If enough people can't get together to pay for quality television, then we don't deserve to have it available.
The reason why cash-starved public broadcasting sucks is because they have to resort to begathons (which is itself a sign that you Philistines have won). These stations are almost as commercial as the commercial media to which they were supposed to be an alternative. I don't think you bothered to read my previous post in its entirety.
If enough people can't get together to pay for cruise missiles, then maybe we don't deserve to have them available either. Let's pass the hat and see who'll pitch in.
First of all, the PBS/CPB tax bite to you is a few pennies a month; you're now an official nominee for CyberScrooge 1999 if you're going to whine about this (see chart, which shows that public broadcasting in the US is cash-starved beyond all reason).
Secondly, it isn't the government's job to entertain people, nor is that public broadcasting's job. Plenty of dollars flow through commercial broadcasting, and commercial broadcasting sucks to the Nth degree as a result (chasing after the lowest common denominator of everything); public broadcasting (in the US) was designed to provide a telecommunications infrastructure to public education, and to provide programming (news, documentaries, essays, science, culture, etc) that wasn't -- and isn't -- being provided by the commercial entities.
But irate politicians, almost from the beginning, angered by the news coverage, have, over and over again, cut funding, or made public broadcasters beg for money from its viewers or from corporations, making US public broadcasting mediocre at best. Public radio and TV is now about Lawrence Welk reruns, wimpy classical music playlists, and de-clawed information programming; public broadcasting in its current, messed-up state can be (and is) emulated by cable entities and commercial radio stations, yes, but with better funding, PBS/CPB/NPR could put its commercial-space emulators to shame.
In a country where "culture" means mass-produced corporate crap, and "news" means mass-produced corporate infotrivia, and "education" means mass-produced crappy consumers, it might behoove Americans to divert some War Department chump change into a mucho beefed-up PBS.
Not that it matters to you, of course; you'd rather keep public broadcasting's $1 for yourself. Don't spend it all in one place.
We'll see how things "play" out but I expect a revoloution coming on in the music industry.
The Net's a work-in-progress; there's a revolution of sorts coming, but it's not MP3s specifically and it's surely not MP3.com, which is little more than a humongous vanity press (I think that's the point -- well taken -- of the Upside piece). Digital, downloadable music will be revolutionary, but no-one knows how it will be revolutionary; that's why there's all the jockeying and IPO mania and Big Pronouncements. Something's going on, but it may all just be hot air; I suspect the usual suspects -- the RIAA, the big media corporations, and MS -- will end up being the custodians of any successful "revolution" here. Which is not to say that Michael won't make a ton of money from the IPO.
It's less flaky than 5.0 and performs better (it damn well better, for the size of it); I doubt it will ever be as feature-rich as the Winversion, but at least I don't have to boot some other OS in order to see G2-encoded content. Thanx, Real, but please don't leave the PPC/Alpha/etc people in the lurch -- shouldn't it just be a matter of configure and make?
(Trying it -- the non-RPM version -- out on a K6/166, 2.0.36, 64 MB, and a glass of iced herbal tea...)
1) Usually, selling out involves blatantly reversing one's previously stated position. 2) Selling out (if we must use that term) always includes not only a change in one's public persona, but altering one's art to fit someone else's ideas.
Selling Out is Selling Out. An unknown can sell out too. Almost all commercial endeavor (I'm keeping this in reference to the arts) is, to some extent, a sell out. If you "alter one's art to fit someone else's ideas", whether producers, execs, or some imagined audience, you're selling out; it may be so slight as to not be worth mentioning, or it may be blatant.
Now, let's take Lucas. I see nowhere in Katz's article where he cites Lucas explicitly stating that he will not do promotions with fastfood places, etc. This is all based on incredibly vague implications as seen by Katz about the "myth" of Star Wars, and the assertion that somehow these things that have nothing to do with the movie itself degrade the quality of the art.
No. It's about a movie. Not selling out means that you make a movie, that you capture some sort of vision on celluloid that just had to get out; I saw Star Wars three times, and it's merely OK in my books, but I would say there's minimal sellout there -- it was a fun movie in a decade full of great, often heavy, films. There was a freshness about it. Where Lucas went wrong -- both in the rest of that trilogy, and even more so with TPM, is that the film is now part of a money-making apparatus that goes beyond the vision-captured-on-celluloid. It's now a minor, though necessary, cog in a marketing machine, no longer fresh or different -- just Your Basic Hollywood Blockbuster. There is, really, little or no vision at that rarefied level of marketability; it's more just a matter of punching the clock, getting the film done, and amassing the varied marketing forces for battle. Lucas' only responsibilities are to make sure it doesn't suck so badly that it harms the marketing, and to sell the hell out of it with personal appearances (and doing a little myth-making himself about "George Lucas").
As someone who has lambasted Katz of late, I'm very pleased to defend him this time -- amidst all those dreaded Smart Quotes (and that Blind Orange Washington proofreading) lies a rant of substance. Two thumbs up:) I won't be going to see TPM, and I've had the Star Wars stories filtered out from Day One of/. filtering. I miss the old (pre-sequel, pre-hype) George Lucas.
Of course, I'm stuck in Sweden at the moment, so I don't have a clue about the potential candidates. I know that Gore doesn't have a clue, but what about George, how does he stand up when it comes to technical matters?
It doesn't matter. A president's job has little to do with technical matters. If you think Gore hasn't a clue (he actually has the ability to borrow a clue; one wishes he would remind himself of that sometimes), then Bush would be an even bigger joke. Like his father (a man I really like, BTW -- except as a politician), George W just wants to be president; the only relevant details he has worked on so far is fund-raising and focus groups. Policies are not so worked-out at this time, i.e., they're for sale to the highest bidder, be it a special interest group or a corporation. He's ahead in the polls right now, but if the press scrutinizes his past business deals (e.g. Harken Energy, and the Texas Rangers baseball team), the voters will see that he made a lot of money from his surname and the fact that his dad was (at various times) the DCI (head of the CIA), vice president, and president. Of course, the voters may ignore all that and vote for the guy anyway; I'm sure he and his handlers will have worked out explanations and alibis for everything, or Double U wouldn't have run for prez. Are top politicians in Sweden this bad? Many top American politicians are; Bush is in the 90th percentile, with plenty of company.
Oh. Did I forget my RANT tags again? Moderators: I have no problem with this being reduced to a -1 score:)
No, Lucas is no Gates; I'm no Star Wars fan, but I liked his earlier, smaller films a lot.
