Not to single out the Israelis in this regard--apt students though they have proven--for the world round you will find that the security services are populated with a certain ideal: minds as flat as the desert, imaginations empty as spent shell casings.
The ideal, of course, in the modern Western state is the bureaucratic killing mind. Somebody like Eichmann, who, as Hannah Arendt told us in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, wept the day he was given the order to begin the destruction of German Jews...and then doggedly went to work. A touch of sentiment. The hankie. And then the killing work.
We see much the same thing in Washington and Iraq now: bureaucratic detail men, the kind for whom the life and death of entire peoples are merely different standard forms to be filed accordingly, or as in the case of the uncounted Iraqi civilian dead who are their responsibility, corpses not even to be flattered with numbers. Thinking spoils slaughter. Dispassion gets it done.
This is not to say that D&D is any guide to moral imagination. To the contrary: a fantasy life based on killing orcs might, given the right temperament and conditions, actually prove useful to some military applications. But D&D is a test of another essential quality, which is itself the enemy of the bureaucratic killing mind: you project your self into an Other, and that's the beginning of empathy. You inhabit another life, and you care for it. And you can't trust that impulse in the people to whom you assign the terrible work of colonialism.
You think "they need to be truly cross platform," do you, and you're in a pique because you can't get your 2.0 beta? Well, now: who are "they"?
I'll tell you who they are not: they are not Mac programmers. Almost no one from the Mac community has wanted to help work on OOo. Your complaint is with that programming community's indifference to open source, not with OOo. Go download NeoOffice/J, or simply learn to program and volunteer your time.
Good point. For Apple this is going to have serious immediate repercussions. From TFA:
Many in the music business also expressed concern over Apple's growing clout. This stems from the fact that Apple's music store and player are not compatible with any others. One fear is that Apple will become too powerful if consumers continue to choose its digital music platform. Apple declined to comment.
"One fear"? I'd say it's the main fear. The sticking point is not Apple's proprietary technology itself as much as how market share allows Apple to assert downward pressure on per-song pricing. The music biz wants to kneecap Apple. The goal is to force Apple to open the iPod/iTMS, distribute the platform's market share among any number of companies, and so get digital distribution fully under the music industry's thumb. Cartels like chattel, not coequals.
The big question is: if Jobs refuses, will the labels start to defect from iTMS? Apple will have planned for this scenario and their response is going to be very interesting--it will tell us pointedly where the power truly lies.
If you want to irrationally hate somebody, knock yourself out. Of course, it's basically equivalent to irrationally hating Jews or black people, but hey, it's a free country.
Let's compare, Leo.
If I'm Jewish or black, and you hate me on those grounds, "irrationality" barely begins to explain what's wrong with you.
If I'm an entertainment conglomerate habitually signing artists to deceptively one-sided contracts, playing Congress like a fiddle whenever I want copyright extended, using payola to ensure that radio plays my product to the exclusion of others, and so blatantly fixing prices that even my own bought-and-sold poltical representatives are finally unable to pretend otherwise, and you don't mind, but in fact go on to confuse criticism of my tricks with racism, then...
...er, why, thanks! God bless the little people--especially the eager ones!
Brilliant post. You've captured the central weakness of the Wiki very persuasively.
The problem with the Wikipedia idea is that all the people who really know and care about some topic would have to spend their entire lives guarding it from all kinds of problems: inveterate fiddlers, guys with axes to grind, and the many many slightly confused people in the world. Without that intense and permanent guardianship, it will simply be wrong.
That, in essence, is scholarship. And that is also why scholarship is not left to dilettantes.
When an entry in the Wikipedia is wrong, what happens? Nothing.
Exactly. As a previous poster pointed out, errors found in the Brittanica by a 12-year old became a headline on the BBC. That's because the old greybeard of encyclopediae has a reputation it trades on. With Wikipedia, for all we know, 12 year-olds are doing the writing.
But popularity could force solutions. Growing usage of Wikipedia could produce demands for higher accuracy, in turn leading to a more trustworthy model for filtering.
Some issues (the girls) brought up included fears that their friends will think (working in IT) is a geeky thing to do, and that IT work is not very social...
