What is the internet anyway? Good or evil? Behind that question is the idea that a medium is either wholeheartedly good and pro-utopian, or it’s destroying everything around us. I came across the latest example of this all or none approach at Kathryn Cramer’s blog where she writes that,

A few years ago, I viewed the Internet as a vehicle for spreading compassion, spreading empathy, allowing the possibility that someone like me from her dining room could spontaneously arrive at ways to help individual people on the other side of the world

Lately, I have come to view the Internet as a vehicle for rapid re-socialization, much of it for the worse. I see a sudden Internet-induced lack of empathy, compassion, and even basic sympathy, in what I regard as a population of normal (by which I mean not sociopathic) people. I see mean-girl behavior in adult women that would get them sent to the Vice Principal’s office under no-bullying policies if they were sixth grade girls at my son’s school; I see violent ideation expressed publicly; I see demonization (sometimes literally); and I see this passing by without opposition from the communities within which these are expressed.

I find this very worrisome. None of the theories we have about how people behave in large numbers can adequately account for behavior on the Internet because the Internet is too new. A few years ago, I thought of the Internet as a potential solution to many things, and as a tool for spreading compassion across international and cultural boundaries. Now I begin to see it as the opposite: a tool used by others for the mass elimination of empathy, and as a problem rather than a solution.

Now this kind of “I thought the internet was good, but now I realize it’s a bad and scary place that makes people behave badly“, isn’t an uncommon approach. We’ve all seen things on the internet that make us think that maybe Vincent Cerf should have focused on designing birdhouses instead. Birdhouses don’t hurt anyone, except birds with vision problems.

But the internet is still a tool. It is a human tool, and a powerful one. Powerful tools allow people to do greater good and greater evil, which is as close as I’ll go to that inescapable Spider-Man quote. The internet is not one thing and not another, it is a tool and how people use it, is only a matter of scaling up their usual behavior by the ratio of the power they now have.

Cramer uses the term re-socialization to describe what is going on, on the internet, even comparing it to what went on in Nazi Germany. I would question the use of the term in both examples, but in the case of the internet, people are not adapting, so much as they’re using. Moving to Pakistan requires re-socialization. Using the internet is a matter of learning to use a particular tool. The internet we deal with on a daily basis is filled with people very much like us. It’s not a new environment. It’s our environment viewed through the filter of a digital toolset.

Nothing that people do on the internet is new, whether it’s helping people around the world or hurting people around the world. The internet has not changed human nature, only give it more range. The internet reflects the good and bad qualities of human nature. It projects as much empathy as antipathy. There is no single state for the internet, because there is no single state for us.

Sure morality mobs, Anonymous, sexting, twitter, terrorist instruction videos can be pretty horrifying. And the next generation always seems to have no more morals or sense of right and wrong. But hasn’t it always been that way? People have always been freaked out by the next generation and their hangouts and manners and attitudes. Everyone’s Greatest Generations was always someone else’s bunch of no good punks who need to get a good whuppin from their parents.

So like every tool humans ever invented, the internet is a bunch of problems and solutions wrapped in one. Think about cars, planes, computers, fire, dynamite, sharp blades, television and the printing press. It’s always been this way. It always will be this way. And if we ever get around to nanotech, FTL, genetically engineering humans and holodecks, they’ll be that way too. That’s always been a basic theme in Science Fiction, but Science Fiction cliches are a lot easier to deal with, until it actually happens, and the world gets very strange, and people begin putting the technology to all sorts of unexpected uses, that we really should have expected if we had been paying more attention to human nature.

While the endless CSI and Law and Order generic spinoff series may make it seem like the TV detective show is a good bet, the demographics listed in the Variety report tell a different story. Lately of course new launches of TV detective shows haven’t gone too well. Whether it’s Women’s Murder Club or Raines, the shows have fizzled and there’s a reason.