We bitch and moan about a glitzy, heavily-marketed OS, and its associated products and FUD and such; some of us do the same about the "dumbing-down" implied by putting KDE or GNOME on top of Linux, but we don't do the same thing with popular culture. If we are excited over Lucas and Phish and EBM and Alcoholica and South Park (to name just a few examples over the past year or so), it shows me that many of us "haven't tried Linux", so to speak; it shows me that we grok the user-friendly, the glitzy, the hyped, the popular (either mass-culturally or subculturally so), and the shockful -- rather than take the time and "RTFM" concerning music and the visual/televisual arts. My pop-culture examples are not buggy like Win*, but they do come from a dominant platform (shared by a small set of large corporations, rather than a single one), and they have their various deficiencies (and I say that as someone who has enjoyed -- in small doses -- all of the aforementioned examples). I dunno. I have come to associate showbiz marks with WinDOS users, perhaps wrongfully so.
The best article I've seen so far came from Maggie O'Kane of the (British) Guardian Weekly ( here -- I think you're allowed to read it without a login); there's also a short article here. And I'd bet that if you searched "depleted uranium" on DejaNews^H^H^H^H, you'd find a thing or two. But kudos to the Beeb, and a pox on all those big US outlets that won't tell Merkins what atrocities (to describe them as "little Chernobyls" may only be a slight exaggeration; time will tell) their tax dollars are being used for, both in Iraq and in Serbia. Half-life is a bitch:(
DU-enhanced weapons are like Lite Nukes minus the Giant Mushroom Clouds and the guilt; the reason the guilt isn't there is because there doesn't seem to be much reportage or discussion about it. See No Evil, etc. It will take widespread news footage of deformed babies and livestock, and mutant produce before that discussion will begin, and then Americans may just choose to ignore it unless it happens on their own soil. And it has, in a way -- Gulf War Syndrome and health problems in post-Gulf offspring may well be related to DU; if there's a ground war in Serbia, the NATO troops may be exposed to the radiation, leading to Who Knows What?®
I would direct you to a/. article on Katz, which includes links to Rogers Cadenhead's and Lloyd Wood's musings (updated links included here anyway) on The New Media Icon his baaaad self. Katz violently (i.e. violence both verbal and virtual -- no blows ensued; I'm much younger and come from a rougher, tougher neighborhood anyway) objected to the notion I put to him that there might be a sliver of self-promotion and shallow thought in what he does sometimes at this site, especially in the wake of Littleton.
The interactivity that he inspires here should suffice for you, no matter that, amidst the genuine wisdom I see on/., there is often a lot of crap to wade through. Katz's time belongs to him, and if he should choose not to spend more time amongst us on these pages, I can understand. But I would say that a Katz-less interactivity isn't really as valuable as one that includes him; he's just one human being, and he probably doesn't have the time and energy to spend on being more hands-on here.
On second thought, maybe a Katz-less interactivity isn't really interactive at all. He just comes down from the mountain bearing his zeroes and ones; then he zips off elsewhere. Sending e-mail to him is a hit-and-miss proposition if you don't keep it trivial.
"Ever got the feelin' you been cheated?" -- Johnny Rotten, to the crowd, to Malcolm, to himself, after a disastrous 70's US Sex Pistols gig and tour.
(And Katz, if you're reading this, the ball remains in your court; I'm still curious to read your non-bleary-eyed take on the "guilty bystander" e-mail message.)
--
In half-defense of Katz (2nd try)
on
Infinite Space
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· Score: 1
Despite all of his protestations, Katz really is a one-way, old-school journalist. Instead of letting Slashdot Threads be the place in which his readers interactively discuss his work, he selectively quotes lurkers -- encouraging more people to make their comments to him instead of making them publicly.
The reason for this should be fairly obvious: He can control the resulting dialogue better by directing it through his mailbox instead of a public forum.
If he truly believed in interactivity, he would participate in Threads. (Of course, if he truly believed in technology, he would actually make use of it in his daily life. The furthest he has gotten into using a computer was to create a new document in a word processor. Everything else is beyond his capabilities.)
I'm still waiting for Katz to hold up his end of an attempted dialog (via e-mail and/.) about his Littleton articles, old-school versus new-school media, and forms of violence embedded in US culture. In his defense, I'll say that he's probably pretty busy; it's hard to respond to e-mail with more than a terse sentence or two when you're being deluged with the stuff. It's even harder to really read all the e-mail (as I've learned from one of his responses, in which he got pissed at a line in the first couple of sentences without bothering to actually read the actual food-for-thought meat of the message).
The bottom line: Katz doesn't scale, and he continues to bring the mediocrity of the Old School to his New School ventures. The former can (and must) be forgiven, but the latter is unfortunate from someone who seeks to be the net.journalist. NetAid: a 24-hour Peace Netcast in honor of (and in aid of) Radio B92 on its 10th birthday, 15 May 1999.
Despite all of his protestations, Katz really is a one-way, old-school journalist. Instead of letting Slashdot Threads be the place in which his readers interactively discuss his work, he selectively quotes lurkers -- encouraging more people to make their comments to him instead of making them publicly.
The reason for this should be fairly obvious: He can control the resulting dialogue better by directing it through his mailbox instead of a public forum.
If he truly believed in interactivity, he would participate in Threads. (Of course, if he truly believed in technology, he would actually make use of it in his daily life. The furthest he has gotten into using a computer was to create a new document in a word processor. Everything else is beyond his capabilities.)
I'm still waiting for Katz to hold up his end of an attempted dialog (via e-mail and/.) about his Littleton articles, old-school versus new-school media, and forms of violence embedded in US culture. In his defense, I'll say that he's probably pretty busy; it's hard to respond to e-mail with more than a terse sentence or two when you're being deluged with the stuff. It's even harder to really read all the e-mail (as I've learned from one of his responses, in which he got pissed at a line in the couple of sentences without bothering to actually read the actual food-for-thought meat of the message).
The bottom line: Katz doesn't scale, and he continues to bring the mediocrity of the Old School to his New School ventures. The former can (and must) be forgiven, but the latter is unfortunate from someone who seeks to be the net.journalist. NetAid: a 24-hour Peace Netcast in honor of (and in aid of) Radio B92 on its 10th birthday, 15 May 1999.
Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 15:16:06 +0200
Subject: nettime:US shuts down Yugoslav Internet - confirmed!
Unfortunately it seams that Loral Orion will have to close down all satellite connections to Yugoslavia. Mr. Laban who is representative for Loral Orion communication in Yugoslavia said that Loral Orion informed him about that action. For now, ISPs which are connected through LoralOrion are working, but it is just a matter of time. Strange enough the measure will affect not only ISPs in Serbia but also Montenegrian ones. Overall effect will be that two closest ISP to regime (ptt.yu and eunet.yu) that operate through ground lines will continue operating, but satellite providers - who also close to the regime, but at least try to maintain some image of independence - will be closed down.
For the past decade, the entire world has been watching genocide in the Balkans and turned a blind eye. I think that it is about time we did something. I don't think that NATO is going about this the right way, but how on earth can anyone justify standing back and doing nothing? Genocide is murder to the nth degree. These are people who are dying, and for the umpteenth time since World War Two, when we all said never again, we've been ignoring it. I'm sick and tired of people saying that this is US imperialism. Have you no consience? NATO is going about this in a less than ideal manner, but something needs to be done.