Once your High Elf builds up enough EXP points and you've found the right Star Trek.sig for your posts, all these fears will melt away.
In other words, it allows you to more effectively steal information and services from those who are kind enough to provide them for free, in exchange asking only for the opportunity to show you an easily ignored advertisement. Spoiled scum like you, with your obnoxiously oversized sense of entitlement, ought to be exiled to the desert, if you ask me. There you can establish your commune or whatever it is you hippies like to do, while we in civilized society will do our best to forget you.
I cannot imagine a more selfish attitude towards the world than that which the teabagging cocksmokers of Slashdot bring to light.
LOL! My good man, can you have reached the ripe age of harrumphing without having seen "The Big Lebowski"? You really owe it to yourself to see David Huddleston's performance as the titular character; it will cure you forever of the urge to use mothballed expressions such as "whatever it is you hippies like to do" and "we in civilized society." Conscious self-parody is one thing, after all, but your sleepwalking has moved me to unexpected sympathy in a way I've not felt since the prez fell off a Segway.
Now, in any case, no one is under any obligation to view ads in any context. Nor should imposition, the sine qua non of advertising, be euphemized as "opportunity." It's your confusion of obedience with duty that has led to your arch and sniveling denigration of your ad-free fellow man. You, sir, are no advertisement for advertisements.
They knwo that if they let MS do what MS is good at (technology, improvements, getting things right over time) it will crush Linux. The only hope they have is to run to the goverment for help.
My god, Agent Z-X9, we've been discovered! Even our Hidden Island Fortress of Zealotry was no match for their best, if somewhat dyslexic, minds! Grab every distro you can before they're crushed, and somebody start pleading with Washington! There'll be no stopping MS if it's allowed to do what it is good at--deploy overdue fixes years too late!
Here's the problem with the analogy: it's that there are lots of automakers, and they haven't twisted arms to ensure that their car is driven by 97% of the market, and they also haven't taken illegal measures to prevent others' products appearing in their cars.
But if the above conditions were true, then it is possible that the auto maker in question, like Microsoft, would be governed by a consent decree that restricts its options in an effort to reform it and prevent further injury to consumers and competitors.
(But let us also be realistic: after years of litigation the automaker would in all likelihood have been let off with a slap on the wrist, just as Microsoft was by the administration of George W. Bush, to whose campaign it has contributed handsomely.
Gates' imperious, not to mention immoral, behavior toward Danish workers and indeed Danish sovereignty seems modeled on the tactics favored by the regime in Washington. Invade and occupy here, threaten jobs there. Any objections? Tough luck!
But as the world is understandably revulsed by this bullying, there is increasingly a price to be paid. Boycotts, already harming sales of US products abroad, are merely the start. The reconfiguration of international political and military alliances is another, as witness events in motion from Europe to Asia to South America. Bullying incites an already dangerous world. And it sends those sane and decent elements, who should be one's natural allies, into confederacy against you.
Poor America: allowing your oligarchs to ruin your good name for no more than the price of a paltry tax cut or a cheap Walmart shirt is an awfully poor bargain. Look around: Luce's American Century is over. The dollar's in steep decline, your prospects dim, your employers shuffling jobs offshore, your enemies multiplying like an OxyContin habit, your unbought friends fewer and fewer. Time to wise up.
If at least you would have read the article, you would have seen that Microsoft is not the only one company in the entire universe to do this. So no, is does not show how low Microsoft can go, it just shows how low any company can go.
Your Honor, my client stands accused of cutting deals to harm his neighbor, bribing the investigating officer, strong-arming witnesses, and launching "initiatives" in which he vows to indulge in more of the same.
Far from reflecting personally upon my client, these charges merely show how low any human being can go!
Stop putting all evil on Bill's shoulders.
Furthermore, my client is tired of these accusations, which have been repeated on a regular basis for over a decade. Hasn't my client suffered enough?
In 2003, amid digital chatter that dropped the jaws of 58 scientists in 23 countries, the machines predicted the flop of "Matrix Revolutions." And, recently, when the first TV ads appeared with Keanu Reeves monotoning away as "Constantine," the machines went nuts again.
