Day: September 6, 2000

Gloria Steinem Gets Married (It’s All About the Hypocrisy)

    Responding to an old article about Gloria Steinem (Steinem finds ‘truth’ behind Valentine’s Day love fools), Josh posted a comment the other day saying,

I just heard that Gloria Steinem … just got married. Apparently she doesn’t quite agree with you that romance is always “an unnatural idea created by patriarchal institutions to keep women in their place.

    First, I don’t happen to think marriage is “an unnatural idea created by patriarchal institutions.” That, in fact, was a summary of Steinem’s claims against marriage in her 1992 book, Revolution From Within, in which Steinem slammed romance and marriage as patriarchal constructs designed to keep women from engaging in revolutionary acts. Just read what she wrote:

Romance itself serves a larger political purpose by offering at least a temporary reward for gender roles and threatening rebels with loneliness and rejection. … (Romance) also minimizes the very anti-patriarchal and revolutionary possibility that women and men will realize each other’s shared humanity when we are together physically for the sexual and procreative purposes society needs. … The Roman ‘bread and circuses’ way of keeping the masses happy – and the French saying that ‘marriage is the only adventure open to the middle class’ – might now be updated. The circus of romance distracts us with what is, from society’s point of view, a safe adventure.

    Comparing marriage to the spectacle of the Roman ‘bread and circuses’ presents a pretty stark case against marriage, as does the view that romance is a construct largely designed to be used as a threat to keep women from challenging gender roles.

    And now Steinem is getting married. What are we to make of this? This isn’t too difficult — like most ideologues, Steinem is a hypocrite (always has been). The whole thrust of the above chapter of Revolution From Within is that many women are making “inauthentic” choices. No woman (or man) would really choose a conventional marriage with all that it entails so there must be something forcing women into marriages. But of course those who consider themselves enlightened enough to point out that other people’s choices aren’t really legitimate rarely apply the same sort of logic to themselves.

    This is no different than pro-life individuals, such as Gary Bauer, who could go on all day about the evils of abortion but then stutter and fumble all over themselves when asked what they would do if their daughter wanted an abortion.

    What are we to make of Steinem’s marriage? If we take her claims in Revolution From Within seriously, she is making an inauthentic choice based on patriarchal browbeating. Personally I just hope she’s happy in her marriage and would repudiate her implication that women who want to get married are victims of patriarchal brainwashing.

MP3.Com Loses Big Time

CNet reports that the judge in Universal’s lawsuit against MP3.Com has determined that MP3.Com should pay $25,000 per copyright violation, which could cost MP3.Com upwards of $120 million from this suit alone — and there are bound to be more lawsuits as other record companies jump on the bandwagon. MP3.Com vows to appeal, but if this judgment is upheld, MP3.Com is probably dead, especially since Universal clearly is never going to give the company approval to use its music on the MyMP3.Com service.

I think the judge here made the right decision. Napster was treading on thin ground when it said “Come get free copies of other people’s music here,” but MP3.Com stepped way past the line when it said “Come get free copies of other people’s music — we went out and coded it for you.” MP3.Com tried to claim it was just facilitating what consumers could do anyway, but it violated the right of the record companies to associate with whom they wanted. Essentially, MP3.Com tried to force the record companies to do business with it, and it go shot down because of it. Having seen people expropriate my own intellectual property without permission, I cannot feel too sorry for MP3.Com.

On the other hand, if the record companies knew what was good for them they would reach a licensing agreement with some service like MP3.Com sooner rather than later. The ability to control recorded music is already out of their hands thanks to the convergence of cheap, powerful computers, the MP3 format and the widespread penetration of digital music in the form of the compact disk. Consumers seem completely unwilling to buy into the various Super CD-type schemes, and once the MP3 player market matures (give it another 2 years at most for Walkman-like penetration) the record companies will have some serious problems on their hands.

Source:

Ruling against MP3.com could cost $118 million. Jim Hu and Evan Hansen, CNet.Com, September 6, 2000.

Jon Katz Goes Off the Deep End

Okay, I have to get a confession out of the way — I am an avowed Jon Katz hater of many years. I first started ragging on Katz regularly when he was writing for Wired’s various online ventures, and followed him over to Slashdot where ripping Katz’s latest efforts is a sport.

The thing with Katz is not that he writes things I do not agree with or that he is not a particularly good or careful writer (though all three of those things are true), but rather that he is completely inconsistent and often downright bizarre. I’m beginning to suspect that Katz is an artificial intelligence program akin to Eliza.

The problem for the true Katz basher, unfortunately, is that Jon’s starting to go so far off the deep end that it is not even sporting to take swipes at him anymore. Today, for example, he actually has a serious article pushing the role-playing games “Mage: The Ascension” and “Shadowrun” as allegories of our technocratic age. According to Katz,

It’s amazing to encounter so insightful a worldview in a paper-and-pencil role-playing game. While mainstream society was dismissing geeks and nerds, they were increasingly retreating — via games, MUDs and MOOs — into their own folktales, fantasy worlds that foretold the future as brilliantly as Orwell or H.G. Wells. “Shadowrunner,” “Werewolf” and “Changeling” were escape routes, a new genre that offered some of the most revealing insights yet into the people who built (and are still building) the Net and Web, and creating continuing revolutions like the open source movement.