But why Yugoslavia? As someone pointed out, it's because "people like us" (i.e. caucasian, albeit swarthy ones) are being massacred. It's also because it's in the US's backyard (the US is a European power, ever since WWI).
But why Yugoslavia? Massacres equally as heinous are going on elsewhere; if bombs must fall on Serbia, why not send a few to the Sudan, where the Muslim government in the north wants to destroy and/or convert and/or enslave the Christians in the south. Right-wing pols (and voters) in the US like to say that their country is a "Christian nation", yet they don't raise a fuss about the Sudan.
What about East Timor? Let drop some bombs on the Indonesians. East Timor should have become independent about 25 years ago, as Portugal was releasing its colonies. But they were invaded by Indonesia (with some help, or at least acquiesence from Dr Kissinger and Friends), and have been slowly genocided ever since.
What about Latin America? The CIA overthrew a government in Chile, and the US looked the other way as murders and human-rights abuses took place over a long period of time. Ditto in places like Argentina, except there was no need for some spectacular US-sponsored coup. In Central America, Merkins swallowed whole a bunch of lies about Contra thugs being "freedom fighters", and to this day the US government and media refuse to acknowledge that there were free elections (complete with international observers) in Sandinista Nicaragua long before the election that brought Dona Violeta to power. And in other Central American countries, those that didn't have the audacity to overthrow their US-backed dictators and US-trained generals, massacres occurred, based on the "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" ethos of Vietnam.
What about Tibet? Though the Dalai Lama probably wouldn't approve, maybe the US should have been bombing China all these years, rather than sit idly by and let China run roughshod over that land.
Why Yugoslavia? Why now? Why was there a clause in the Rambouillet accords that would have forced Milosevic to cede his country's sovereignty over to outsiders? Why was that accord drawn up so maliciously that Milosevic would have no option other than to walk away from it and face NATO bombs? And wasn't Milosevic "our guy", once upon a time, just like Saddam and Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden before? They only became "monsters" when they no longer suited the purposes of the West.
Why? The US, and the West, perpetrates a lot of violence -- military, political, and economic -- around the world every day, and no fuss is raised about it. Now, all of a sudden, a despot in the Balkans is coerced into accepting a bunch of smart bombs on his soil. It makes for lots of exciting TV programming, but, in a way, it's nothing new. Except for all the unanswered questions. NetAid: a 24-hour Peace Netcast in honor of (and in aid of) Radio B92 on its 10th birthday, 15 May 1999.
You don't understand. It's the great Bell Labs tradition to invent great technology and bury it.
There was a press release earlier this year about EPAC (the current version of PAC) being made G2-compatible, i.e. you could play a PAC file on a RealPlayer just as you can an MP3, and apparently also stream it. I don't know if it's a reality now, since I'd be hard-pressed to find, download, or stream a PAC file. I think there's also some Liquid Audio sort of PAC clients out there, but I can't remember any of the relevant URLs.
Apathy is not the problem (IMHO); figuring out what to do to help, is an issue to discuss. Which is a question Katz does not seem to have addressed. Is this one of the sources of your hostility toward him?
The hostility comes from exasperation toward the media in general in this whole episode. If I give Katz a hard time, it's because I take the time to read him (and I actually like him, believe it or not), and maybe because I hold him to a higher standard than I hold the people in his old milieux.
To borrow a line from Thomas Merton, one that I think Katz might be familiar with, for all the good that may have come out of all this, Katz fails to hold up the mirror and give any of us the sense of being the "guilty bystander in a turbulent, desperate, cynical and violent world". We all have blood on our hands from Littleton, but no one with the audience to hear such a message will even come close to saying anything like that. The persecuting and harassment of geeks comes from all of us, geeks included. Eric Harris wrote "I am the law, if you don't like it you die. If I don't like you or I don't like what you want me to do, you die"; I maintain that he had lots of hatred and violence in him long before he was ever embroiled in the intramural warfare of the school grounds (IMHO). The society that can bully Yugoslavia by impossible demands at Rambouillet and via smart bombs in the air and by keeping the press on a short leash at home is the society that has lots of violences, large and small, physical, social, and psychological, coursing through its veins. If we can't start dealing with that, then we're all just a bunch of Gasbags here.
In the interest of saving my busy fingers from typing, here's a copy-and-paste from higher up the page.
...you'd think that all this commisserating would lead to a greater awareness of those around the world who are bullied in one way or another -- that it would lead to a sense of the bigger picture, and maybe lead to some energy directed towards it, instead of a feel-good exercise in stress-testing/.'s server. But I get from all these posts no notion of that, no notion that anyone's interested in changing their backyards, much less the world, and no realization that we middle-class geeks, too, are bullies when we buy into the demonization of our domestic poor, or when we let our tax dollars get spent on clamping overseas dissent, or when those tax dollars are used to create "collateral damage", or when we cheer union-busting activity domestically and overseas, or even when we buy a pair of Air Jordans or a Disney action figure. If only one person had said "I vow never to be a bully in any way, shape, or form", I'd feel a little better about Katz's charade. But no one did. And in that apathy lies the seed of another generation of nerds and geeks and outsiders being schoolyard victims, because that apathy will probably be passed down to our offspring. So be it; the enemy continues to be us. Nothing to see here...
I have no problem with the venting; I just object to the blinkered-ness of the whole thing; this is so hermetically-sealed as to be laughable. I guarantee you that nothing will be accomplished from all this, once the smoke clears and the hype fades.
I've met many who've been able to buy into conformity, both mainsteam and counter-culture. I have yet to meet someone who could buy their way out of non-conformity. It just doesn't follow. You don't decide to be a misfit. Others decide for you. In a nutshell, that's what we've been talking about.
Ask Katz about his generation, and those who cut their hair, changed their clothes, and were "Clean for Gene" in 1968. What about Bill Clinton, who shaved his beard and donned suits in order to "work within the system". There's lots of grownups who look aghast when they see old high-school pictures, just as today's green-haired or black-mascara'd or omnipierced kids will look aghast when they look back at their current selves. Plenty of people buy their way into conformity; there's been former Flower Children who have become corporate disinfo people for scum like Nike. Plenty of people "sell out", even to the point of wearing it as a badge of honor.