Here's something so easy it's been whipped up at home.
Of course Apple should offer it. Of course Apple doesn't have to offer it.
But along you come, a one-man corporate rights brigade, wagging your finger and telling people the corporation owes them nothing beyond the dotted line. And what's more, peeps better not go droolin' after Tiger! Advertised features! Life of the product! Ain't no free lunch! Everybody clear on that?
Such tiresome scolding, such quick subservience to a business. Where's the joy in that, pray tell?
With Apple at the forefront of online music stores, it makes sense that we support them by buying our portable music at iTunes rather than listening to radio (whether free or otherwise).
That's pretty specious logic. Buying an iPod--or for that matter a Powerbook--doesn't enter one into some kind of desperate codependency where you have to take care of Apple. It's a business transaction, not a Vegas marriage.;-)
And of course if Apple did change to replacable batteries I've no doubt the Yugo drivers would all start whinging about how Apple makes so much money on all the accessories.
Sneering at people for being "Yugo drivers" sends the wrong message about Apple at a time when the company is making new products that are--surprise, surprise--priced for Yugo drivers. Moreover, less spiteful Apple users don't like to be associated with ugly elitism. Stop hurting Apple.
And not only for people to tire of their old tunes.
The real growth potential for iTunes lies in copyright enforcement efforts. Legal digital music sales are but a drop in the bucket next to infringing trading. Apple and the music industry mafia (MIM) for whom it has become the best-known GUI know that the real money is waiting for free mp3s to dry up.
That makes it likely Apple will ally itself with crackdowns in the future. A position of dominance in the market will make it safer for Apple to sacrifice hip cred in order to increase profits--the reprehensible Pepsi/iTunes "I Fought The Law" ad is probably a harbinger.
But how long will MIM still be onboard? MIM cares only about MIM, and it will face more temptations to leave Apple at the altar as new cheaper hardware proliferates. Apple's license to sell music isn't permanent; the next few years are going to be very interesting.
Yet here we see that, as you say, Ms. Fiorina is worth negative $7 billion.
Great point in a great post.
It's a pity that Americans, their once-fierce spirit shattered by today's cult of corporate obedience, kowtow endlessly to such con artists. Elite bloodsuckers like Fiorina should be in leg irons. The damage they do to society far outweighs the harm of petty criminals and drug dealers.
Get it through your heads, my right wing friends. Your vote for this agenda is going to leave you outsourced, downsized, marginalized--while the Fiorinas laugh all the way to the bank.
If people wanted a hip music player that works with their computer, why wouldn't they want a hip computer as well?
Elementary, my dear Watson. Because you can't brandish your Mac mini in public.
The iPod's a social signifier. Computers that sit at home aren't. The idea of a "hip computer" is one with very limited appeal--a claim that's easy to quantify by pointing at Apple's market share.
The hip market, in other words, is already tapped out. Apple knows this, and that's why it's pitching affordability as a major appeal of the mini. Affordability is a reason the mini surfaced at Target.com, and why, in another area, with the Shuffle, Apple has set its sights on Walmart America.
Apple's going for broad, sweaty, big and beefy market share--with the Walmart move, it's cozying up to Red staters for a change. iPod's given it a taste, and it's tired of settling for the dinky demographic of hip.
Wise move? For now, definitely. And yet...people who flatter themselves with the lable of hip are notorious for being as conscious of inclusivity as exclusivity: forever monitoring their in-group status, they don't exactly like seeing their symbols being crowded by the hoi polloi. Can the aura of Apple's cool survive pro-Bush housewives in stretch latex fondling iPods at Walmart? Stay tuned.
A more accurate characterization is that Sokal, through deliberate fraud,and playing on his legitimate reputation within physics,... (snip)
First, it is enough to observe that every victim of parody cries foul. From politicians to popes and, since Sokal, postmodernists, too, no authority has welcomed the lash of satire.
In l'affaire Sokal it does little good to complain about "deliberate deception." The essence of the hoax was exposing the intellectual failings of certain theorists, indeed, of a trendy ontological viewpoint. This Sokal did marvelously in his parody (a literary form that is itself a kind of "deliberate deception," since to be successful it must both mirror and subvert its target). Failing to get the joke permitted the hoax. And, many would argue, proved Sokal's point.
