Day: April 12, 2001

Betty Dodson Rips “The Vagina Monologues”

Eve Ensler’s controversial play, “The Vagina Monologues,” includes a scene in which a woman attends a Betty Dodson-like seminar (if you don’t know what I mean, visit Betty Dodson’s web site — warning, though, parts of the site are sexually explicit). Based on that I had assumed that Dodson would like the play. Wrong. She hates it for much the same reason that a lot of critiques of radical feminism dislike it.

Dodson posted an article about the play, “V-Day, Inc.,” on her web site. According to Dodson, when she originally saw the play in 1996 she disliked elements of it and made some suggestions to Ensler. By the time she saw it again in 1998, however, the play had changed dramatically for the worse. As Dodson aptly describes it, the play represents the worst form of anti-male, anti-sex feminism:

Now in the nineties they had done it again. V no longer stood for vagina. It stood for violence. Sex and violence, never sex and pleasure. Talking about sexual pleasure when there is so much sexual violence against women would be inappropriate, insensitive and politically incorrect. And who is to blame for all the sexual violence against women? According to Ms. and other fundamentalist feminists it’s still the patriarchy. Does that mean daddy or our brothers? Is it the stranger who raped us? Or is it the first man who broke our heart or the first one we married who cheated on us? Maybe it’s the pope or God himself, but it’s definitely mankind.

That night I wondered how men in the audience felt after being nailed as “the enemy.” It’s my bet that the men attending V-Day were all staunch supporters of equal rights for women. But here they were, faced with the same old male bashing of the sixties and seventies.

As far as I’m concerned, Dodson is right on the money about Ensler,

Eve is no longer the disarming young woman delivering her monologues. She has become an evangelical minister shouting and gesturing and admonishing us to demand an end to violence against women as the crowd roars in agreement. Toward the end of the evening Eve asked everyone who’d ever been raped to stand up. There was a smattering of women standing where I was sitting. Then she asked for those women who had been beaten to stand. Many more stood up. Finally she asked all those to stand who knew any woman who’d been raped or beaten which included most of the audience. I refused to stand as an insignificant protest knowing she would never ask those of us who had never been raped or beaten and who loved having orgasms to stand.

That’s the main problem with V-day. Women end up celebrating sexual violence and not the creative or regenerative pleasures of erotic love. Ending violence is a worthy cause and I’m all for it. But consistently equating sex with violence offers no solution. V-day promises us that awareness plus education equals prevention.

In an article last month for The Nation, Katha Pollitt couldn’t understand “how anyone could find The Vagina Monologues antimale…” At least Dodson gets it, even if the usual suspects don’t.

Source:

V-Day, Inc.. Betty Dodson, BettyDodson.Com, 2001.

Amtrak Becomes Federal Drug Snitch

Amtrak is reminiscent of a lot of the recent dot.com failures. The main difference is that although Amtrak hasn’t been profitable and likely never will be profitable, it props itself up through government largesse. Even with all of the federal aid it receives, however, profitability for the railroad is always 2-3 years down the road. Now Amtrak has decided to diversify into a line of work that might bring it back to profitability — it’s going to become a government snitch.

Amtrak recently entered into an agreement with the Drug Enforcement Agency. As a result an Amtrak computer terminal sits at the desk of a DEA agent stationed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The DEA will use the data about passengers to decide which people to question and whose luggage to inspect with drug sniffing dogs.

In return, Amtrak receives 10 percent of the value of any cash or other goods that agents seize from “drug couriers.” Of course much of the cash that DEA agents seize from “drug couriers” is actually from people it never even bothers to indict with any crime. Since the cost of hiring a lawyer to get back a few thousand dollars worth of cash is often more than the money, there isn’t much incentive for people to challenge such seizures (which need to be banned outright).

The criteria for profiling passengers on Amtrak seems to be much the same as for airlines — people who pay for their ticket very close to departure, especially in cash, are likely to get the third degree from the DEA if they’re heading to or from certain cities.

Source:

N.M. Amtrak Office Is Paid for Tips on Drug Suspects. Associated Press, April 12, 2001.

Why Katz Gets Flamed

PopPolitics.Com has a profile of Jon Katz which, among other things, tries to figure out why people on Slashdot flame him so much. The answer, of course, is inadvertently contained in Julia Lipman’s piece.

1. Lipman writes,

He’s maligned and even dissed by members of his own constituency who fail to recognize him for what he is: a leader of one of the important social movements of the Internet Age.

I suspect if Katz doesn’t think of himself as any sort of leader of a social movement, but he comes across as a self-appointed spokesman for what he thinks is some broad “geek” social group. Thanks, but no thanks.

2. Lipman writes,

But most of the flames his stories receive aren’t just about the stories; they’re about him. Katz is a big-name writer using his own name at a place where most of the monikers are more along the lines of “Hemos” and “CmdrTaco.” He’s writing about technology from the perspective of a journalist. Some of what makes Katz distrust big media might make Slashdot readers distrust Katz.

Give me a break. First, I know I don’t and I doubt most other Slashdot readers think of Katz as a “big name” writer. Maybe Lipman’s impressed by his resume, but I’m not.

But more importantly, the problem is that he writes like someone who cut his teeth writing for major magazines. His analyses always tend to be mind-numbingly superficial.

Just compare Katz’s review of several books about the Internet including Carl Sunstein’s Republic.Com to Matthew Gaylor’s review, both of which were published on Slashdot this month.

