessly, establishing for himself no moral position from which to critique. If he were able to respond to their attacks with more tact, by which I mean answering the accusation while pointing out his rival’s flaws, he would appear to be making a reasoned stance instead of merely slinging mud because he wants the nomination.

Also, he has a boring name and looks German. (For those of you playing the home game: that was a lame joke.)

Part Two: My Problem with Deaniacs

Ananna wanted to know why I and others had singled out Deaniacs for the object of my ire rather than spreading the dislike to include Clarkies, Kucinicheads, Moseley-Braunites, Sharptonians, and Kerry Kids. I can’t speak for everyone, but for me it comes down to two things: volume, and signal-to-noise ratios. There are a lot of Deaniacs in the blogsphere talking a lot of crap at a very high volume. You don’t see very many Sharpton supporters in the comment threads of message boards saying that anyone who doesn’t support their candidate in the primaries is either a Republican or an idiot. By contrast, I see a lot of Dean supporters (this is not a bad thing) who are saying that people who vote for Kerry or Edwards are simply too stupid to see that by doing so they’re leading this country into a hell of gulags and one minute hates (this is a bad thing). To make it clear, though: a Sharpton supporter or Kucinich supporter or Kerry supporter or Edwards supporter who says the same thing gets me just as irritated as a Dean supporter who says it. Actually, that’s why I stopped reading the comment threads at the Daily Kos; I got tired of the endless “the General can piss further than your Doctor” and “the Doctor eats your candidate for lunch” and “the [General/Doctor] is more electable than your loser” crap that took the place over when Clark announced.

Telling other people that they’re scum because they don’t share your convictions about a candidate is shitty. People disagree. People can honestly make an intelligent judgment based on the evidence available to them that disagrees with judgments you yourself have made. The Deaniacs who understand this are okay with me, and I’m happy to discuss candidates and issues with them. The Deaniacs who don’t understand this, and so posit that Kerry’s only winning because of a Republican/Diebold scheme to re-elect Bush, have none of my respect. I don’t like blind partisanship and there seems to be a highly partisan Dean party within the larger Democratic party in a way that there isn’t a Kerry party or an Edwards party. Those were the people I was commenting on in the post that Ananna responded to.

A recap and a few points…

I don’t like Dean because I feel that he has presented himself as a type of person that I feel is not suited for the Presidency. I don’t like some Deaniacs because they seem to have forgotten that people can disagree with them and that non-Dean Democrats are on their side (or were prior to being called fools). I don’t think that these partisan Deaniacs are representative of everyone who supports Howard Dean.

Also, and this bears making clear, I think that Dean was an invaluable part of this primary season, and I think that his campaign has been an impressive indication of the way that things really could be. Dean has done more to shape the agenda and presentation of the Democratic party than any other single person in the country (with the notable exception of George W. Bush) and for that, for his arrogance and tactlessness, the primary and the party is better off. Because of the innovations that Dean’s campaign introduced, elections are better off. I think that Dean is a great candidate for the primary, I just don’t think he’s a great candidate for the general election. I suspect, though, that he’s just about worn out his usefulness and has certainly worn out his welcome.

To clear a few things up, just in case: I don’t really like any of the candidates and don’t know who I’ll be pulling the lever for when the Colorado primary hits in April. I’d be happiest with an Edwards or a Kerry nomination, but only because I find them less distasteful than others (although Kerry is losing my sympathies). It is my sincere belief, though, that any of the candidates could clean Bush’s clock in the general election.

And yes, if Dean is nominated I’ll happily vote for him. I may not think he’d make a great President, but he’d be better than what we have now.