Yes, there's "bigger fish to fry" out there, and we should "think globally, act locally". More importantly, you'd think that all this commisserating would lead to a greater awareness of those around the world who are bullied in one way or another -- that it would lead to a sense of the bigger picture, and maybe lead to some energy directed towards it, instead of a feel-good exercise in stress-testing/.'s server. But I get from all these posts no notion of that, no notion that anyone's interested in changing their backyards, much less the world, and no realization that we middle-class geeks, too, are bullies when we buy into the demonization of our domestic poor, or when we let our tax dollars get spent on clamping overseas dissent, or when those tax dollars are used to create "collateral damage", or when we cheer union-busting activity domestically and overseas, or even when we buy a pair of Air Jordans or a Disney action figure. If only one person had said "I vow never to be a bully in any way, shape, or form", I'd feel a little better about Katz's charade. But no one did. And in that apathy lies the seed of another generation of nerds and geeks and outsiders being schoolyard victims, because that apathy will probably be passed down to our offspring. So be it; the enemy continues to be us. Nothing to see here...
Read this, and this, and this; hopefully I didn't botch the links. In light of a big ol' world out there, full of violences in which we ourselves are often the bullies. Katz's message is self-aggrandizing bullshit (however noble his original intentions, it has long passed the level of trite and obscene), and we do little to advance much of anything by being self-congratulatory or all-of-a-sudden "shocked" into "aware"-ness about the plight of a relatively privileged few.
"The great triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." -- Aldous Huxley
If we remain ignorant of the general violence and suffering out there, while obsessing over this particular Hellmouth, what really have we gained? If we lament the sins without lamenting the sins of omission that this media circus is all about, what really have we gained?
Kids can get outcast by merely being more shy or more awkward than their peers. And they certainly don't chose to be that way.
But they grow out of it, and they don't get killed or imprisoned for it. I'm not endorsing the abuse of outcast kids; I'm just saying there's literally millions of people around the world who don't get to grow out of their outcast status, and who don't have the option of buying a makeover to become like the "popular kids". People who are cradle-to-grave outcasts don't get much attention from us; people who are really taking shit for being different don't get our attention, unless NATO, CNN, and the State Department band together and foist it upon us.
If you feel that your ego is big enough already, you're free to skip the "hellmouth" stories, and move on to the other interesting items that Slashdot carries
In a nutshell: Real is pissing me off for not coming up with their long-promised G2 Linux client, as is Microsoft with their Media Player; I can live with MP3, though sound quality is often a GIGO proposition (world-class encoders are a must, ideally Free ones); I haven't tried KDE (I'm a minimalist mwm person), but I think the C++ orientation (and OpenParts) is great, and I detest the GNOME/KDE flamewars; I have great hopes for the K7, and will probably get a dual-K7 mobo once they go to the.18-micron process; I tend not to upgrade my distros until the need for a bunch of library upgrades becomes crucial.
OK? I've skimmed the topics. I would be repeating myself, or lamely seconding the posts of others, if I were to post a bunch of comments on those topics. Meanwhile, this "Hellmouth" scam (for in Katz's hands, it has become little more than that) seems much more Matter-ful, especially since I believe the general response to it to be as awful as the mainstream cluelessness about "geeks, goths, nerds, and outsiders".
Today is World Press Freedom Day, a freedom that we in the West take for granted, even as that freedom often seems bogus amidst the deluge of pablum like that purveyed by the likes of Katz and his peers; tomorrow we commemorate those people slain in WWII, not just soldiers, but Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Christians, dissenters -- people who really were different, not for wearing mascara, or playing Quake, or consuming the latest Maverick/Interscope/MCA/Dreamworks product.
People who actually stood for something have actually had Big Substantive Evil visited upon them, just for being different, or for protesting against injustice. We have, at least in the case of WWII, taken up arms to liberate some of those people, to "make the world safe for democracy", and all that. Nowadays, we just ignore them, or call them all sorts of names, or make them strawmen for stump speeches and campaign-fundraising mass-mailings, or pass laws against them, or make fun of them -- there was an earlier post about what it's like to be an Arab-American; I think he just gave us the tip of a nasty iceberg. And you can't be bothered to even register and log in, much less offer a decent argument.
Do you want to do something to protest the Cuban Embargo? Or protest against the use of depleted-uranium Lite Nukes in Iraq and Serbia? Or fight for the rights of Third World garment workers to unionize and collectively-bargain for the chance to make more than 10-45/hr? Do you want to organize boycotts against those corporations that coerce people into permanent sweatshop slavery? (No, because you probably benefit from that cheap labor, though I suspect that it's not that simple.) Do you want to write letters to editors challenging a wide variety of FUD? Do you want to write your representatives, urging them to free Leonard Peltier, or grant amnesty to those people imprisoned because of the War on Some Drugs? There's plenty of outcasts out there that we've criminally ignored, and I suspect we'll continue to ignore them long after the hangovers of Katzdot's Hellmouth Toga Party.
Disclaimer: Typed quickly; all spelling mistakes and errors in logic left intact.
That's the difference between "real life" and "high school." In "real life," there's legal recourse. In high school, there's a prison-movie-esque code of silence. If you "rat out" someone who is picking on you, be it a peer or a faculty member, expect things to get much worse, not any better.
You'd think that with all this "consciousness-raising" hot air we've all spewed, that high-school geeks would take the time to assert their rights as US citizens, rather than just whine or try to form a special-interest group.
It is a cliche' of human history to fear what you don't understand, and it is a very small step from fear to hatred.
[...]
Small wonder an unrestrained jock clique drove these kids to violence. It only amazes me that it doesn't happen more often. How sad that it had to come to this before anyone noticed.
It happens. Terrorist acts have occurred (or been foiled) in the US, and against Americans overseas, in response to its status as the "Great Satan". Rockets fly on a regular basis in Israel's Lebanese "Security Zone"; Israel also has had to deal with violence in "Judea and Samaria". People (in the form of groups) have taken up arms all throughout this century in response to being bullied. But here's the difference: we usually treat these people like scum or psychos for complaining or trying to fight back. They're "terrorists" (or, in past decades, "communists") in our eyes, and rarely ever seen as "victims" or "freedom fighters" or "founding fathers"; nobody notices them or "feels their pain" either -- it's no wonder they feel they have to resort to the plastique and the hardware to get our attention. And while we're not putting Eric'n'Dylan on a pedestal, we're using the cluelessness of the overreaction against "geeks'n'goths" to put forth our own truckload of cluelessness about "outsider"-ness and "oppression". We're just spinning our wheels until the next Big Outrage. We rail against the clueless and the hypocrite, yet we rarely put ourselves under the lens, and we rarely take the time to understand anything outside of our own front doors and cliques. Middle-class America may well be the nastiest clique of them all.
Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of violence, or of Hizbollah.
I'm being "different" and "non-conformist" for critiquing Katz and his motivations, but, as I write this, my post (click the "Parent" link to see it, if you must) has been moderated down to zero. I was being deliberately belligerent (hence the boldface), hoping to smoke the Gasbag out to explain himself. It'll never happen. I know.
But I find it interesting that by being a non-conformist Devil's Advocate here (and I didn't even have to buy my "difference" at the mall!), I get thwacked by some anonymous moderator. This farce gets more farcical by the minute.
