Bloggasm

Awhile back, I wrote a post about a library book-banning that I found particularly silly. The book put Communism in a favorable light, and parents complained.

Apparently, the war is still raging, and is amounting to a very expensive war at that:

For months, a battle has been waged over a controversial children’s book about Cuba.

Critics say the book shows Cuba in a favorable light, offensive to many Cuban immigrants.

The Miami-Dade School Board ordered “Vamos a Cuba” and the rest of the books in the series pulled from school library shelves, but a judge has put that decision on hold.

School board attorney Julie Ann Rico warned members they’d be on shaky legal ground if they banned the book, but they did it anyway. Now, the American Civil Liberties union is suing the school board, saying their decision was purely political and violates a Supreme Court decision that says: “Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.”

As is usual, a group of conservatives, in their push to censor or attack something they don’t like, they’re actually giving the book more publicity (The Da Vinci Code anyone?). I’ll let you know if I find out how well the book is selling.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that feminists seem to be highly divided on the issue of porn, and whether they’re for it or against it. One side will say that it’s demeaning towards women. Others say that women shouldn’t be ashamed to express their own sexuality.

Perhaps as a middle point for the two, we have some film awards for feminist pornography.

This particular writer is all in a huff:

Oh Lordy Lordy! The last bastion of male chauvinist pigs is about to fall. A group of feminazis, no doubt high on testosterone, in Toronto has launched a clutch of annual ‘Best Film Awards’ for “feminist pornography”.

Till now we have been told that porn in any form is an assault on the dignity of women, a denial of their right not to be known only as receptacles of male bodily fluids and unquestioning providers of pleasure, often verging on the perverse, to men. Feminist writers and activists have been tirelessly pointing out for decades that the grossness of pornography - we are not talking of dainty pillow books or girlie magazines - only highlights the loathsome crudity of men’s secret desires.

Andrea Dworkin, icon of provocative feminism and high priestess of the movement against porn who died a disgruntled, frustrated and crotchety middle aged woman last year, made intercourse, in her eponymous bestseller, of any kind look filthy, distasteful and dishonourable. Porn, she would often thunder to deafening applause, is the theory; rape is the practice.

In order to try to define what constitutes porn as “feminist porn,” we have this:

And what is the Pepsi difference with feminist porn? For Gallant, there are three criteria that determine whether porn is feminist. The first is that the film shows women getting their fair share of pleasure. “So, real female orgasms, and women are actually having a good time. That’s first and foremost.” Second is that the work be directed or produced by a woman. And third is that it expand the range of female sexual expression currently seen. These criteria still include male filmmakers, as long as they can come in with two out of three. “And we have to think it’s hot,” she laughs.

Funny, I would have thought that one of the requirements would be that the women in the porn had unshaved armpits and legs. ZING!

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by Simon Owens

I had a romantic notion before going to see the ten o’clock showing of Superman Returns. We would go to the video store, rent the original Superman movie, and watch it, reveling in old Superman nostalgia from my childhood. Upon hearing this idea, my friend said, “Dude, the first Superman movie was terrible,” and then began to rattle off a number of points, most importantly the fact that in the original Superman, Lex Luthor had been cast as a silly, comedic character, unworthy as Superman’s nemesis.

He’d confirmed a number of my own suspicions that had begun to arise when I flipped to HBO one day and watched the second Superman movie, one that I had watched over and over again as a child while humming along to the now-famous orchestral theme song. The movie, I could see now, was complete and utter dogshit, but I had held out to the possibility that it had suffered from bad-sequel-syndrome, and that maybe the original was just as good as I remembered it to be.

Obviously, it wasn’t, so we skipped out on that idea and went to the theater without any Superman prep time, ready to discard the previous Superman movies from our minds and view this new, 21st-century, post 9/11 (for some reason, movie critics like to use the words “post 9/11″ when talking about epic movies, so I’ll follow in line) interpretation of it.

Only, from the very beginning the audience immediately begins to see references from the original movie. Indeed, the opening credits are almost exact replicates of the 80s-style blue retro laser credits used before. And throughout the movie, the plot is littered with smirking winks to not only the original movies, but the old television show and comic books as well (It’s a bird, it’s a plane, etc…), in what adds up to a movie that is perhaps too much a homage to the Superman franchise as a whole rather than the Man of Steel himself.