• A couple weeks back I mentioned that the first person to say that Kerry had been winning instead of Dean in the primaries because of a nefarious plot by Diebold deserved to get smacked. Well, I fear I must direct your attention to Atrios. No, Atrios himself doesn’t say that Diebold won the vote for Kerry, but he noticed some wonky numbers at CNN and posted about them. His theory is that “some monkey at CNN could have just entered the wrong numbers,” but the comment thread doesn’t get fifteen comments in before theories about how Diebold shafted Dean, and how this related back to Skull and Bones, begin to swill. Someone please remind me that these people aren’t representative of Dean’s support at large.

  Then again, in an interview with Salon Dean said:

  It seems to me there’s a little of George Bush in John Kerry. George Bush says the most blatant things that are just plain false. No Child Left Behind leaves every child left behind — something that Senator Kerry also voted for. How many rationales has George Bush given us for the Iraq war? Well, how many rationales has John Kerry given us for the Iraq war (which he also supported)? So I’m beginning to see a pattern. Maybe they shared a little more than just brotherhood at Skull and Bones, I don’t know.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.

• Speaking of Dean, Deaniacs, and Salon, that magazine has an article up speculating about whether or not Dean’s disappointed voters will vote for the eventual Democratic nominee.
• Raznor is looking for nominations for his first ever Raznor Awesome List. The subjects of this list are the best anti-war songs written between 1965 and 1975. Go! Now! Cast your votes!
• Good news! The AP is reporting that the Massachusetts High Court ruled that only full marriage for homosexuals would be constitutional. Groovey.
• The Mad Cow story gets weirder. The man who killed the only “mad” cow in the United States, Dave Louthan, is quoted by the New York Times as saying that the infected cow in question was not a downer cow (a cow that’s too sick to get up, in case you’ve not been following the story) but was up and walking around. According to Mr. Louthan, the cow was found by “a fluke” rather than through routine inspection.

  The part of the story that really gets me, though, is this one:

  In his new role as bloody-handed industry critic, Mr. Louthan argues that too few cattle are tested for mad cow to say with certainty that beef is safe. “One mad cow is a scare, but two is an epidemic,” he said. “They absolutely, positively don’t want to find another.”

  Ed Curlett, a department spokesman, said about 83 a month were tested at Vern’s from October to December. (The testing began only in October, when the government starting paying $10 a brain sample.)

  The department has not changed last year’s plans to test 40,000 cows nationwide this year, out of 30 million slaughtered. Janet Riley, a spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute, which represents slaughterhouses, called that “plenty sufficient from a statistical standpoint.”

  The government has to pay these people to test for Mad Cow disease? I thought that the marvel of the free market was that the industry could self-regulate better than the government would ever be capable of.

• Women’s eNews has an article up about how this year’s Oscar nominations have a surprising number of female-related nominations. I say female-related nominations (female-related program activities?) because the article takes into account nominations in the Best Actor category for men who were in movies directed by women.

  Unfortunately, I’m not as happy with the nominations as Women’s eNews. The Best Actress award this year will likely go to Charleze Theron for her turn in Monster, which doesn’t make me happy because, as Christopher Null at filmcritic.com put it:

  [Naomi] Watts is an outstanding choice here, but Charlize Theron did the two things that Oscar loves its starlets to do: Gain weight and cry. Non-glamorous always earns the statues. Think Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball… and this year another Monster will do the trick.

  Monster hasn’t deigned to grace my hometown, yet, so maybe I’ll just be floored when I see Ms. Theron’s performance, but I can’t ignore that every article about it has gone out of the way to point out how much had to be done to Ms. Theron to make her “ugly.” The critics are lauding the performance, but they also said that about Halle Berry’s shrieking, hysterical, amateur-hour (but oh-so-unglamorous) Oscar-winning performance in Monster’s Ball. (Women’s eNews article via Ms. Musings.)