“Women’s Murder Club” clocked in as ABC’s oldest series demographically with a media age of 57. That’s practically Murder She Wrote numbers, itself a long running and high rated detective show on CBS that had to be booted off because its demographics were just too high. Women’s Murder Club to no one’s surprise has been canceled by ABC. But the TV detective story doesn’t quite end there.

NBC’s oldest demographic series is Monk, another TV detective show, ringing in at 58. Canterbury’s Law, a lawyer slash detective series, ringings in as FOX’s oldest skewing demographic at 55. It too was canceled. The pattern isn’t too hard to spot.

In 2003 CBS had a median viewer age of 52. Today it’s 54. No network wants to be the next CBS, yet at 50 ABC is almost there. And the TV detective series too often plays to the PBS Inspector Morse demographic, an older viewership that networks don’t really want anymore. And that’s bad news for TV detective shows.

The problem arises from cross demographic programming. TV networks killed the detective action series in favor of the detective investigative series because it rated better across gender lines. One hour series rate better with women than with women. Detective shows rated better with men. The sort of detective shows on television are an attempt to cater to both sides of the table and produce neutered detective shows that are more about relationships and autopsies than shooting the bad guy. And those are not the shows with a good lock on younger viewers who bore easily. And while detective shows skew to a female and older audience, the young males turn on the XBox 360 and explore Azeroth.

To get them back, networks need to revise their programming model radically and move away from a conservative watered down approach that results in TV shows that no one but grandma watches. If TV networks were less conservative in their programming strategy, paradoxically they would have more room to cater to a wider demographic of viewers, without constantly and futilely chasing after younger viewers.

It wasn’t until I heard the slogan “Information Wants to be Free” repeated for the umpteenth time by some Neo wannabe who imagines that the real world is something out of a William Gibson novel, or worse yet a Cory Doctorow blog, that I realized just how thoroughly stupid it is. Yes I’ll plead guilty to using the slogan “Information Wants to be Free” on occasion. My only defense is that as a member of a species that often confuses catchy slogans with reality, it took a while for me to build up an immunity to repeating stupid but catchy things that other people had thought of as a way to avoid using theirs brains.

Information obviously does not want to be free. Information is agnostic, or a series of symbols only accessible to qualified human beings, who are the ones who want or don’t want things. It is their motivations that determine whether the information gets to be free or not. If you doubt that, let me know when you find out who D.B. Cooper really was, or how much of ancient myth was actual history, like Troy, or just mouth gargle. Slogans such as these are often repeated by teenagers who are happy enough to accept the entire infrastructure of conspiracy theories from UFO’s to JFK’s assassination to 9/11 truthism, all of which are premised on a simmering stewpot of competing ideas, none of which come with any definitive corroborating fact.

The idea that information wants to be free is a very seductive idea in a time when I can send the entire contents of an encyclopedia around the world with a click of a button or stick it on a thumb drive and carry it with me feeling just like a very boring James Bond. But so what? Subtract the humans from the equation and that USB drive is nothing more than a small piece of plastic with some flash memory inside, readable only by other devices wrapped in plastic. Sure aliens might do something with it, but they were too busy killing JFK on the grassy knoll. If information really wanted to be free, there would be no dictatorships, no doubts and no mysteries. But information doesn’t really want to be free. It only wants to be free as much as we want it to be.

Mike Resnick’s August column at Baen’s delivers an oratory of praise for Olaf Stapledon. It’s a continuation of a tendency within SF to give Stapledon a ridiculous amount of credit, in this case giving him credit for inventing Science Fiction. Yes Stapledon did write up some revolutionary ideas, but the problem with giving him credit for them is that he really didn’t originate them, it’s hard to say that anyone did.

Stapledon often gets the credit because his books, such as Last and First Men and Star Maker read somewhat like conventional Science Fiction. This makes it easy to attach a Grandfather of Science Fiction moniker to him. Even the turgid prose and blatant racism and dated politics that fill Stapledon’s books put him in line with earlier Science Fiction. In practice though Stapledon was a popularizer of ideas, rather than an originator, and the claims made for him often veer into the absurd.