This thread starts with the assertion that geeks are geeks because they like Doom, Bjork and Marylin Manson, and use Linux. A bold assertion, as many of the testimonials of ex-highschoolers in this forum show: back when those people went to highschool, neither Doom, nor Marylin Manson, nor Linux existed yet. But geeky people were still being outcast for being different. So far for that theory.
What he's saying, I think, is that far too many people (of all ages) define themselves by what they buy (or wouldn't be caught dead buying). It's a very shallow form of "outcast". Meanwhile, there's tons of people who don't have the luxury of buying an identity -- a gay or lesbian didn't buy his/her outcast status, a non-white person didn't either. A campesino didn't buy his outcastness; he, too, was merely born into it. I'm repeating myself, but I'll say it again: if goths, geeks, nerds, etc, are being killed or imprisoned or massively ripped off or beaten bloody and senseless simply for "who they are" (which, in this culture, is often a synonym for "what they bought at the mall"), then all these threads would be both relevant and important. But if they're just being hassled by The Man for being "different", there are several remedies, since The Man is probably acting illegally. If Katz has some legal advice, then bring it on, but to turn this into a bandwidth-hogging inanityfest doesn't do a damn thing but pat "us geeks" on the head and remind us about how "important" we are. My ego is big enough already: I don't need to have mine stroked by Jon the Sycophant and his Interactive Amen Chorus.
Please, Katz, come out and say what you're doing, because I'd find a character study of your pathos much more interesting than this drivel shit.
He won't tell you a damn thing, so I will presume to speak for him until he fesses up. Jon Katz has bills to pay. He has found a nice little motherlode to mine; this topic gives him quite a lucrative talking point for his next book tour. There is little, if any, altruism involved here -- he's simply working his little niche, and doing it quite well. It doesn't matter that this series of articles has all the substance of Springer's Final Thought (or whatever it's called); it only matters that his New Pet Topic has the juice and oomph of Springer's show. He's no better or worse than all the talk-show circuses out there; he's no better or worse than all the pap and pablum that passes for mainstream "journalism". But since we have him in our sights here at/., I will gladly give him a reasoned lambasting ("KATZ SUX", while -- regrettably -- increasingly true, is not a valid argument).
Here's the boldface...
OK, Jon, you bastard! Come on out and explain yourself. Tell me where I'm wrong. Refute my many arguments over the past two weeks. Can you? You have my e-mails, and my/. posts are easily searchable. Why don't you write an article addressing the many complaints about your pimping?
Katz has progressed from Lovable Gasbag to Despicable Pimp in a matter of weeks. Or is it months? Years? When geeks, goths, nerds, etc, are being killed for "who they are" or imprisoned for it, then we can talk. If they're being unfairly treated by authority figures, they have legal recourse -- there no need to really say anything more than "call your family lawyer or a local ACLU branch". Anything beyond that is just Springerville, however classier it may seem than Jerry's show. At least Jerry's honest about it: he'll gladly tell you he has bills to pay, and he foists junk upon an audience that'll gladly lap it up. He is the self-proclaimed "Ringmaster". Let's see Jon attempt to begin to equal that sort of honesty.
Slashdot Mirror
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The reason why cash-starved public broadcasting sucks is because they have to resort to begathons (which is itself a sign that you Philistines have won). These stations are almost as commercial as the commercial media to which they were supposed to be an alternative. I don't think you bothered to read my previous post in its entirety.
If enough people can't get together to pay for cruise missiles, then maybe we don't deserve to have them available either. Let's pass the hat and see who'll pitch in.
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Secondly, it isn't the government's job to entertain people, nor is that public broadcasting's job. Plenty of dollars flow through commercial broadcasting, and commercial broadcasting sucks to the Nth degree as a result (chasing after the lowest common denominator of everything); public broadcasting (in the US) was designed to provide a telecommunications infrastructure to public education, and to provide programming (news, documentaries, essays, science, culture, etc) that wasn't -- and isn't -- being provided by the commercial entities.
But irate politicians, almost from the beginning, angered by the news coverage, have, over and over again, cut funding, or made public broadcasters beg for money from its viewers or from corporations, making US public broadcasting mediocre at best. Public radio and TV is now about Lawrence Welk reruns, wimpy classical music playlists, and de-clawed information programming; public broadcasting in its current, messed-up state can be (and is) emulated by cable entities and commercial radio stations, yes, but with better funding, PBS/CPB/NPR could put its commercial-space emulators to shame.
In a country where "culture" means mass-produced corporate crap, and "news" means mass-produced corporate infotrivia, and "education" means mass-produced crappy consumers, it might behoove Americans to divert some War Department chump change into a mucho beefed-up PBS.
Not that it matters to you, of course; you'd rather keep public broadcasting's $1 for yourself. Don't spend it all in one place.
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The Net's a work-in-progress; there's a revolution of sorts coming, but it's not MP3s specifically and it's surely not MP3.com, which is little more than a humongous vanity press (I think that's the point -- well taken -- of the Upside piece). Digital, downloadable music will be revolutionary, but no-one knows how it will be revolutionary; that's why there's all the jockeying and IPO mania and Big Pronouncements. Something's going on, but it may all just be hot air; I suspect the usual suspects -- the RIAA, the big media corporations, and MS -- will end up being the custodians of any successful "revolution" here. Which is not to say that Michael won't make a ton of money from the IPO.
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(Trying it -- the non-RPM version -- out on a K6/166, 2.0.36, 64 MB, and a glass of iced herbal tea...)
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2) Selling out (if we must use that term) always includes not only a change in one's public persona, but altering one's art to fit someone else's ideas.
Selling Out is Selling Out. An unknown can sell out too. Almost all commercial endeavor (I'm keeping this in reference to the arts) is, to some extent, a sell out. If you "alter one's art to fit someone else's ideas", whether producers, execs, or some imagined audience, you're selling out; it may be so slight as to not be worth mentioning, or it may be blatant.
Now, let's take Lucas. I see nowhere in Katz's article where he cites Lucas explicitly stating that he will not do promotions with fastfood places, etc. This is all based on incredibly vague implications as seen by Katz about the "myth" of Star Wars, and the assertion that somehow these things that have nothing to do with the movie itself degrade the quality of the art.
No. It's about a movie. Not selling out means that you make a movie, that you capture some sort of vision on celluloid that just had to get out; I saw Star Wars three times, and it's merely OK in my books, but I would say there's minimal sellout there -- it was a fun movie in a decade full of great, often heavy, films. There was a freshness about it. Where Lucas went wrong -- both in the rest of that trilogy, and even more so with TPM, is that the film is now part of a money-making apparatus that goes beyond the vision-captured-on-celluloid. It's now a minor, though necessary, cog in a marketing machine, no longer fresh or different -- just Your Basic Hollywood Blockbuster. There is, really, little or no vision at that rarefied level of marketability; it's more just a matter of punching the clock, getting the film done, and amassing the varied marketing forces for battle. Lucas' only responsibilities are to make sure it doesn't suck so badly that it harms the marketing, and to sell the hell out of it with personal appearances (and doing a little myth-making himself about "George Lucas").