Within Troy there was fury at the Greeks after the Horse turned out to be more than it seemed. But like the Trojans, the editors of Social Text have only themselves to blame.
Nice to see Ron Kuby is still out there all these years later, making the right kind of trouble. From TFA:
Lanzisera said he originally felt like telling the lawyers calling them to go to a very hot place of eternal suffering, but he eventually accepted an offer from an attorney named Ron Kuby, described by the Associated Press as a radical lawyer who promised to handle the case without charge.
Kuby got into the swing of things by saying his clients' case was like the lawyer joke, "What do you say to a lawyer with an IQ of 50? Good morning, your honor."
If he can keep this issue alive, Kuby wants to file a civil lawsuit against the court officials.
Ol' Bill Kunstler would be proud. Take 'em for all they're worth, Ron.;-)
There is nothing else like this phenomenon in the entire consumer culture. If anything else performed as horribly as Windows, and on such a global scale, consumers would scream bloody murder and demand... (snip)
...Would you not be, like, that is the goddamn last time I buy a Ford?
Shhh. Don't tell him about the Pinto.
Or ciggies. Or booze.
The fact is, consumers will go on buying all sorts of products that do much worse things than get viruses or spyware. They'll eat themselves into obesity, smoke their way into cancer, drink their livers all to blood n' piss, and yes, explode in small gastank-combustible Fords one year and, a generation later, break their necks rolling over in giant top-heavy Ford SUVs.
In a disposable culture where life is cheap--and fella, I'm not talking about Timbuktu--a certain fatalism is woven into consumption patterns, literally and figuratively. The latter is what we should try to address. Why are people so easily fleeced, so unable to think and act rationally at the intersection of money and desire, even with piles of reeking evidence shat all about them? Wait--could it not be because we're irrational, urge-driven tribal creatures, historically prone to going over the cliff with our fellow lemmings--in short, not nearly as perfect as "power user" Mark Morford?
But even that self-professed credential is suspect. If you can't configure a Windoze box to resist attack for four minutes, you're no power user. Indeed, you have no business even plugging one into the fucking wall.
This is not to defend Gates' crapware, merely to point out the shallowness of believing that Windoze represents something unique in the annals of consumer innocence (the nice word for it) or stupidity (the unkind one). As the Windoze cancer has metastasized, we see just another measure of a culture that cannot rid itself of addiction to reality TV, lying politicians, overpaid athletes, cheating accountants and corrupt CEOs, epic tax forms, etc. We see, in short, ourselves.
And one last thing: when, by dint of pluck, intelligence, accident, or blind luck a person manages to avoid one of the many stupidities to which we're all prone at some time or other, what's the most winning attribute? Is it to go before the world and pound your chest? Do you bray over others' failure and congratulate your success? I'll let Morford give his answer:
By the way, yes, I own a tiny handful of Apple stock. Do I need to advocate for Mac? Hardly. I'm already happy as can be thanks to the success of the brilliant, world-altering iPod.
Great! Now what are you gonna do about being smug, bitchy and naive?
Slashdot Mirror
The ideal, of course, in the modern Western state is the bureaucratic killing mind. Somebody like Eichmann, who, as Hannah Arendt told us in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, wept the day he was given the order to begin the destruction of German Jews...and then doggedly went to work. A touch of sentiment. The hankie. And then the killing work.
We see much the same thing in Washington and Iraq now: bureaucratic detail men, the kind for whom the life and death of entire peoples are merely different standard forms to be filed accordingly, or as in the case of the uncounted Iraqi civilian dead who are their responsibility, corpses not even to be flattered with numbers. Thinking spoils slaughter. Dispassion gets it done.
This is not to say that D&D is any guide to moral imagination. To the contrary: a fantasy life based on killing orcs might, given the right temperament and conditions, actually prove useful to some military applications. But D&D is a test of another essential quality, which is itself the enemy of the bureaucratic killing mind: you project your self into an Other, and that's the beginning of empathy. You inhabit another life, and you care for it. And you can't trust that impulse in the people to whom you assign the terrible work of colonialism.