Resnick writes

It’s almost impossible to find a science fiction idea in the pulps of the 1930s and 1940s, or even the digests of the last half century, that does not owe something—usually a major something—to Stapledon. (In fact, when Larry Niven’s brilliant Ringworld came out and credited Dyson Spheres as its inspiration, I decided that that was the first truly major science fictional concept that did not owe anything to Stapledon.

Alternate universes and time travel easily come to mind. So do AI’s and robot uprisings. Giving Stapledon a ridiculous amount of credit diminishes not only the credit for the writers and playwrights who were helped popularize these ideas, but the continuity of ideas that produced them. Stapledon didn’t invent SF tropes anymore than Jules Verne or Capek or H.G. Wells or Stephen Vincent Benet did or that mysterious Kiwi author who far more accurately foresaw space travel earlier and more accurately than Stapledon. They retooled, updated, added and remixed what already existed, mixing Scientific, political and philosophical speculations with ideas that dated back to the ancient Greeks.

Stapledon’s work was boldly imaginative, but he didn’t invent Science Fiction. He was part of a tradition that predates the official American Science Fiction we think of as Science fiction, a tradition still part of earlier traditions of speculating and mythologizing the universe.

Here’s a fun question for Resnick and the Stapledon devotees. Name the SF novel written over two decades before Stapledon even began writing that foresees a matriarchy, laser weapons, flying cars, the elimination of crime and automated agriculture. Oh and it was written by a Muslim woman in India.

The SF world isn’t flat, it’s just flat for some people.

It can be a bit weighty but stick with me. Both Batman Returns and The Dark Knight were basically about the question of whether Gotham could be saved. Any third Batman movie from Nolan will inevitably also deal with the same question.

Bruce Wayne’s father attempted to try and save Gotham through social aid, by building a metro tying together Gotham. This addressed some of Gotham’s problems, but not the real problem, crime. Organized crime. Batman is the tool that Bruce Wayne chose to use to save Gotham from organized crime.

Ra’s Al Ghul believed that Gotham could not be saved. That it was a source of rot and had to be destroyed. In Batman Returns, Batman stopped Ra’s Al Ghul, fighting for the right to try and save Gotham. In The Dark Knight however Gotham and Bruce Wayne need to be saved from Batman. Bruce Wayne wants to resume a normal life and everyone is hoping that the police and Harvey Dent can step in to restore law and order to Gotham.

In The Dark Knight the question is no longer can Batman save Gotham, it’s clear that he can. The question is can Gotham be ruled by the law. As Ra’s Al Ghul came to challenge the idea that Gotham could be saved, the Joker serves as an agent of chaos, challenging the idea that Gotham can be ruled by the law.

The Joker’s tactics are multifold, first in his games with criminals and ordinary people, he seeks to prove that given a choice, people can be predictably programmed to turn on and kill each other without following any moral code. He also seeks to prove that any enforcers and keepers of the law, whether it’s Batman or Dent or the police detective he’s locked in with, can just as easily be forced to break the law, proving once again that there is no moral order, either from the top down, or the bottom up.

The thrust of the Joker’s argument to Dent is that there is no morality because people are not moral. Something Dent himself already believes by that point. Those who administer the law are in the end just as broken as those who are subject to it. The only morality therefore is the morality of chance. When you subtract the idea that there can be any kind of formal moral order, right and wrong don’t enter into it, and the only chance for either justice or right, is pure chance. This is the basic argument of chaos and anarchy, if order is biased toward selfish human choices that are immoral, then the amorality of chance is preferable.

By refusing to be corrupted Batman denies the Joker his ultimate victory, but leaves Gotham dependent on him for law and forces a coverup that turns him into the enemy of the law, giving the Joker a smaller subtler victory. Gotham can still be saved, but Batman is still the only one who can do it. Law enforcement has proven that it can’t step up. That leaves Gotham with a Dark Knight, an outsider who must do what Gotham itself can’t.