As someone who has lambasted Katz of late, I'm very pleased to defend him this time -- amidst all those dreaded Smart Quotes (and that Blind Orange Washington proofreading) lies a rant of substance. Two thumbs up :) I won't be going to see TPM, and I've had the Star Wars stories filtered out from Day One of /. filtering. I miss the old (pre-sequel, pre-hype) George Lucas.
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It doesn't matter. A president's job has little to do with technical matters. If you think Gore hasn't a clue (he actually has the ability to borrow a clue; one wishes he would remind himself of that sometimes), then Bush would be an even bigger joke. Like his father (a man I really like, BTW -- except as a politician), George W just wants to be president; the only relevant details he has worked on so far is fund-raising and focus groups. Policies are not so worked-out at this time, i.e., they're for sale to the highest bidder, be it a special interest group or a corporation. He's ahead in the polls right now, but if the press scrutinizes his past business deals (e.g. Harken Energy, and the Texas Rangers baseball team), the voters will see that he made a lot of money from his surname and the fact that his dad was (at various times) the DCI (head of the CIA), vice president, and president. Of course, the voters may ignore all that and vote for the guy anyway; I'm sure he and his handlers will have worked out explanations and alibis for everything, or Double U wouldn't have run for prez. Are top politicians in Sweden this bad? Many top American politicians are; Bush is in the 90th percentile, with plenty of company.
Oh. Did I forget my RANT tags again? Moderators: I have no problem with this being reduced to a -1 score :)
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We bitch and moan about a glitzy, heavily-marketed OS, and its associated products and FUD and such; some of us do the same about the "dumbing-down" implied by putting KDE or GNOME on top of Linux, but we don't do the same thing with popular culture. If we are excited over Lucas and Phish and EBM and Alcoholica and South Park (to name just a few examples over the past year or so), it shows me that many of us "haven't tried Linux", so to speak; it shows me that we grok the user-friendly, the glitzy, the hyped, the popular (either mass-culturally or subculturally so), and the shockful -- rather than take the time and "RTFM" concerning music and the visual/televisual arts. My pop-culture examples are not buggy like Win*, but they do come from a dominant platform (shared by a small set of large corporations, rather than a single one), and they have their various deficiencies (and I say that as someone who has enjoyed -- in small doses -- all of the aforementioned examples). I dunno. I have come to associate showbiz marks with WinDOS users, perhaps wrongfully so.
A missive from the 2 department.
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DU-enhanced weapons are like Lite Nukes minus the Giant Mushroom Clouds and the guilt; the reason the guilt isn't there is because there doesn't seem to be much reportage or discussion about it. See No Evil, etc. It will take widespread news footage of deformed babies and livestock, and mutant produce before that discussion will begin, and then Americans may just choose to ignore it unless it happens on their own soil. And it has, in a way -- Gulf War Syndrome and health problems in post-Gulf offspring may well be related to DU; if there's a ground war in Serbia, the NATO troops may be exposed to the radiation, leading to Who Knows What?®
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The interactivity that he inspires here should suffice for you, no matter that, amidst the genuine wisdom I see on /., there is often a lot of crap to wade through. Katz's time belongs to him, and if he should choose not to spend more time amongst us on these pages, I can understand. But I would say that a Katz-less interactivity isn't really as valuable as one that includes him; he's just one human being, and he probably doesn't have the time and energy to spend on being more hands-on here.
On second thought, maybe a Katz-less interactivity isn't really interactive at all. He just comes down from the mountain bearing his zeroes and ones; then he zips off elsewhere. Sending e-mail to him is a hit-and-miss proposition if you don't keep it trivial.
"Ever got the feelin' you been cheated?" -- Johnny Rotten, to the crowd, to Malcolm, to himself, after a disastrous 70's US Sex Pistols gig and tour.
(And Katz, if you're reading this, the ball remains in your court; I'm still curious to read your non-bleary-eyed take on the "guilty bystander" e-mail message.)
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The reason for this should be fairly obvious: He can control the resulting dialogue better by directing it through his mailbox instead of a public forum.
If he truly believed in interactivity, he would participate in Threads. (Of course, if he truly believed in technology, he would actually make use of it in his daily life. The furthest he has gotten into using a computer was to create a new document in a word processor. Everything else is beyond his capabilities.)
I'm still waiting for Katz to hold up his end of an attempted dialog (via e-mail and /.) about his Littleton articles, old-school versus new-school media, and forms of violence embedded in US culture. In his defense, I'll say that he's probably pretty busy; it's hard to respond to e-mail with more than a terse sentence or two when you're being deluged with the stuff. It's even harder to really read all the e-mail (as I've learned from one of his responses, in which he got pissed at a line in the first couple of sentences without bothering to actually read the actual food-for-thought meat of the message).
The bottom line: Katz doesn't scale, and he continues to bring the mediocrity of the Old School to his New School ventures. The former can (and must) be forgiven, but the latter is unfortunate from someone who seeks to be the net.journalist. NetAid : a 24-hour Peace Netcast in honor of (and in aid of) Radio B92 on its 10th birthday, 15 May 1999.
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The reason for this should be fairly obvious: He can control the resulting dialogue better by directing it through his mailbox instead of a public forum.
If he truly believed in interactivity, he would participate in Threads. (Of course, if he truly believed in technology, he would actually make use of it in his daily life. The furthest he has gotten into using a computer was to create a new document in a word processor. Everything else is beyond his capabilities.)
I'm still waiting for Katz to hold up his end of an attempted dialog (via e-mail and /.) about his Littleton articles, old-school versus new-school media, and forms of violence embedded in US culture. In his defense, I'll say that he's probably pretty busy; it's hard to respond to e-mail with more than a terse sentence or two when you're being deluged with the stuff. It's even harder to really read all the e-mail (as I've learned from one of his responses, in which he got pissed at a line in the couple of sentences without bothering to actually read the actual food-for-thought meat of the message).
The bottom line: Katz doesn't scale, and he continues to bring the mediocrity of the Old School to his New School ventures. The former can (and must) be forgiven, but the latter is unfortunate from someone who seeks to be the net.journalist. NetAid : a 24-hour Peace Netcast in honor of (and in aid of) Radio B92 on its 10th birthday, 15 May 1999.
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But why Yugoslavia? As someone pointed out, it's because "people like us" (i.e. caucasian, albeit swarthy ones) are being massacred. It's also because it's in the US's backyard (the US is a European power, ever since WWI).