I'll tell you who they are not: they are not Mac programmers. Almost no one from the Mac community has wanted to help work on OOo. Your complaint is with that programming community's indifference to open source, not with OOo. Go download NeoOffice/J, or simply learn to program and volunteer your time.
Many in the music business also expressed concern over Apple's growing clout. This stems from the fact that Apple's music store and player are not compatible with any others. One fear is that Apple will become too powerful if consumers continue to choose its digital music platform. Apple declined to comment.
"One fear"? I'd say it's the main fear. The sticking point is not Apple's proprietary technology itself as much as how market share allows Apple to assert downward pressure on per-song pricing. The music biz wants to kneecap Apple. The goal is to force Apple to open the iPod/iTMS, distribute the platform's market share among any number of companies, and so get digital distribution fully under the music industry's thumb. Cartels like chattel, not coequals.
The big question is: if Jobs refuses, will the labels start to defect from iTMS? Apple will have planned for this scenario and their response is going to be very interesting--it will tell us pointedly where the power truly lies.
Let's compare, Leo.
If I'm Jewish or black, and you hate me on those grounds, "irrationality" barely begins to explain what's wrong with you.
If I'm an entertainment conglomerate habitually signing artists to deceptively one-sided contracts, playing Congress like a fiddle whenever I want copyright extended, using payola to ensure that radio plays my product to the exclusion of others, and so blatantly fixing prices that even my own bought-and-sold poltical representatives are finally unable to pretend otherwise, and you don't mind, but in fact go on to confuse criticism of my tricks with racism, then...
The problem with the Wikipedia idea is that all the people who really know and care about some topic would have to spend their entire lives guarding it from all kinds of problems: inveterate fiddlers, guys with axes to grind, and the many many slightly confused people in the world. Without that intense and permanent guardianship, it will simply be wrong.
That, in essence, is scholarship. And that is also why scholarship is not left to dilettantes.
When an entry in the Wikipedia is wrong, what happens? Nothing.
Exactly. As a previous poster pointed out, errors found in the Brittanica by a 12-year old became a headline on the BBC. That's because the old greybeard of encyclopediae has a reputation it trades on. With Wikipedia, for all we know, 12 year-olds are doing the writing.
But popularity could force solutions. Growing usage of Wikipedia could produce demands for higher accuracy, in turn leading to a more trustworthy model for filtering.
Once your High Elf builds up enough EXP points and you've found the right Star Trek .sig for your posts, all these fears will melt away.
In other words, it allows you to more effectively steal information and services from those who are kind enough to provide them for free, in exchange asking only for the opportunity to show you an easily ignored advertisement. Spoiled scum like you, with your obnoxiously oversized sense of entitlement, ought to be exiled to the desert, if you ask me. There you can establish your commune or whatever it is you hippies like to do, while we in civilized society will do our best to forget you.
I cannot imagine a more selfish attitude towards the world than that which the teabagging cocksmokers of Slashdot bring to light.
LOL! My good man, can you have reached the ripe age of harrumphing without having seen "The Big Lebowski"? You really owe it to yourself to see David Huddleston's performance as the titular character; it will cure you forever of the urge to use mothballed expressions such as "whatever it is you hippies like to do" and "we in civilized society." Conscious self-parody is one thing, after all, but your sleepwalking has moved me to unexpected sympathy in a way I've not felt since the prez fell off a Segway.
Now, in any case, no one is under any obligation to view ads in any context. Nor should imposition, the sine qua non of advertising, be euphemized as "opportunity." It's your confusion of obedience with duty that has led to your arch and sniveling denigration of your ad-free fellow man. You, sir, are no advertisement for advertisements.
They knwo that if they let MS do what MS is good at (technology, improvements, getting things right over time) it will crush Linux. The only hope they have is to run to the goverment for help.
My god, Agent Z-X9, we've been discovered! Even our Hidden Island Fortress of Zealotry was no match for their best, if somewhat dyslexic, minds! Grab every distro you can before they're crushed, and somebody start pleading with Washington! There'll be no stopping MS if it's allowed to do what it is good at--deploy overdue fixes years too late!