• Wampum has a post about a story in the January 31st issue of Le Monde which told the story of a Frenchman who was arrested for making a bomb threat… When really it was just a misunderstanding of language. I’d laugh if I wasn’t at least slightly appalled.
• Trish Wilson has a long, thoughtful, and, of course, good post about “paternity fraud” and it’s origins and implications.
• I have to confess to finding these IBM ads for Linux to be cool, stylish, and intriguing. Then again, I’m a fan of Linux and other open-source projects. If I could find a windowing system that I liked as much as Mac OS X (and an open-source program that could make Flash movies) I’d be sorely tempted to convert.

Hotmail has jumped the shark. Terribly. Since the switch-over to the new design not only have I been subjected to a million offensive ads for dating services, the bloody thing doesn’t work. Half the time when I click on one of the buttons to, say, navigate between e-mails, I click and click away without any effect.

So, I’m going to get rid of my hotmail account. Does anyone have any suggestions for what service I could use instead? Ideally, a POP3 or IMAP service would be ideal, but I’m broke so I understand that those are probably out of the question. Oh, and there’s another preference: I have a fondness for long e-mail address, so I’d like something that can support my habit.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Allow me to indulge in a bit of post-modernism here for a second.

Looking at the “Recently updated comments” section on the right side of the page I see that as of this moment two of the top five posts have titles that begin with “a few quick [nouns] on…” (Specifically, those posts are A few quick links from Amp and A few quick thoughts on Iowa.) On top of this I just wrote a post titled A few quick thoughts on the primaries.

Apparently two of the three bloggers around here are quite accomplished at generating a few quick nouns.

As the Democratic primaries are sweeping the nation (that makes it sound like a plague, a trend, or an uprising of housewives) I’ve decided to finally break my non-public vow of primary celibacy. This won’t be a long post, but hopefully the comment thread will be interesting.

I know that a lot of you, most of you, like me, still have the primaries ahead of them. I’m also pretty sure that there’s at least one or two of you out there who, like me, haven’t been following the tracking polls, columns, stump speeches, and petty pissing fights that have bogged down some of the blogs. So maybe you haven’t gotten a chance to read some articulate, intelligent appraisals of the candidates.

Since I know that Alas has a readership consisting entirely of people capable of making articulate, intelligent statements, I’d like to invite anyone who is willing to post a bit about their thoughts on the candidates. Which candidate are you supporting and why? Which candidate are you actively not supporting and why? Are you going to vote in the primary or are you going to sit this one out? Are you going to be voting in the general election? (Just to be clear, though, if you want to comment that you won’t be voting for Mr. Clark because he sounds like George W. Bush, that’s okay, too.)

I’ll be posting my own thoughts in the comments section once I’ve had some sleep.

(Oh! I just remembered… Thanks, John Isbell, for the lovely letter about Mr. Kerry you wrote me a few months ago. I forgot to write you a thank you note, so consider this a thank you and an effort to make sure everyone knows what a sweetheart you are.)

When I was younger I was addicted to the History Channel. My dad and I used to stay up (insomniacs us) into the wee hours of the morning talking about history and watching the History Channel. This was around about the time that they were showing a lot of World War II shows, so I got a decent education about World War II and related matters. It was no substitute for a good history book or history class, but it was nice and serves me well in Trivial Pursuit to this day. (At least, the old Trivial Pursuit where the history questions were about history and not about arts and entertainment, but I digress.)

Sadly, I must report that the History Channel is not what it used to be. I was pretty sure that things were going downhill when the history shows with prunish professors began to be replaced with shows about the histories of certain football teams, but when they got Jenny McCarthy to be spokeschest for a show called “Boy Toys” I knew the belovéd channel of my youth had perished.

Just now I was flipping through the channels and came across an ad for a series on the History Channel called The Barbarians. I’m not sure what the other episodes were about, but they were advertising a set of episodes about barbaric leaders from history. The examples of barbarians they mention in the ad were as follows: Attila the Hun, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Osama bin Ladin, and Saddam Hussein.