But why Yugoslavia? Massacres equally as heinous are going on elsewhere; if bombs must fall on Serbia, why not send a few to the Sudan, where the Muslim government in the north wants to destroy and/or convert and/or enslave the Christians in the south. Right-wing pols (and voters) in the US like to say that their country is a "Christian nation", yet they don't raise a fuss about the Sudan.
What about East Timor? Let drop some bombs on the Indonesians. East Timor should have become independent about 25 years ago, as Portugal was releasing its colonies. But they were invaded by Indonesia (with some help, or at least acquiesence from Dr Kissinger and Friends), and have been slowly genocided ever since.
What about Latin America? The CIA overthrew a government in Chile, and the US looked the other way as murders and human-rights abuses took place over a long period of time. Ditto in places like Argentina, except there was no need for some spectacular US-sponsored coup. In Central America, Merkins swallowed whole a bunch of lies about Contra thugs being "freedom fighters", and to this day the US government and media refuse to acknowledge that there were free elections (complete with international observers) in Sandinista Nicaragua long before the election that brought Dona Violeta to power. And in other Central American countries, those that didn't have the audacity to overthrow their US-backed dictators and US-trained generals, massacres occurred, based on the "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" ethos of Vietnam.
What about Tibet? Though the Dalai Lama probably wouldn't approve, maybe the US should have been bombing China all these years, rather than sit idly by and let China run roughshod over that land.
Why Yugoslavia? Why now? Why was there a clause in the Rambouillet accords that would have forced Milosevic to cede his country's sovereignty over to outsiders? Why was that accord drawn up so maliciously that Milosevic would have no option other than to walk away from it and face NATO bombs? And wasn't Milosevic "our guy", once upon a time, just like Saddam and Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden before? They only became "monsters" when they no longer suited the purposes of the West.
Why? The US, and the West, perpetrates a lot of violence -- military, political, and economic -- around the world every day, and no fuss is raised about it. Now, all of a sudden, a despot in the Balkans is coerced into accepting a bunch of smart bombs on his soil. It makes for lots of exciting TV programming, but, in a way, it's nothing new. Except for all the unanswered questions. NetAid : a 24-hour Peace Netcast in honor of (and in aid of) Radio B92 on its 10th birthday, 15 May 1999.
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There was a press release earlier this year about EPAC (the current version of PAC) being made G2-compatible, i.e. you could play a PAC file on a RealPlayer just as you can an MP3, and apparently also stream it. I don't know if it's a reality now, since I'd be hard-pressed to find, download, or stream a PAC file. I think there's also some Liquid Audio sort of PAC clients out there, but I can't remember any of the relevant URLs.
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Apathy is not the problem (IMHO); figuring out what to do to help, is an issue to discuss. Which is a question Katz does not seem to have addressed. Is this one of the sources of your hostility toward him?
The hostility comes from exasperation toward the media in general in this whole episode. If I give Katz a hard time, it's because I take the time to read him (and I actually like him, believe it or not), and maybe because I hold him to a higher standard than I hold the people in his old milieux.
To borrow a line from Thomas Merton, one that I think Katz might be familiar with, for all the good that may have come out of all this, Katz fails to hold up the mirror and give any of us the sense of being the "guilty bystander in a turbulent, desperate, cynical and violent world". We all have blood on our hands from Littleton, but no one with the audience to hear such a message will even come close to saying anything like that. The persecuting and harassment of geeks comes from all of us, geeks included. Eric Harris wrote "I am the law, if you don't like it you die. If I don't like you or I don't like what you want me to do, you die"; I maintain that he had lots of hatred and violence in him long before he was ever embroiled in the intramural warfare of the school grounds (IMHO). The society that can bully Yugoslavia by impossible demands at Rambouillet and via smart bombs in the air and by keeping the press on a short leash at home is the society that has lots of violences, large and small, physical, social, and psychological, coursing through its veins. If we can't start dealing with that, then we're all just a bunch of Gasbags here.
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Ask Katz about his generation, and those who cut their hair, changed their clothes, and were "Clean for Gene" in 1968. What about Bill Clinton, who shaved his beard and donned suits in order to "work within the system". There's lots of grownups who look aghast when they see old high-school pictures, just as today's green-haired or black-mascara'd or omnipierced kids will look aghast when they look back at their current selves. Plenty of people buy their way into conformity; there's been former Flower Children who have become corporate disinfo people for scum like Nike. Plenty of people "sell out", even to the point of wearing it as a badge of honor.
Yes, there's "bigger fish to fry" out there, and we should "think globally, act locally". More importantly, you'd think that all this commisserating would lead to a greater awareness of those around the world who are bullied in one way or another -- that it would lead to a sense of the bigger picture, and maybe lead to some energy directed towards it, instead of a feel-good exercise in stress-testing /.'s server. But I get from all these posts no notion of that, no notion that anyone's interested in changing their backyards, much less the world, and no realization that we middle-class geeks, too, are bullies when we buy into the demonization of our domestic poor, or when we let our tax dollars get spent on clamping overseas dissent, or when those tax dollars are used to create "collateral damage", or when we cheer union-busting activity domestically and overseas, or even when we buy a pair of Air Jordans or a Disney action figure. If only one person had said "I vow never to be a bully in any way, shape, or form", I'd feel a little better about Katz's charade. But no one did. And in that apathy lies the seed of another generation of nerds and geeks and outsiders being schoolyard victims, because that apathy will probably be passed down to our offspring. So be it; the enemy continues to be us. Nothing to see here...
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Read this, and this, and this; hopefully I didn't botch the links. In light of a big ol' world out there, full of violences in which we ourselves are often the bullies. Katz's message is self-aggrandizing bullshit (however noble his original intentions, it has long passed the level of trite and obscene), and we do little to advance much of anything by being self-congratulatory or all-of-a-sudden "shocked" into "aware"-ness about the plight of a relatively privileged few.
If we remain ignorant of the general violence and suffering out there, while obsessing over this particular Hellmouth, what really have we gained? If we lament the sins without lamenting the sins of omission that this media circus is all about, what really have we gained?--
But they grow out of it, and they don't get killed or imprisoned for it. I'm not endorsing the abuse of outcast kids; I'm just saying there's literally millions of people around the world who don't get to grow out of their outcast status, and who don't have the option of buying a makeover to become like the "popular kids". People who are cradle-to-grave outcasts don't get much attention from us; people who are really taking shit for being different don't get our attention, unless NATO, CNN, and the State Department band together and foist it upon us.
If you feel that your ego is big enough already, you're free to skip the "hellmouth" stories, and move on to the other interesting items that Slashdot carries
In a nutshell: Real is pissing me off for not coming up with their long-promised G2 Linux client, as is Microsoft with their Media Player; I can live with MP3, though sound quality is often a GIGO proposition (world-class encoders are a must, ideally Free ones); I haven't tried KDE (I'm a minimalist mwm person), but I think the C++ orientation (and OpenParts) is great, and I detest the GNOME/KDE flamewars; I have great hopes for the K7, and will probably get a dual-K7 mobo once they go to the .18-micron process; I tend not to upgrade my distros until the need for a bunch of library upgrades becomes crucial.