The movie picks up somewhat from the series, when Superman (Brandon Routh) returns to Earth after being gone for five years in search of left-over remnants of Krypton (as a result of scientists claiming they’d found the planet). He tries to pick up his life where he left off, but predictably, he comes to find that the world has moved on without Superman. Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has a kid and is now engaged with the editor’s nephew. She’s also now a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for an editorial titled “Why The World Doesn’t Need Superman.” The Daily Planet seems to have gotten along fine without his investigative reporting, and Clark Kent is met with lukewarm sentiment from everyone at the paper except Jimmy Olsen (Sam Huntington) who couldn’t be happier to see him.

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) has managed to get out of prison because of a silly, implausible legal loophole that had to do with Superman not being there as a witness for his appeal (is it just me, or does the central theme to this story add up to: “Superman shouldn’t leave the planet for long periods of time”?), and is back to his scheming ways. He treks up to the Fortress of Sollitude to trick Jor-El’s (Marlon Brando) pre-recorded ghost into telling him all the secrets of Krypton, allowing him to have technology much more advanced than that of the rest of the human race. His grand scheme is to drown out most of the continents with crystal continents of his own (using Kryptonian technology that apparently just involves dipping crystal in water), and then sell the land for vast sums of money. Because Superman is such a God-like character and almost impossible to stop, of course he has to find some Kryptonite along the way so he can have his typical scene where he is able to best Superman.

Like the Batman Begins movie, this one suffers from an overly-convoluted scheme that we’re not really able to wrap our minds around, despite the fact that we’ve turned our brains off at the very beginning (as anyone should during a comic book movie). After we find out that Lex Luthor has gathered technology thousands of years ahead of our time and we begin to consider all the cool things he could do with it, he decides to…grow masses of ugly, barren land so he can sell beach-front property?

Kevin Spacey, though much better as Lex Luthor than Gene Hackman’s comedic portrayal, still isn’t quite able to capture the pure genius that we’ve come to expect of the character. He adds some interesting crazy psychosis to the mix, and comes off as slightly darker, but director Bryan Singer can’t quite give up the old Lex Luthor – the one who thinks it prudent to lighten the atmosphere with a corny joke every few minutes. Kate Bosworth makes for a terrible Lois Lane because we’re never able to really like her throughout the entire thing – in fact she plays a self-absorbed bitch. Though there seems to be a few sparks between her and Superman, she treats Clark Kent like an irrelevant piece of shit (or a child, even), and ignores everything said by anyone that doesn’t add up to her getting her way. Jimmy Olsen is his usual gee-golly self, and Perry White’s (Frank Langella) character is too much a rip-off of Spiderman’s arrogant J. Jonah Jameson. And like most super hero movies of late, the movie rushes through scenes that should be longer, and gives us prolonged stare-into-each-others-eyes scenes when we wish it would speed up.

This is not to say that there aren’t successes in this movie. Most of the action scenes are terrific – when Superman zooms through the clouds in his red and blue, there is something uniquely American about the entire thing, and there are certainly things that Bryan Singer borrowed from the original movies which were welcome, especially the old orchestral theme song. As the movie nears its end, we grow slightly more convinced at the connection between Lois Lane and Superman, especially in the scene where he flies her off the rooftop for a night-time air-stroll through the city. Lex Luthor’s hatred for Superman is more fully-realized, and though the dialog is corny at times, it’s several steps above the drudge that was Xmen 3.

Superman isn’t necessarily a bad movie, it’s just a mediocre one. When a fan-base is forced to wait years in between one sequel and the next, expectations begin to rise. Add to the fact that this particular sequel has had a very long and bumpy ride (read that, it’ll make you laugh and cry and cringe), then one can understand the disappointment that arises when movies like Batman Begins and Superman Returns have the plots of half-hour television shows, rather than epic movies. If you want us to love a super hero movie, give the villain some real ammo, something more than just the desire to sell shitty beach-front property, and perhaps you won’t hear us say “We waited almost twenty years for that?” when the credits begin to roll.

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I thought that this was pretty funny, though not surprising. There’s a post over at the unofficial Google Weblog that says that up to 80% of search queries that come from the Microsoft sever come in via Google:

Techwebs, Andrew posted Google analytics stats about visitors to his website. He said that there were over 80% of people from Microsofts domain reached his site through a Google Search, while only 20% used a Microsoft search engine.