Now where does a third Batman movie from Nolan go from here? If the first movie asked can Gotham be saved and the second movie asked if Gotham could be saved under its own law and order, the third movie might ask whether Gotham will ever need to be saved from Batman or whether Gotham itself can save Batman.

The ending of The Dark Knight was inevitable, because Batman exists because the police and the prosecutors office can’t handle it alone. The third movie will have to go into more uncharted territory, asking about the soul of Batman and the soul of Gotham and how both will find their balance in their unique relationship.

A Wall Street Journal essay comparing Bush to Batman in The Dark Knight has gotten a good deal of attention both positive and negative. It’s inevitable that conservative commentators will attempt to read conservative messages into popular movies, as they view it as a way of demonstrating that the people are with them. By turn liberal commentators are happy to read liberal messages in movies, not in the name of populism, but a sense of artistic vindication.

Since Batman is the story of a vigilante who dons a mask to fight crime while cooperating on and off with the police, it’s naturally going to be more given to a conservative reading than a liberal one. While Batman has been written from a liberal perspective, the politics of the average comic book writer being what they are, the character and setting are naturally more given to a conservative interpretation. And this is a problem for superheroes in general, because aside from having them exclusively fight Neo-Nazis, Big Corporations, the Religious Right and a Neo-Con government, making a superhero liberal takes more work than making him or her naturally libertarian or conservative.

Many movie critics have described The Dark Knight as a post 9/11 movie, which it might be, or simply influenced by America post 9/11. But the important thing to understand about The Dark Knight is that it lacks an ideological agenda, either Democrat or Republican. It takes place in a version of the real world where all actions have consequences and there are no perfect solutions.

The Dark Knight focuses on blowback and escalation, as a product of Batman taking the war to the mob. An anti-war reading however would have to argue that Batman was wrong for putting on the cape in the first place and that the status quo where the mob ruled Gotham was preferable. And that’s a hard position to defend. The Joker is a consequence of Batman’s war on crime as Gotham’s war becomes a clash of symbols. The Dark Knight references CIA extractions, blowback, rendition, surveilance, abuse of power and all those things, but it views them as tragic yet inevitable products of the escalation that occurs when you take on a fight of this magnitude.

Read from the standpoint of middle eastern politics, the mob can be viewed as the Saddam Hussein like dictators while the Joker is the new breed of terrorists dedicated to seeing the world burn. Batman represents the more ruthless darker tactics of Bush’s War on Terror while Harvey Dent represent the more “noble” criminal justice campaign against terror of the Clinton Administration. But Dent like the Clinton Administration has a dark side that makes him no different really than Batman, Bush. The tactics that enable him still rely on illegal and questionable measures.

The question that would really move The Dark Knight into one political category or another, is whether Batman’s actions are ultimately necessary or not. I suspect most viewers will answer that they are, since Batman is the hero. A minority might agree with Bruce Wayne’s regrets and argue that Wayne should have kept off the batsuit and tried to fight crime by fighting social problems, but a conservative rejoinder would be that fighting organized crime attacks the cause of many social problems, including drugs and prostitution and poverty.

The conventional Batman tries to do both, using his wealth to help people as Bruce Wayne and promoting Dent, while fighting organized crime by night. This can be read as the two sides of America, the dark that uses killing, torture and imprisonment to fight threats while the light dispatches foreign aid across the world. One can’t really exist without the other. In The Dark Knight, it isn’t only Harvey Dent who has two faces, but Batman as well. Harvey Dent’s noble public image was an unrealistic veneer just as Bruce Wayne’s is. His results came about through Batman’s darker tactics. Standing in between them Commissioner Gordon meditates the extremes on behalf of the city of Gotham and sacrifices a real hero, Batman to give the city an unreal hero, Harvey Dent. But despite the public war with Batman, covertly Gordon relies on Batman, just as America under any administration must rely on covert and darker tactics to see its way through the dark night.

It isn’t that Bush is Batman. Every US President must be part Batman, part Dent and part Gordon to do his job.