Hey, I am a fanatical RPG fan who has bookshelves filled with games I will never play, but this is the biggest crock of —- I have read in a long time. They are fun games, but they hardly rise to the level of a new sort of folk tale. I am surprised he doesn’t add in a riff about how “Magic: The Gathering” is some geek take on the duality of art and commerce.

The thing I detest about Katz is his self-appointed role as geek spokesman, especially with the nonsense he wrote after the Columbine shooting. Katz depicted Klebold and Hariss as these helpless misunderstood, victims of a cruel society. Hey, I spent my lunch hours in high school with some friends programming on Trash-80s and Apple IIs, and I do not remember any of us feeling we had to off our classmates because we were misunderstood.

The bottom line is that Katz really gets off on that mix of superiority and fear that many of us felt as kids because we were not part of the popular crowds but, on the other hand, we killed those kids — metaphorically, of course — when it came time for the SATs. Katz always strikes me as the sort of guy who would rent a Ferrari to go back to his 10 year high school reunion to prove something to his former classmates.

Why Is Apple Always So Expensive?

There is no way you could get me to buy a Macintosh today, but when I was a kid I saw that 1984 SuperBowl commercial and I had to have a Mac. The camera shop where I bought my Apple II finally got some in and that Mac was mine — until my parents saw the price tag.

Nothing has changed since then, with Apple’s latest machine, the Apple Cube, being more of the same. Charles Haddad writes in Business Week that he’s Rethinking the Cube.

I don’t usually keep up with new hardware introductions by Apple and this is exactly why. Okay, for $1,800 the sucker (er…consumer) gets a G4 450 mhz processor with a whopping 64 megabytes of RAM, an anemic 20 gig hard drive, no PCI slots, and port connectors on the bottom of the machine.

Even Apple’s alleged entry level consumer computer, the iMac, is overpriced. In March, for example, Apple released the iMac 350. For $1,000 you could get a 350mhz processor with a whopping 64 mb of memory and a 6 gig hard drive. Compared to what you could buy (or better yet build — which is simply not an option with Apple) on the Intel/AMD side of things, this is a ridiculous price for that featureset.

Source:

Rethinking the Cube. Charles Haddad, BusinessWeek, September 6, 2000.

I Couldn’t Live Without My Palm

Okay, I probably could live without it, but the Palm IIIx is one of the few gadgets I have actually ended up using on a regular basis rather than relegating to some desk drawer. The Palm is successful because it sticks to doing its core functionality very well.

I bought my Palm, for example, largely to replace the various paper-based calendar systems I have used over the years. If you are a hardcore Franklin or DayTimer fanatic like I was, the Palm is a godsend. With the Palm I can carry several years worth of appointments, along with all the personal contact information I need — all in a package that weighs only a few ounces. Compare that to the huge Franklin planners I used to tote around (and have you ever tried to do a quick search for specific appointments over an entire year in a Franklin planner? The Palm wil spit that back at you in seconds).

Recently I started using my Palm for some of my smaller database needs. I have databases filled with my CD and book collections, for example, as well as my Lego want-list. I also use it on occasion for word processing. But for the most part I stick with the basic organizer functions.

Considering the model I have now retails for well under $200, the Palm is a steal.

Libertarian Party Follies

    Sometimes I really have to wonder what goes on in the minds of those behind the Libertarian Party. Yesterday a press release from the Libertarian Party arrived in my e-mail in box trumpeting the fact that Libertarian Harry Browne pulls ahead of Pat Buchanan in major national poll. The critical observer might wonder if pulling ahead of Buchanan’s almost non-existent level of support is anything to trumpet, and to help you make up your mind the Libertarian Party itself pretty much points up the futility of it all.

    The press release goes on to say:

“Stick a fork in him — Pat Buchanan is done,” said Libertarian Party National Director Steve Dasbach. “The only news coverage Buchanan should get now is in the political obituary section.”

According to a September 5 Rasmussen poll of 2,250 likely voters, support for Browne has risen to 1.0 percent — while support for Buchanan fell to 0.9 percent.

    The obvious unanswered question that the above two paragraphs scream is if Buchanan is dead at 0.9 percent, exactly why am I supposed to get excited by Browne at 1.0 percent? Especially considering that Buchanan is a member of party that a) polled double digits in a national election, and b) will receive $12 million in matching funds (though whether Buchanan or John Hagelin gets to spend that money is still up in the air).

    In many respects the fact that the Reform Party’s level of support is down to Libertarian Party-style single digit (or less) numbers is a sign that it’s truly arrived in the land of political irrelevancy (and yes, the bottom line is that on the national level the Libertarian Party is irrelevant as a serious political contender, though on a local level in some states it is more of a player).

    Don’t feel to bad for the Libertarian Party. After all it’s so confident that government is ineffective that it won’t even take a stand against capital punishment (the same government they excoriate for high capital gains taxes can murder its own citizens with impunity without the Libertarian Party taking a stand one way or another — too controversial don’t you know.)