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Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker essayist and author of the book The Tipping Point, has a wonderful essay on his website about possible conflicts of interests for journalists and how he confronts and works with these conflicts of interest. An excerpt from his opening paragraphs:

As a writer I wear two hats. I am a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, where I have been under contract more or less continuously since 1996. I also do public speaking, based on my second career as the author of two books—The Tipping Point and Blink. Over the past four or five years, I have given talks to corporations, trade associations, conventions of one sort or another, colleges, think tanks, charitable groups, public lecture series and, on one occasion (arranged by my mother) my old high school. For some of those engagements, I have been paid. For those given to academic and charitable organizations, I generally have not.

Most of the time, these two hats complement each other. It was because of my work as a New Yorker writer that I was able to get a contract to write my books. It is because of my books that I have gotten speaking engagements, and it is, in part, because of my books and my speaking that some people have discovered me in the New Yorker. But I recognize that there is also the possibility that these two roles can come into conflict, as is always the case when someone has to serve two different constituencies. This note is an attempt to talk about that possibility, and to think through its implications. I will warn you that what follows is quite long. It is long because the question of potential conflicts of interest is a fraught and difficult subject for journalists, and I think it is worth taking seriously.

In the essay, Gladwell makes several good points:

1. Journalists usually tend to be liberal, and it’s silly to pretend that they aren’t or that they have no political leanings, as the editor for the Washington Post does (he doesn’t even vote, and claims that he doesn’t even think about who he’d vote for if he did).

2. Having a political opinion is not the same as having a political bias. Opinions can change while a bias tends to stay the same. So this means that a journalist can be liberal without having a liberal bias, though if there is going to be a bias, it tends to be liberal.

3. There is no vast recruiting system in journalism to get liberals. It’s just something they’re naturally drawn to, just as people in the arts tend to be liberal.

4. Most pundits seem to claim that a lot of bias is caused by money being exchanged between journalist and another party, and he points out that there are more powerful relationships that don’t involve money which can cause bias.

5. His methods for trying to decrease his own bias to a very minimal amount.

It’s a wonderful essay, one of those pieces that keep you glued to every word until the very end and leaves you with that warm feeling in your stomach when you finish reading it.

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Unqualified Offerings is the weblog of freelance writer and accounting analyst Jim Henley, who lives in Silver Spring, MD with his family in an unprepossessing subdivision. Preoccupations include what passes for national security, politics, comic books and science fiction, health and fitness, and poetry. UO went live on October 21, 2001.

Simon Owens: As the election season gears up, do you think that the major political blogs will have more political clout than usual?

Jim Henley: Well, there’s no “usual” yet. It’s only the last election cycle or two where blogs have had a chance to play a significant role, either on the editorial or advertising side.

Simon Owens: Most people can’t help but notice that political groups are starting to advertise on political blogs in mass numbers. During an election year, are political blogs more profitable than usual?

Jim Henley: At the very least, they’re starting to talk about reading them - to admit to reading them. Who knows how long they’ve been reading them without letting on.

Simon Owens: Has blogging affected your political outlook on life at all since you’ve started? Has it caused you to follow current events more closely than you did before?

Jim Henley: I think blogging has. In the 1990s I maintained a fairly conventional right-libertarian stereotype of the “America-hating liberal.” Blogs have shown me that liberals have all sorts of ideas and assumptions I don’t agree with, but not the animus toward the country I used to imagine. Meanwhile, I’ve seen many conservatives and fellow libertarians exemplify what I used to consider characteristically “liberal” vices, like right-wing equivalents of “political correctness.”

Simon Owens: How often do readers in your comments section give you a new insight on a story you’ve highlighted?

Jim Henley: At least daily.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Jim Henley: Radley Balko’s civil-liberties-themed The Agitator is indispensible. I call him America’s Most Important Blogger and I mean it. Crooked Timber is a great left-wing group blog by a bunch of academic types. Matthew Yglesias is my favorite liberal blogger and James Joyner’s Outside the Beltway is the best conservative newsblog/portal. Reason’s Hit and Run has the most enjoyable comment threads. I’m going to hurt people’s feelings stopping at five but you said.

