According to Gallycat, the students riled up by the threat of Random House's publication of the Jewel of Medina were planning little more than a publicity campaign to e-mail the publisher and news outlets and so on. Perfectly innocuous stuff in a pluralistic society. Which makes Random House look like a bunch of wusses, and makes Professor Denise Spellberg's frantic warnings about threats to Random House's staff and property look even more like disingenuous bigotry, to put it kindly.
From the “this surprises you why?” department:Random House was going to publish a book titled The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones, a historical novel that features one of Mohammad’s wives, and has decided “oops, bad idea.” Quoth Random House in the Washington Post Op-Ed, “after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received "from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.” Apparently one of those credible sources was an American academic named Denise Spellberg (sage advice from the Smart Bitches, do not let this woman blurb your book) who got an advance copy and apparently got her knickers in a prudish little twist (you see Muhammad had wives, and gasp, may have had sex with them) and made a “frantic” call to the editor of a popular Muslim website (this book made her frantic) and asked him to warn Muslims about this nasty, evil, book that “made fun of Muslims and their history.” And apparently, armed only with Spellberg’s description of this “very ugly, stupid piece of work,” not having read it himself, he did exactly what she asked, warning people of the coming literary apocalypse. And, of course, offense spreads like wildfire.But what seems to be the trigger that caused the book to be pulled was Spellberg’s own warning to her own editor at another imprint at Random House. According to Spellberg, if the book was released there was “a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence.” Apparently she babbled on like an islamaphobic neocon frightened by Obama’s middle name. The Terrorists would kill them all if the book saw the light of day. Her warning was bounced around the email servers at Random House until the book was pulled less than a month later.Spellberg might count Random House’s withdrawl of the book as some sort of victory, but I wonder if she realizes that encouraging them to stomp this book by using threats of violence is casting Islam in a much more vile light before a much broader audience than the book’s publication ever would have.
His rant is here, and somewhat predictably there are responses in the blogosphere ranging from laconic bemusement by Scalzi to rhetorical dismemberment on the Feminist SF Blog. I would like to add my own little can of lighter fluid to this raging bonfire by offering everyone who’s jumping on this OMGWTFTEHGAYS panicmobile a nice little clue:Marriage defined by the state <> marriage as defined by the church (any church.)Repeat this a few times every time you’re frightened by images of George Takai on his honeymoon.Shall I defend my thesis with facts? (Oh please, not those.)I’m married in the Catholic Church. They don’t believe in divorce, you know. If I got a divorce, all nice and legal, the Pope starts going “lalalalala I can’t hear you lalalala” and says I’m still married. Of course, if divorced me tried to continue filing my taxes jointly or keep my ex-wife on my health insurance, I’d have some legal issues. If I died without a will, she wouldn’t inherit. But in the church, I’m still married. I get another wife, the US Government says it’s just fine while the Church says I’m still married to the first one. Another situation, a Muslim man can divorce his wife just by telling her he divorces her. Fine, his church says they’re divorced. But if he’s a US citizen and hasn’t filed the right paperwork, he’s going to be facing bigamy charges if he marries again— even if his wife says, “but he really did divorce me.”There are common law marriages that aren’t properly recognized by any particular church, and pagan marriages that aren’t recognized by the state. There are sects of particular religions that explicitly allow polygamy that the US has never legally recognized. (That’s a particularly thunderous silence in Mr. Card’s article.)Card’s thesis seems to be that if the State’s view of marriage in legal terms does not conform to a person’s view of marriage in religious/spiritual terms, it is a proper basis for succession and/or actual revolt. This might have been a cogent argument in the time of Henry V, nowadays it doesn’t particularly wash.
Politicians love child porn. It is the ultimate grandstanding issue. It is an issue with effectively no opposing side, after all, if you come out "against" child porn you've implicitly cast any opposition into the role of pedophiles and child molesters. There's no downside.Enter New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. He loves the children. And he's discovered that there's this thing called the internet and, on it is, GASP, child porn. So, like any good crimefighter, he launches a campaign to "encourage" broadband providers to "volunteer" to take actions "surgically directed" only at child pornography and "not at any protected content." Of course, this works really well, causing Time-Warner to pull 10,000 Usenet newsgroups to curb the corrupting influence of the 88 groups that the AG's office found to contain evidence of child porn. Even better than using this as political red meat to make him look "tough" when he's "protecting the children," Mr. Cuomo has indulged in a grand New York tradition, the protection racket. Apparently the threat of painting a corporation as facilitating the distribution of child porn is a great way to generate an income stream (from C-net):
But over time, it may encourage more attorneys general to play Net censor, especially if they come to view broadband providers as compliant, off-the-books sources of revenue. This seems to be Cuomo's opinion; his press release said Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint will pay "$1.125 million to fund additional efforts by the attorney general's office and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to remove child pornography from the Internet." [my emphasis]
