Month: August 2000

Democrats Appease Racial Intolerance

    On August 14, USA Today ran an interesting article (“Lieberman says loyalty questions hurt”) on Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman’s reaction to anti-Semitic statements made about him. The story is interesting because it is fascinating to see how far Democrats are willing to acquiesce to racial intolerance when trying to court African American votes.

    How unfashionable anti-semitism is among whites can be seen by the fact that the only white individuals who made anti-semitic remarks directed against Lieberman were fringe white supremacists — the sort of folks who tend to hate Catholics as much as Jews.

    On the other hand, anti-semitic views seem to have a much stronger grip in African American communities. In a recent poll, 40 percent of African Americans interviewed said they agreed with the statement that Jews have too much power in America. Wow.

    That’s why it shouldn’t be surprising that two representatives of prominent African American organizations quickly raised questions about Lieberman begin a Jew. First, Lee Alcorn, head of the NAACP chapter in Dallas, told a radio talk show host that,

I think we need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level because we know that their interest primarily has to do with, you know, money and these kinds of things.

    To its credit, the NAACP moved quickly to suspend Alcorn, with NAACP head Kweise Mfume calling Alcorn’s statements “repulsive.”

    Louis Farrakhan, who in the past has referred to Jews as “bloodsuckers” also weighed in saying that he questioned whether Lieberman would “be more faithful to the Constitution … than to the ties that any Jewish person would have to the state of Israel.”

    The surprising part is Lieberman’s reaction. According to the USA Today story, Lieberman actually plans on sitting down and talking to Farrakhan about, in USA Today’s words, “the issue.”

    So rather than strike out against anti-semitism and in favor of racial tolerance, Lieberman is going to sit down and talk with a man who once told American Jews they were “wicked deceivers of the American people…You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell.”

    After Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush visited Bob Jones University, which prohibits interracial dating, Democrats and the media had a field day. Here was the Republican’s racial intolerance on full display for all to see. But apparently the rules are different for Farrakhan who can question the loyalty of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee based solely on the fact that he is Jewish and, far from being excoriated by the candidate and the party, buy himself a seat at the table for his outburst.

    Just like the Republicans, the Democrats are more than happy to embrace and exploit racial intolerance when taking the moral high road means the risk of alienating core constituents. For this it should be ashamed.

PGN to JavaScript – Yes!

PGN to JavaScript tool on CoolTool.Com I was so geeked I dropped everything I was doing to download and play around with it. Bottom line — this thing rocks.

For those of who are not chess fanatics, PGN is the most common format for describing chess games. It is a fairly straightforward text format describing the date of the game, the players and then a list of moves. What the PGN to JavaScript tool does is convert a PGN file into a JavaScript mini-applet that simulates a chessboard.

For example, check out this game that I played on Chessmaster 6000 over the weekend. Note that although I love chess I pretty much suck at it and I set Chessmaster 6000 to what I call the “idiot” level so even I could beat it (i.e. if you know anything about chess, this game is probably likely to make you giggle at my moves). But watching the game replayed via the web is just enough incentive to make me want to crack all those chess books I have been collecting over the years and get with it improving my game.

I wish there were more applications like this to take real world stuff and easily put it on the web.

Bias in Schools

John Leo wrote an op-ed piece a few weeks ago (Anti-male bias increasingly pervades our culture) claiming that increasingly there is an anti-male bias present in popular culture. He repeats a couple of well-known incidents, most notably the brief controversy over an American Greetings Cards ad campaign which featured a greeting card that read on the outside, “Men are always whining about how we are suffocating them,” and then the punch line on the inside goes, “Personally, I think if can her them whining you’re not pressing hard enough on the pillow.”

Switch the gender on the card and you’ve got an instant boycott by the National Organization for Women, but at the time American Greeting Cards saw nothing wrong with the message of the card, noting that “we’ve heard no protests from consumers who are buying and using this card.”

While these sorts of things are a bit annoying, I tend to think some of the reaction to the male bashing cards, calendars, etc. is an overreaction. Yes, the feminists are complete hypocrites on this issue, but on the other hand there are more important things to worry about. Near the end of his column, however, Leo highlights a disturbing case of the kind that does deserve more attention.

Barbara Wilder-Smith, a teacher and research in the Boston area, was recently quoted in several newspapers on how deeply anti-male attitudes have affected the schools. When she made “Boys Are Good” T-shirts for boys in her class, all 10 of the female student teachers under her supervision objected to the message. (One, she said, was wearing a button saying “So many men, so little intelligence.”)

“My son can’t even wear the shirt out in his back yard,” she said. “People see it and object strongly and shout things.” On the other hand, she says, nobody objects when the girls wear shirts that say “Girls Rule”…

That is extremely bizarre, but very typical of the attitudes from radical feminists in academia. This reminds me of an online forum my wife and I participated in that included feminist college students. After a particularly heated debate over some issue, one of the feminist decided to insult my then-pregnant wife with the worst insult she could come up with at the moment — “I hope have a boy!”