Katz’s flowery prose would probably be adored by fans of the New York Review of Books but for the life of me I have no idea what Katz means when he writes things like, “Net culture is not known for carefully dissecting its own implications” or “…a new strain of rationalist political sensibility is emerging from this tech generation” and especially thing like, “As John Raulston Saul wrote, this is a brilliant, successful and creative culture, but an Unconscious Civilization in many ways, unaware of the political realities spawned by the very technology they are making and using, or by the daunting challenges the unchecked rise of corporatism poses. Sometimes the fallout can be serious. As a consequence, it created an Unconscious Revolution.”

For Katz, it’s all about the platitudes. For Gaylor, on the other hand, even if you aren’t a right wing nut like myself the review at least gives you some idea of what Sunstein actually said in his book rather than Katz’s vague description that, “Unplanned, unprogrammed encounters are central to democracy” without ever mentioning that what Sunstein is really calling for is more state control over free spech (ironic for someone who writes for the Freedom Forum, isn’t it?)

Did the FBI Fire on the Branch Davidians, Round 2

I have no idea whether or not the FBI fired on members of the Branch Davidians during its final assault on the compound on April 19, 1993. Many people thought the issue would be settled by a re-enactment ordered by the judge to evaluate infrared video footage taken from an FBI plane.

That footage shows flashes that anti-government activists claim are shots being fired by FBI agents. The FBI, meanwhile, maintains that the flashes are not gun shots but essentially background noise. The re-enactment was supposed to resolve this. FBI agents went out and performed similar maneuvers in which they fired their weapons. Meanwhile a plane took infrared video of the action on the ground and compared it to the video taken in 1993.

The new video was site by Sen. John Danforth (R-MO) as proof that the FBI had not fired on the Davidians. But according to an article by James Bovard, that may not be the end of the story.

According to Bovard, Mike McNulty — who released the award winning but flawed documentary “Waco: Rules of Engagement” — has produced another film demonstrating that there were significant differences between the original assault on the Branch Davidian compound and the re-enactment.

The two main claims of the movie are that a) in 1993 agents in Waco were equipped with weapons that had only 14-inch barrels, but during the re-enactment used weapons with 20-inch barrels, and b) in 1993 agents were equipped with off-the-shelf standard ammunition, but for the re-enactment used military-issue ammunition that is designed, among other things, to minimize muzzle flash (to reduce the ability to be spotted during combat).

Of these claims are accurate it will be interesting to see how Danforth and others attempt to spin them. I have no idea if the difference in barrels and ammunition would make a significant difference in what the infrared video camera would detect, but on first blush it is difficult to imagine why the FBI would do a re-enactment that didn’t duplicate both the type of guns and ammunition its agents were using at the Waco siege except to rig the outcome.

Source:

The Latest Waco Fireball. James Bovard, The American Spectator, April 5, 2001.

Abuse of AIDS Funds Endemic

Last year I posted a brief message describing how, in the late 1980s, my father had founded a group to help AIDS patients in the El Paso, Texas area, and how that group had suffered from financial mismanagement and allegations of fraud after his death.

Apparently this is an endemic problem with federal AIDS funds according to an article published in January in Washington Monthly. The article, by ACT-UP co-founder Wayne Turner, notes that not only were millions of dollars wasted, embezzled and otherwise fraudulently used, but also that many of those who have tried to highlight the fraud “were criticized for drawing attention to the scandal, mostly by employees of other AIDS agencies who feared the scandal could taint their own organizations.”

Some of the waste Turner documents is hardly unprecedented in government-funded programs, but the idea of people in nonprofit AIDS organizations drawing $180,000 salaries and flying to junkets disguised as health conferences while AIDS patients around the country struggle to maintain financial solvency in the face of high health care costs is disgusting.

As Turner sums up his article, “Those who implement the CARE Act now need to place a greater priority on patients’ needs, instead of the money-hungry AIDS industry.”

Microsoft Out to Kill MP3?

A ZDNET article outlines Microsoft’s attempts to kill the MP3 format. Apparently Microsoft is shipping an MP3 encoder with Windows XP but limits the encoding to just 56kb/s. OTOH you can encode music in Microsoft’s proprietary format with all the quality you want, but then the user has to deal with digital rights management bugs.

According to ZDNET, most of the people they talked to expect MP3 to be around for a long time to come but,

Still, experts said Microsoft’s increasingly aggressive efforts to popularize its proprietary audio format–along with legal difficulties facing Napster–could stem MP3’s popularity. They cite Microsoft’s vast resources and the broad reach of its Windows operating system. Microsoft, for example, has been giving away free licenses to other companies to use its audio technology, which now is supported–along with MP3–by major hand-held music players.

Here’s what I think: most digitial rights management schemes are horrible simply from an end user experience. Sure DRM is being built into some handhelds, but even computer savvy reviewers are finding the almost impossible to use and slower than molasses (Sony and Pioneer, for example, both have DRM-enabled players where the time required to encode an MP3 song into a DRM version and then transfer that song onto the player often exceeds the playing length of the song — which just won’t cut it).

If electronics manufacturers ever get together and come up with a single, easy to use, fast, unbreakable DRM system then we’re in trouble, but I just don’t see that happening — these are the same folks, after all, who can’t even agree on standards for the next generation of CD/DVD audio.