Historically, almost every significant economic crash has been due to one factor of the human psyche, the inability to conceive of change. Not adapt to change; we’re pretty damn good at figuring things out after the fact. Beforehand? Not so much. Entire industries collapse because of the assumption that the fourth quarter will be exactly like the first, only more so. This is true even when those assumptions are based on patent absurdities.One incredibly obvious absurdity that infects everyone from a two person tech startup to the federal government; prosperity requires indefinite growth. It’s ingrained in our psyche. But think about it. Economics is not divorced from the physical world, and in the end economics is still the organized distribution of resources. Things will always run out. Labor, energy, capital, customers, people’s attention spans, bandwidth, tax base— everything is finite. Therefore, at some point, growth must stop. The problem, of course, is because of the assumption prosperity requires growth, we’ve done everything to insure that when it does stop it becomes a massive disaster because all the systems we’ve constructed to assume growth don’t really work when growth stops. (Case in point, the design of the Social Security system, which requires a constant permanent growth in the working population in order to work.)Now, Microsoft’s existence is based on a similar absurdity, the permanent upgrade path. The idea that software is in a continual state of improvement, and that it is a valid assumption that the end user will continue to buy the new version of an application every few years or so. Both are at odds with reality. Every technology has an endpoint, there comes a time when a system is so mature that it does what it does well enough that any future meddling actually makes things worse. I write for a living, and deal with several flavors of MS Word every day. I can say that, for my purposes, there is absolutely no functional difference in any version of Word released since 2000. It’s a damn word processor. You’re not making it any better. The OS is facing the same problem. Intel has said there’s no compelling reason for them to upgrade their 80,000 PCs to Vista. The only reason the public’s buying the OS is because it comes on new machines— a substantial number of which are being downgraded to XP. The fact that XP is “good enough” is going to become a big problem for Microsoft. They’ll continue to push new OS’s onto new PCs, but fewer people are going to bother “upgrading,” meaning that developers are going to serve a Windows market that’s more and more fractured, and therefore they will not be as likely to utilize new “features” in the OS, (if half the computers there are running XP, you’re losing half the market when you develop something that only works for Vista or Windows 7). With less software requiring the new OS, it becomes even less attractive to upgrade. And as more and more of the stuff people do with computers moves to the internet, the OS on the machine becomes irrelevant. If your browser does all of what you need, why do you need Vista?In fact, Intel’s decision should give itself pause, because it’s based on a similar model. What happens to the tech industry when people don’t buy a new PC every three years? What happens when the five-year old PC works just fine?
At least according to our latest asshat, none other than Stephen King. I’ve never thought of him as having a big mouth, but apparently it is just large enough to hold a foot. Quoth King:
I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.
And then they cover this. (via Scalzi)You know, I'm enough of a geek to actually be interested in fonts in and of themselves. But tying them into campaign coverage gives me a hefty dose of WTF.And I give the irregular-weekly asshat award to Seymour Chwast who managed to turn font aesthetics into a partisan smackdown:
Optima is one of the worst pre-computer typefaces ever designed. It was created to satisfy everybody’s needs. A straightforward, no-nonsense, no-embellishment face, it comes in regular and bold but little character can be found in either weight.Optima is not inappropriate for use by Senator McCain.
Ok, there are some internet folks out there that need a whopping cluebat of perspective. May I please provide your clue:
Introducing Charlotte Allen, from the Washington Post. Before I deconstruct her rampant idiocy, let me allow her to spew a few of her own words:
The theory that women are the dumber sex [...] is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid.
Presented for your consideration, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of California. Whose attitude toward the free flow of information on teh interwebz seems cribbed from North Korea. Apparently a swiss bank is somewhat miffed at Wikileaks.org a website organized by a bunch of journalists and other activists whose primary mission is to give an anonymous platform for publicizing documents showing governmental and corporate wrongdoing in situations where the "leaker" would suffer serious reprisals. (i.e. it targets a lot of nasty regimes that could, for instance, kill you for blabbing embarrassing facts.)So what happens when lawyers working for the Swiss banking group Julius Baer, file for an injunction to suppress the site's publication of several documents posted on the site allegedly revealing the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion? Why, the judge issues a permanent injunction shutting down the whole effing site, with only a couple hours notice to the sites' owner. Now, within a few hours, someone must have pointed out to Judge White that he was not, in fact, issuing internet rulings in mainland China, and his injunction might be viewed as a tad extreme, because the permanent injunction was clarified with a temporary injunction focusing only on the documents in question.Way to uphold the bastion of freedom. Nice to know that any tin-pot regime and corporate scumbag can get a web-site sanitized just by filing suit in California.(But actually not, since no one can take back electrons. The site is mirrored up the wazoo all over the world, meaning the injunction is pointless and ineffective in addition to being draconian.)
Thanks to The Smoking Gun website, I now know that Tops is including presidential candidate trading cards in their sets of baseball cards. . .
Christians can be stupid too.The minister with the stuffed pig is really on the same moral level as the idiots in Sudan who were demonstrating to have that teacher executed over a teddy bear.I have the really sad feeling that the ultimate apocalypse will be waged over something this idiotic.
. . . is they don't realize they're being unintentionally funny until it's too late.
Sudan doesn't like your teddy bears.
Britain's foreign secretary said he was "very concerned" about the case of a UK teacher who was in court Thursday, facing charges of offending religion by allowing a teddy bear to be named "Mohammed."
There's an interesting post on the Feminist SF Blog about aliens in Larry Niven's Known Space series. Essentially it points out how both the Kzinti and the Puppeteers both have what amount to non-sapient females, and how this amounts to a stealth misogyny. An interesting point that I think goes a little off the rails when the argument turns to objections to the biological justification of the Kzinti's sexual dimorphism:
I presume Niven had been asked earlier why all the kzinti who we ever met in Known Space were all males, and he was trying to come up with a backstory to excuse this other than “I’m a sexist git, what can I say?”
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