But if the above conditions were true, then it is possible that the auto maker in question, like Microsoft, would be governed by a consent decree that restricts its options in an effort to reform it and prevent further injury to consumers and competitors.
(But let us also be realistic: after years of litigation the automaker would in all likelihood have been let off with a slap on the wrist, just as Microsoft was by the administration of George W. Bush, to whose campaign it has contributed handsomely.
But as the world is understandably revulsed by this bullying, there is increasingly a price to be paid. Boycotts, already harming sales of US products abroad, are merely the start. The reconfiguration of international political and military alliances is another, as witness events in motion from Europe to Asia to South America. Bullying incites an already dangerous world. And it sends those sane and decent elements, who should be one's natural allies, into confederacy against you.
Poor America: allowing your oligarchs to ruin your good name for no more than the price of a paltry tax cut or a cheap Walmart shirt is an awfully poor bargain. Look around: Luce's American Century is over. The dollar's in steep decline, your prospects dim, your employers shuffling jobs offshore, your enemies multiplying like an OxyContin habit, your unbought friends fewer and fewer. Time to wise up.
Your Honor, my client stands accused of cutting deals to harm his neighbor, bribing the investigating officer, strong-arming witnesses, and launching "initiatives" in which he vows to indulge in more of the same.
Far from reflecting personally upon my client, these charges merely show how low any human being can go!
Stop putting all evil on Bill's shoulders.
Furthermore, my client is tired of these accusations, which have been repeated on a regular basis for over a decade. Hasn't my client suffered enough?
Because for every 359 people who buy a PS3, someone will buy an X-Box. ;-)
Here's something so easy it's been whipped up at home.
Of course Apple should offer it. Of course Apple doesn't have to offer it.
But along you come, a one-man corporate rights brigade, wagging your finger and telling people the corporation owes them nothing beyond the dotted line. And what's more, peeps better not go droolin' after Tiger! Advertised features! Life of the product! Ain't no free lunch! Everybody clear on that?
Such tiresome scolding, such quick subservience to a business. Where's the joy in that, pray tell?
Damn, that's a good one.
Their slogan: Think Different, Swine. ;-)
That's pretty specious logic. Buying an iPod--or for that matter a Powerbook--doesn't enter one into some kind of desperate codependency where you have to take care of Apple. It's a business transaction, not a Vegas marriage. ;-)
You need to understand this because there are several good reasons to think seriously about the ethics of shopping through iTunes.
We need a new term. Macublican? ;-)
Sneering at people for being "Yugo drivers" sends the wrong message about Apple at a time when the company is making new products that are--surprise, surprise--priced for Yugo drivers. Moreover, less spiteful Apple users don't like to be associated with ugly elitism. Stop hurting Apple.
And not only for people to tire of their old tunes.
The real growth potential for iTunes lies in copyright enforcement efforts. Legal digital music sales are but a drop in the bucket next to infringing trading. Apple and the music industry mafia (MIM) for whom it has become the best-known GUI know that the real money is waiting for free mp3s to dry up.
That makes it likely Apple will ally itself with crackdowns in the future. A position of dominance in the market will make it safer for Apple to sacrifice hip cred in order to increase profits--the reprehensible Pepsi/iTunes "I Fought The Law" ad is probably a harbinger.
But how long will MIM still be onboard? MIM cares only about MIM, and it will face more temptations to leave Apple at the altar as new cheaper hardware proliferates. Apple's license to sell music isn't permanent; the next few years are going to be very interesting.
Great point in a great post.
It's a pity that Americans, their once-fierce spirit shattered by today's cult of corporate obedience, kowtow endlessly to such con artists. Elite bloodsuckers like Fiorina should be in leg irons. The damage they do to society far outweighs the harm of petty criminals and drug dealers.
Get it through your heads, my right wing friends. Your vote for this agenda is going to leave you outsourced, downsized, marginalized--while the Fiorinas laugh all the way to the bank.
Elementary, my dear Watson. Because you can't brandish your Mac mini in public.
The iPod's a social signifier. Computers that sit at home aren't. The idea of a "hip computer" is one with very limited appeal--a claim that's easy to quantify by pointing at Apple's market share.