It turned out we had a very bright, beautiful daughter, but I would hope that whether they are boys or girls all children in schools are treated with the utmost respect and as individuals, rather than being singled out for special treatment and disdain because they are members of a politically incorrect sex. Unfortunately this sort of equality now seems entirely at odds with the feminist desire to ghettoize people by sex.

Weird Al Is the Killer MP3 App.

As far as I’m concerned the greatest thing about MP3 is that I’ve got all of Weird Al Yankovics albums on my hard drive and can pretty much work for 5 or 6 hours straight without hearing the same Weird Al song twice.

Who could ask for more? It’s so nice to be able to listen to “Yoda” followed by “The Saga Begins” without having to swap CDs. I’ve also got a special play-list of all of Al’s food-oriented songs. I Love Rocky Road! Yes!!

(And no, I did not steal the songs off of Napster, I went to Best Buy and paid for all the CDs).

The Revolution Will Be Blogged

It is hardly the first such look, but WebReview
has a nice piece on the web logging phenomenon, The
Blogging Revolution. To my mind, web logging (blogging for short) is here
to stay and makes the Internet far more interesting.

Much of the media coverage of blogging treats it as a new phenomenon, but in
reality it goes back to before the web was born when Tim Berners-Lee saw the
web as integrating both content creation and browsing. Unfortunately, Mosaic,
Netscape, Microsoft and others delivered only half a solution — the browsing
part — but didn’t integrate any decent creation tools into the browser.

Today, however, there are starting to be an abundance of creation tools that
integrate with the browser — really are the browser. Blogger
is the best known of these. Blogger makes it trivially easy to keep a running
commentary news site. I used it for about three months at the end of 1999 to
keep my sites updated and found it an excellent tool for blogging. The only
drawback is it does not have more advanced content management features, but
most of its audience probably does not need those.

The tool I am currently using, Conversant,
not only lets me update my site daily but it lets me manipulate those daily
updates in ways that Blogger cannot. I can take this page, for example, and
make it appear as any number of static URLs, or include it as part of a newsletter
page, along with other entries, on making web sites.

But the point is not Blogger vs. Conversant (they are different tools suited
for different purposes), but rather what has come to be the traditional paradigm
of web sites, the .com phenomenon, with grassroots shoestring operations. The
conventional wisdom 18 to 24 months ago was that the corporate suits had all
but taken over the web. Boo.Com, Salon.Com and other top flight sites were going
to push the little guy aside. Instead, the little guy (or gal) is back with
a vengeance.

I have been arguing from the time I sent my first e-mail message back in the
early 1980s that the Internet is pretty much going to destroy the traditional
media model. Look, I want to buy my shoes from Nike, but I do not exactly want
to sit around talking to Philip Knight or his cronies for conversation. I think
Salon.Com is easily the best online magazine out there, and even it comes across
as boring and pretentious most of the time. It is better than most of the print
crap out there, but I actually spend more time reading blogs maintained by one
or two people in their spare time than I do reading Salon.Com.

Blogs also solve one of the problems that plagues traditional media — with
Blogs there is instant peer review. I watch a lot of television, for example,
and constantly see talking heads make basic errors of fact or reasoning. Writing
a letter of complaint to a major network to point out an error is a severe waste
of time. With a Blog, though, I can instantly link to the offending passage,
point out the error, and let readers decide. The person making the statement
may choose to respond in similar fashion. Contrary to the popular opinion that
online communities generate more errors, my experience is that they are no more
factually challenged than traditional media, plus they include tools to make
it easier to catch and track errors.

As the tools to create web sites become simpler and cheaper (could it be any
cheaper to create a web site?), the problem for media corporations needing to
make millions in advertising is going to skyrocket. This may be a pie-in-the-sky
prediction, but I think it is likely that in another 20-25 years the current
media system — where large conglomerates merge with each other to take advantage
of scales of economy — will gradually give way to a grand dispersal of the
media where a typical person’s daily newspaper is half a dozen small independent
feeds collated together rather than the product of a single business entity.

Why not beat the rush and try out Blogger or Conversant or even Manila.
They are all free, and do a good job of making blogging a cinch.

Battle of the Kooks for the Reform Party Nomination

Somehow I got on a mailing list for supporters of John Hagelin, the kook fighting certifiable nut case Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination (not that it matters, since Reform Party is quickly becoming even more irrelevant than the Libertarian Party — who thought that was even possible?)

Anyway, I’m somehow getting these updates from Hagelin supporters and one of them sends me an e-mail today which includes the following claim about Hagelin’s extremely high intelligence which is presumably supposed to make him more appealing to voters:

Dr. Hagelin has already challenged the other two main candidates to a mapping of their brain waves (his brain wave coherence levels were in the upper one
percent of measurement), but his opponents have refused. I think we know why.

I think we do know why — that might be the sort of thing to appeal to the nut cases in the Natural Law Party, but for normal people it’s a bright “KOOK” stamp on Hagelin’s forehead. Hagelin’s web site is hilarious since his main argument for president seems to be that he’s the smartest man in America (IQ 145 he claims) and, obviously, you want a smart scientist running the show. Unfortunately aside from his views on quantum physics, the 12 year old girl next door has more common sense and a better grip on reality than Hagelin.