Don’s 25-year career as an entrepreneur, executive, investment manager and commentator has been built around his passion for the application of technology and innovation to the challenge of investing.

Prior to founding Trend Macrolytics with David Gitlitz, Don was Vice Chairman and co-Chief Investment Officer of Barclays Global Investors, where he worked with the world’s largest institutional investors to create innovative indexing and quantitative investment management strategies.

After Barclays, Don was CEO and co-founder of MetaMarkets.com, and manager of the pathbreaking OpenFund — the world’s first mutual fund to disclose all its holdings and trading activity in real-time on the Internet.

Don was the inventor of the POSIT ECN, and founder of Investment Technology Group at Jefferies & Company. He has been a hedge fund manager and an options market maker on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the Pacific Stock Exchange, and the New York Stock Exchange.

Don runs a web-log based on his forthcoming book, The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid — in which he examines the obstacles to wealth creation by ordinary people. He is the author of Index Options and Futures: The Complete Guide, and editor of Portfolio Insurance: The Guide to Dynamic Hedging, both published by Wiley & Company.

Don’s columns are published weekly on SmartMoney.com and he contributes frequently to National Review Online, where he writes the Krugman Truth Squad column. He appears regularly on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company” and on Bloomberg TV, CNN and Fox News. He was formerly a columnist for TheStreet.com and Business 2.0. His commentaries have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Pensions & Investments, the American Spectator, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Detroit News.

Simon Owens: Do you think that political blogs are able to create an effective checks and balance on the Mainstream Media? Do they tend to ignore bloggers when they point out mistakes in their reporting?

Don Luskin: The MSM is very defensive of its credibility, and is loathe to point out serious errors no matter who points them out. It’s all the worse when upstart media competitors like bloggers point out the errors.

Simon Owens: Many mainstream journalists grow frustrated with bloggers because there doesn’t seem to be much of a filtration system to their reporting. Do you think there’s an validity to this frustration?

Don Luskin: Yes and no. It’s true that blogs are unfiltered. But editorial filters are themselves unfiltered. You are always reading words that are the product of somebody’s judgment. Who filters the filter? At least with blogs there are no illusions. You aren’t told there is some wise editor who somehow knows that only truth will get published.

Simon Owens: Conservative political bloggers have grown furious with the New York Times for its recent set of leaks, yet at the same time one of the most important things about democratic governments is that they must remain as transparent as humanly possible. When is it ok to publish a leak and when should newspapers hold back?

Don Luskin: It surprises me that there aren’t more objections to the leaks themselves, but rather to the fact that the leaked content gets published. If government can’t keep its own secrets, whose fault is that really? From the standpoint of a media outlet, if some government official is telling you a story, how can you think the government doesn’t want you to publish it? You are between a rock and a hard place if one government official tells you the information and another begs you not to publish it, as appears to be the case with the SWIFT surveillance.

Simon Owens: You often refer to the New York Times as the “elite.” What do you think causes this elitist atmosphere in journalism?

Don Luskin: It is literally a cultural elite, with its members drawn from filtration processes including Ivy League schools, best families, and so on. It is also an elite in the sense that the Times is indisputably a tastemaker and trendsetter – small number of people with enormous influence. But when you come right down to it, most media have the property of being elitist simply because they are one-way “I talk you listen” propositions, with enormous capital costs creating barriers to entry. Of course blogs change all that. Though even within the blog world, there will always be an elite – the most popular blogs with the widest audiences. They tend to act like the MSM because they, too, are one-way “I talk you listen” propositions, and that always goes to one’s head.

Simon Owens: As someone who has appeared on live television, are there many differences between the televised political world and the political blogosphere?

Don Luskin: There are all the differences in the world. Blogging is personal and natural, and can be a reflection of one’s own personality and style. Television is a highly controlled and structured environment in which guests must fit into very narrow time slots, and cannot really express themselves because they are always responding to surprise questions asked by someone else. There are elements in common, though. Television succumbs to the temptation to be sensationalistic, in a quest for a wide audience. Blogs often do the same thing.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Don Luskin: I always get a laugh from Best of the Web Today by Jim Taranto. For people interested in economics/politics, I’d suggest Greg Mankiw’s blog, EconoPundit, Reality is Unreal, and George Reisman’s blog.

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