OK? I've skimmed the topics. I would be repeating myself, or lamely seconding the posts of others, if I were to post a bunch of comments on those topics. Meanwhile, this "Hellmouth" scam (for in Katz's hands, it has become little more than that) seems much more Matter-ful, especially since I believe the general response to it to be as awful as the mainstream cluelessness about "geeks, goths, nerds, and outsiders".
Today is World Press Freedom Day, a freedom that we in the West take for granted, even as that freedom often seems bogus amidst the deluge of pablum like that purveyed by the likes of Katz and his peers; tomorrow we commemorate those people slain in WWII, not just soldiers, but Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Christians, dissenters -- people who really were different, not for wearing mascara, or playing Quake, or consuming the latest Maverick/Interscope/MCA/Dreamworks product.
People who actually stood for something have actually had Big Substantive Evil visited upon them, just for being different, or for protesting against injustice. We have, at least in the case of WWII, taken up arms to liberate some of those people, to "make the world safe for democracy", and all that. Nowadays, we just ignore them, or call them all sorts of names, or make them strawmen for stump speeches and campaign-fundraising mass-mailings, or pass laws against them, or make fun of them -- there was an earlier post about what it's like to be an Arab-American; I think he just gave us the tip of a nasty iceberg. And you can't be bothered to even register and log in, much less offer a decent argument.
Do you want to do something to protest the Cuban Embargo? Or protest against the use of depleted-uranium Lite Nukes in Iraq and Serbia? Or fight for the rights of Third World garment workers to unionize and collectively-bargain for the chance to make more than 10-45/hr? Do you want to organize boycotts against those corporations that coerce people into permanent sweatshop slavery? (No, because you probably benefit from that cheap labor, though I suspect that it's not that simple.) Do you want to write letters to editors challenging a wide variety of FUD? Do you want to write your representatives, urging them to free Leonard Peltier, or grant amnesty to those people imprisoned because of the War on Some Drugs? There's plenty of outcasts out there that we've criminally ignored, and I suspect we'll continue to ignore them long after the hangovers of Katzdot's Hellmouth Toga Party.
Disclaimer: Typed quickly; all spelling mistakes and errors in logic left intact.
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You'd think that with all this "consciousness-raising" hot air we've all spewed, that high-school geeks would take the time to assert their rights as US citizens, rather than just whine or try to form a special-interest group.
It is a cliche' of human history to fear what you don't understand, and it is a very small step from fear to hatred.
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Small wonder an unrestrained jock clique drove these kids to violence. It only amazes me that it doesn't happen more often. How sad that it had to come to this before anyone noticed.
It happens. Terrorist acts have occurred (or been foiled) in the US, and against Americans overseas, in response to its status as the "Great Satan". Rockets fly on a regular basis in Israel's Lebanese "Security Zone"; Israel also has had to deal with violence in "Judea and Samaria". People (in the form of groups) have taken up arms all throughout this century in response to being bullied. But here's the difference: we usually treat these people like scum or psychos for complaining or trying to fight back. They're "terrorists" (or, in past decades, "communists") in our eyes, and rarely ever seen as "victims" or "freedom fighters" or "founding fathers"; nobody notices them or "feels their pain" either -- it's no wonder they feel they have to resort to the plastique and the hardware to get our attention. And while we're not putting Eric'n'Dylan on a pedestal, we're using the cluelessness of the overreaction against "geeks'n'goths" to put forth our own truckload of cluelessness about "outsider"-ness and "oppression". We're just spinning our wheels until the next Big Outrage. We rail against the clueless and the hypocrite, yet we rarely put ourselves under the lens, and we rarely take the time to understand anything outside of our own front doors and cliques. Middle-class America may well be the nastiest clique of them all.
Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of violence, or of Hizbollah.
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But I find it interesting that by being a non-conformist Devil's Advocate here (and I didn't even have to buy my "difference" at the mall!), I get thwacked by some anonymous moderator. This farce gets more farcical by the minute.
I still await Katz's explanation.
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What he's saying, I think, is that far too many people (of all ages) define themselves by what they buy (or wouldn't be caught dead buying). It's a very shallow form of "outcast". Meanwhile, there's tons of people who don't have the luxury of buying an identity -- a gay or lesbian didn't buy his/her outcast status, a non-white person didn't either. A campesino didn't buy his outcastness; he, too, was merely born into it. I'm repeating myself, but I'll say it again: if goths, geeks, nerds, etc, are being killed or imprisoned or massively ripped off or beaten bloody and senseless simply for "who they are" (which, in this culture, is often a synonym for "what they bought at the mall"), then all these threads would be both relevant and important. But if they're just being hassled by The Man for being "different", there are several remedies, since The Man is probably acting illegally. If Katz has some legal advice, then bring it on, but to turn this into a bandwidth-hogging inanityfest doesn't do a damn thing but pat "us geeks" on the head and remind us about how "important" we are. My ego is big enough already: I don't need to have mine stroked by Jon the Sycophant and his Interactive Amen Chorus.
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He won't tell you a damn thing, so I will presume to speak for him until he fesses up. Jon Katz has bills to pay. He has found a nice little motherlode to mine; this topic gives him quite a lucrative talking point for his next book tour. There is little, if any, altruism involved here -- he's simply working his little niche, and doing it quite well. It doesn't matter that this series of articles has all the substance of Springer's Final Thought (or whatever it's called); it only matters that his New Pet Topic has the juice and oomph of Springer's show. He's no better or worse than all the talk-show circuses out there; he's no better or worse than all the pap and pablum that passes for mainstream "journalism". But since we have him in our sights here at /., I will gladly give him a reasoned lambasting ("KATZ SUX", while -- regrettably -- increasingly true, is not a valid argument).
Here's the boldface...
OK, Jon, you bastard! Come on out and explain yourself. Tell me where I'm wrong. Refute my many arguments over the past two weeks. Can you? You have my e-mails, and my /. posts are easily searchable. Why don't you write an article addressing the many complaints about your pimping?
Katz has progressed from Lovable Gasbag to Despicable Pimp in a matter of weeks. Or is it months? Years? When geeks, goths, nerds, etc, are being killed for "who they are" or imprisoned for it, then we can talk. If they're being unfairly treated by authority figures, they have legal recourse -- there no need to really say anything more than "call your family lawyer or a local ACLU branch". Anything beyond that is just Springerville, however classier it may seem than Jerry's show. At least Jerry's honest about it: he'll gladly tell you he has bills to pay, and he foists junk upon an audience that'll gladly lap it up. He is the self-proclaimed "Ringmaster". Let's see Jon attempt to begin to equal that sort of honesty.
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