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Tuesday, December 3, 2002
Have you accepted TiVo as your personal savior? 
| | We don't have a TiVo. We do have about 300 channels coming in from an antenna and a dish. Last night I tried to watch some of it. After catching the end of the Raiders-Jets game (while working on the laptop), I surfed up and down the endless table of choices, finding nothing that attracted my interest more than the stuff on my laptop, or on the bookshelves in my office. Even the good movies (on the Sundance and Flix channels, for instance) tried my patience. |
| | I am actually, seriously, thinking of bagging the TV completely — not because it will change my life, but because my life has changed already. |
Edgization?
| | What's the opposite of centralization? What do you call the process by which intelligence moves to the outside while the inside stays as stable and dumb as possible — you know, kind of the way the Earth organized itself: massive dumb core in the middle, providing gravity for the living beings that do their stuff on the outside? |
| | Right now we're calling it "decentralization," which is a topic Kevin Werbach is having us explore at Supernova 2002 next week. I'm thinking we need a neologism here. |
| | Anyway, Supernova will be thick with wi-fi and blogged out the ying-yang, to be sure. Here's the show blog, already cranking (with links to attending bloggers). |
Downtown Blogville
Homegland security
| | ...under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it. |
Girlism, cont'd
| | Feminism has infused my adult life. It encompasses an attempt to live authentically -- forge a self, dammit -- to work at what interests me; easy, warm relationships with the people I care for; a dogged optimism through the tough times; a comfy cave, and an underlying sense that there's a lot more to this hologram we move in than meets the eye. |
| | "Girlism" sounds like a club style, but it won't help you give birth, pull a teen out of a shooting gallery, or face death. |
| | Good stuff. Read the whole thing. |
| | Doc finds Halley's flirtatious approach appealing and charming; he and his wife both agree that feminism is boring. I'm glad that Doc and his wife have had so little experience with sexism that they can't remember why feminism was ever relevant in the first place. |
| | My grandmother wasn't allowed to finish high school. My aunts had to fight to go to college. Early in my career, I worked in a place that had big gender disparities in pay (and had a male mentor who researched the subject and got me a big raise). I've seen women who flirt with the boss, sleep with the boss, and get their cute butt canned when things go sour. |
| | I'm really not persuaded that the best response to injustice is to giggle and flirt. |
| | Via doc, Sheila Lennon responds to Halley with a testament on the last wave of the women's movement, about equal pay for equal work, being respected as a woman instead of dismissed as a girl, legal birth control, and first-hand reports on the sexual revolution. |
| | Doc finds feminine style attractive in women; and that's peachy. |
| | But the point isn't to make all women chop their long flowing tresses and wear blue jeans. The point is that people are different from each other. Some of these differences line up by gender averages, and some of them don't... |
| | A whole bunch OR-logical assumptions in here. Attraction to one set of characteristics does not exclude attraction to another. Being bored by feminist rhetoric doesn't mean discrediting or even disliking feminism and its achievements (a bit of credit I believe Sheila gave me, even while reminding me of those things). Avoiding the whole topic of feminism (which my wife and I both tend to do) doesn't mean we've had little experience with sexism, or that we don't have our own ways of dealing with it. And disliking the word "sexism" doesn't require cluelessness about the conditions the word labels. |
| | Basically, Halley is in favor of using one's feminine wiles to get ahead in the workplace, Adina says. Well, yeah. And that's easy to criticize. But I also think Halley was trying to dig down into something nameless and deep — something feminist rhetoric and labels like sexism cannot reach, at least not by themselves. That's why she suggested "girlism." I think that was a mistake, because it was still an "ism." |
| | So I think we face a choice here. We can help Halley dig, or we can keep labeling the effort. |
Comdexity
Micropoint
| | Kind of makes you wonder about reality and perception. Some people (supposedly 65%) think Geore Bush is doing a great job. And it sure as hell seems like most people don't think Microsoft is a monopolist, cheating, bullying, block-headed, bloated, dinosaur of an industry - that waits until somebody else does the innovating and then steals it. |
Googo surfing
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