I’ll go ahead and post my warblogger disclaimer: Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are bad people. But, really, how is it that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin are equivalent to Hitler, Stalin, and Attila the Hun? I’ll grant that maybe Osama bin Ladin should be on a list of barbarian invaders (even though that distinction smacks of something it shouldn’t) because of al-Qaeda’s targetting of Europe and the United States, but Saddam Hussein?

Dear reader, I have failed you… I was determined this year to watch the state of the union address and write a post about it. After a minute, though, I left the room where my dad was watching it. I’ve passed through the room a couple times only to find myself getting mad at Mr. Bush for saying that women in Afghanistan are free and treated fairly, among other things.

I tried, but I just couldn’t stand to listen to him. If any posts are written by me on the state of the union address, it’ll be after I read a transcript.

In the near future I’ll either be blogging and commenting a lot more, or a lot less. I lost my job today and so will be busy looking for a new one. If things look good and I get some nibbles, it’ll be a bit before I can blog. If things look bad, I may get to post even more often than even Amp cares to read.

It’s actually not as bad as it sounds. I lost my job, yes, but I was planning on leaving in the near future anyway. It’s a mixed blessing: I’ll have the ability to look for a job without having to schedule around the nine-to-five, on the other hand I don’t have a source of income but do have bills. We’ll see.

Just wanted to let you know: Alas’ll either be PDP-free or so-much-PDP-you’ll-be-past-the-legal-limit.

So Maureen Dowd has written a column about Ret. Gen. and Democratic canidate Wesley Clark’s clothing, or, more exactly, his changes of clothing over time in (it’s assumed) a bid to appeal to a different voting group. While I generally get annoyed by clothing critiques in general, no pun intended, because talking about clothing distracts from things like issues, I have to admit a certain degree of schadenfreude.

Already some pundits, all of them male that I’ve seen, have started rolling their eyes, but the first thing I thought of when I read the column was a Doonesbury cartoon I read awhile back. One of the female characters, Alex it may have been, had written a newspaper article about one canidate or another coming into town. She described how the entourage (all male) looked in their suits, how they’d lost weight, how they’d picked the perfect accessories for their complexions. I believe it was Mike Doonesbury who ended the strip by saying, “You’re trying to make a point, aren’t you?”

So while people are rolling their eyes at Ms. Dowd’s column, I can’t help but smirk a little in the same way I always do when males get treated the way that females have for awhile. (An odd sensation to get, my being male and all.) And, yes, I know that this is pretty much a bad thing in the long run, a lose-lose situation, but it still feels good on some level.

My next post on abstinence-only sex ed. is in the works; I hope to post it by Monday, but we’ll have to see.

Part of what’s making me delay that post is that I’m in the middle of writing a graphic novel. You’ll be hearing more about it as the script progresses (and as I continue to completely suck at drawing), but right now I need a bit of help. And since I know that all of you Alas readers are just dying to know what you can do…

One of the characters in the story lived the first eighteen or so years of her life in the foster system, but I don’t know really know all that much about that sort of thing. What I really need is some objective information on the foster care system in addition to a helping of anecdotal evidence. I’ll be busy digging around on the internet for what information there is, but if any of you want to contribute to my research (maybe you went through foster care, or have a friend or significant other or family member who did, or maybe you’ve worked in the foster system) I’d love to have the help.

You can post information in the comments section, or you can e-mail me at listentothecolourofyourdreams - at - hotmail.com. Anything you mail to me will be entirely confidential. So hey, if you wanna help someone work toward getting out of administrative-assistant-hell-world, drop me a note. Thanks!

Actually, I’m going to expand this cry for help a little. I’m most concerned with foster care programs, but if anyone has any experience with or knowledge of girls homes (drug rehab, etc.-type places) I’d like to hear those as well. The extent of my knowledge of such places is the psych. wing at the local hospital, but my dad was hardly a teenager.

I know I’m asking for personal stuff, but like I said: totally confidential, and it would be a big help to me. I’d like to get this stuff right and not Hollywood-ize it.