The hip market, in other words, is already tapped out. Apple knows this, and that's why it's pitching affordability as a major appeal of the mini. Affordability is a reason the mini surfaced at Target.com, and why, in another area, with the Shuffle, Apple has set its sights on Walmart America.
Apple's going for broad, sweaty, big and beefy market share--with the Walmart move, it's cozying up to Red staters for a change. iPod's given it a taste, and it's tired of settling for the dinky demographic of hip.
Wise move? For now, definitely. And yet...people who flatter themselves with the lable of hip are notorious for being as conscious of inclusivity as exclusivity: forever monitoring their in-group status, they don't exactly like seeing their symbols being crowded by the hoi polloi. Can the aura of Apple's cool survive pro-Bush housewives in stretch latex fondling iPods at Walmart? Stay tuned.
First, it is enough to observe that every victim of parody cries foul. From politicians to popes and, since Sokal, postmodernists, too, no authority has welcomed the lash of satire.
In l'affaire Sokal it does little good to complain about "deliberate deception." The essence of the hoax was exposing the intellectual failings of certain theorists, indeed, of a trendy ontological viewpoint. This Sokal did marvelously in his parody (a literary form that is itself a kind of "deliberate deception," since to be successful it must both mirror and subvert its target). Failing to get the joke permitted the hoax. And, many would argue, proved Sokal's point.
Within Troy there was fury at the Greeks after the Horse turned out to be more than it seemed. But like the Trojans, the editors of Social Text have only themselves to blame.
"I Just Wasn't Made For This Bed," by the Beach Boys
"Rupture," by Blondie
"Born To Run, Unfortunately," by Springsteen
"Start Me Up--No, On Second Thought, I'll Just Catch A Few More Winks Firzzzzzzz," by the Rolling Stones
Lanzisera said he originally felt like telling the lawyers calling them to go to a very hot place of eternal suffering, but he eventually accepted an offer from an attorney named Ron Kuby, described by the Associated Press as a radical lawyer who promised to handle the case without charge.
Kuby got into the swing of things by saying his clients' case was like the lawyer joke, "What do you say to a lawyer with an IQ of 50? Good morning, your honor."
If he can keep this issue alive, Kuby wants to file a civil lawsuit against the court officials.
Ol' Bill Kunstler would be proud. Take 'em for all they're worth, Ron. ;-)
Or ciggies. Or booze.
The fact is, consumers will go on buying all sorts of products that do much worse things than get viruses or spyware. They'll eat themselves into obesity, smoke their way into cancer, drink their livers all to blood n' piss, and yes, explode in small gastank-combustible Fords one year and, a generation later, break their necks rolling over in giant top-heavy Ford SUVs.
In a disposable culture where life is cheap--and fella, I'm not talking about Timbuktu--a certain fatalism is woven into consumption patterns, literally and figuratively. The latter is what we should try to address. Why are people so easily fleeced, so unable to think and act rationally at the intersection of money and desire, even with piles of reeking evidence shat all about them? Wait--could it not be because we're irrational, urge-driven tribal creatures, historically prone to going over the cliff with our fellow lemmings--in short, not nearly as perfect as "power user" Mark Morford?
But even that self-professed credential is suspect. If you can't configure a Windoze box to resist attack for four minutes, you're no power user. Indeed, you have no business even plugging one into the fucking wall.
This is not to defend Gates' crapware, merely to point out the shallowness of believing that Windoze represents something unique in the annals of consumer innocence (the nice word for it) or stupidity (the unkind one). As the Windoze cancer has metastasized, we see just another measure of a culture that cannot rid itself of addiction to reality TV, lying politicians, overpaid athletes, cheating accountants and corrupt CEOs, epic tax forms, etc. We see, in short, ourselves.
And one last thing: when, by dint of pluck, intelligence, accident, or blind luck a person manages to avoid one of the many stupidities to which we're all prone at some time or other, what's the most winning attribute? Is it to go before the world and pound your chest? Do you bray over others' failure and congratulate your success? I'll let Morford give his answer:
Great! Now what are you gonna do about being smug, bitchy and naive?