Day: February 28, 2001

Camille Paglia on “The Vagina Monologues”

In her latest Salon.Com column, Camille Paglia dismisses the “garish visibility” of Eve Ensler and “The Vagina Monologues.”

The perversion of feminism that Ensler represents — turning Valentine’s Day, the one holiday celebrating romantic harmony between the sexes, into a grisly memento mori of violence against women — has been well demonstrated by the ever-alert Christina Hoff Sommers, who gave early warning in her Feb. 11 article in the Wall Street Journal last year (as well as in her campus lectures, media appearances and an article in the Feb. 8 USA Today). That the psychological poison of Ensler’s archaic creed of victimization is being spread to impressionable women students is positively criminal.

…That in the year 2001 the group chanting of crude four-letter words for female genitalia is viewed as some sort of radical liberation implies that the real issue in the “Vagina Monologues” isn’t male oppression but bourgeois repression — the malady of the dainty, decorous professional class that was created in the first century after the Industrial Revolution.

Like Paglia I’m not quit sure how an auditorium full of people chanting “cunt” — as 18,000 people did at Madison Square Garden this month — is empowering.

Sources:

The Bush look. Camille Paglia, Salon.Com, February 28, 2001.

Clit Club. Sharon Lerner, The Village Voice, February 14-20, 2001.

Putting the U.S. Economic Slowdown Into Perspective

The American economy is slowing and there’s been some doom and gloom reports, though for the most part it doesn’t look like the coming recession will be very deep or very long. That said, lets put the news into perspective.

Across the waters, France’s Prime Minister Lionel Jospin is practically jumping with joy over the incredibly good economic news in that nation. According to the latest figures, unemployment in France is only 9 percent! That’s the lowest level it’s been in ten years (as recently as 1997, unemployment in France was at 12.6 percent).

I guess if you can handle the good news in France, not much else is likely to phase you.

The Single Best Thing That Ever Happened to Microsoft

During the Microsoft trial that eventually ended up in an order for the company to be broken up, a lot of anti-Microsoft folks (I’m thinking specifically of the wonderful folks at Slashdot) were thrilled that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson understood their anti-MS arguments so well and would stick it to the company.

I felt like a distinct minority arguing that Jackson was the best thing that ever happened to Microsoft. He was so clearly biased in his view of Microsoft and so arbitrary in his rulings and decisions, that he pretty much guaranteed that his ruling against the company would never stand up. Biased judges are nothing new, but usually they try to be a bit more discrete.

Wired summarizes the appellate court’s outrage at Jackson’s behavior with chief justice Harry Edwards saying, “We don’t run off our mouths in a pejorative way…. The system would be a shambles if all judges did that. Good heavens, is that what judges do? They take preferred reporters in?” Edwards went so far as to ask whether or not Jackson’s conduct might have violated the oath he took upon becoming a federal judge.

A lot of anti-MS commentators made much of the fact that as the finder of fact, the appellate court would probably be unwilling to overturn Jackson’s finding that Microsoft had attempted to use its Windows dominance to harm Netscape. But as Judge David Sentelle pointed out during the recent appellate hearing, that assumes that the judge is a neutral fact finder and Judge Jackson was so obviously not neutral, “Why is the finder of fact entitled to deference anymore?”

And once you get beyond Penfield’s longstanding antipathy for Microsoft, the trial court found plenty of evidence that Microsoft engaged in some pretty unethical business practices (which should shock no one) but surprisingly little evidence that Microsoft had illegally leveraged its OS dominance to drive out Netscape (part of the problem being that Netscape did a pretty good job of self-destructing without any help from Gates and company).

Slashdot Drops the Ball Again

According to a post on Slashdot from last night, this story means that,

Blizzard Entertainment is suing New Line for using the word Diablo as the title of a movie release. Blizzard wants to make a movie of their own with the same title and feel New Line is only using the word to cash in on the popularity of the Diablo gaming world. Since when did Blizzard own all rights to the word “diablo”? And what kind of precedent would this set if they were to win.

The first sentence is correct, but everything that comes afterward is nonsense. Blizzard isn’t claiming they own all instances of the word “diablo.” Rather, like any other company making a movie Blizzard applied for a trademark for a film titled “Diablo” back in 1996 which was approved in 2000.

This is a common practice in the movie industry and hardly anything for Slashdot to start creating hysteria over.