Over on cable street the thinking goes something like this, “We’ve got a virtual internet monopoly now. Broadband is it. Price points for now are keeping dial up customers where they are, but we don’t need them much anyway. Dial up is just like the rabbit ears crowd, it would cost us more to get them than it’s worth. We’ve got a monopoly, but what do we do with it?”

The answer of course is to ramp up prices and monetize every aspect of the service, from the customer base to the internet sites themselves. As far as cable companies are concerned, they have the monopoly, they have the lobbyists, which means they also have the power. Welcome to cable city. With broadband as the default standard, cable companies now face the threat of online video. As TV networks drift toward the internet, this undermines the drawing power of cable, which offers clear visuals, and with both legitimate and pirated cable programs appearing online, undermines the need for cable TV plans.

Cable internet is not the biggest moneymaker for cable companies. That’s why cable companies routinely try to roll it into some sort of package deal. And the internet, the little brother to big cable, is threatening to undermine their TV cable business. Of course cable companies are not going to let this stand.

The answer on both ends is to introduce tiered pricing, set with the perfect access limits to insure that the only online video customers will be watching is cats meowing on YouTube for 45 seconds, maybe twice a day. Regardless of whether customers want TV cable or not, as far as cable companies are concerned, they’re going to be paying for it. And so will the sites themselves. Collecting more money from both customers and sites which choose to pay to get accelerated customer access means cable companies can collect from both sides and make money coming and going.

While the top tier of access limits will squeeze out the more obnoxious terrabyte bittorrent users, the devils in the cable companies customer base, the remaining customers will be profiled into a few categories, from basic access, to middle of the road, to virtually unlimited. What cable companies don’t realize though, is that their biggest threat isn’t the impotent net neutrality or some sort of state or federal action, it’s the simple reality that customers have grown used to watching online video and a tiered plan will open the door for Verizon and telecom and even power and satellite companies to begin grabbing chunks of their customers. And with the squeeze on the internet, dot.coms and even media coms will be on board to help move them to alternatives. Big cable companies are getting ready to put the squeeze on, but they’ll discover that they are biting off more than they can chew.

1. Transitioning a Burned Out TV Series to the Big Screen - Star Trek TOS came to the movie theater after a prolonged absence. Star Trek TNG came too quickly after the end of Star Trek The Next Generation after seven years and a 7th season that most viewers agreed was significantly diminished in quality, and utilized the same writers and directors from the series.

2. Failure to use professional writers and directors - Where the Star Trek TOS movies launched with a good number of professional directors and writers in the mix, Star Trek TNG simply tried to transition the TV writers and directors to the big screen. It obviously didn’t work and what they produced was actually below even TV quality. This kind of incestuous arrangement doomed the TNG movies to be seen as nothing more than expensive TV movies.

3. Overdose - Anticipation is the key to making your movie appealing. Few people were anticipating even the first TNG movie. Where the TOS films were a rebirth, the TNG movies were rolled out on a schedule that seemed mechanical and artificial.

4. The Song remained the same - Where the TOS movies launched by reimagining the story and changing the narrative from one of pure exploration by a brash young Captain, to the story of his aging self trying to recapture that sense of adventure, the TNG movies never reimagined the story. They just gave us the same characters on the big screen with no sense of time having passed.

5. Lack of innovation - See 4, the TNG movies were little more than 2 part episodes on a much bigger budget. When screenwriters beyond the dreaded Ron Moore and Brannon Braga duo got to tackle the material, namely Piller and John Logan, their original ideas got castrated and drained of energy. See 2.

6. Alienating TOS fans - When the decision was made for the TOS movies to give way to the TNG movies, graciousness was the right way to do it. Instead Generations cut out most of the TOS cast and killed of Captain Kirk, unnecessarily and ridiculously. Add to that reports of on set tensions between Shatner and Stewart and the damage was done.

7. Treating Star Trek as an action tentpole - Star Trek movies were meant to be Science Fiction epics, not James Bond in space, but between Patrick Stewart’s desire to be involved in action sequences and Paramount executives, the TNG movies seemed to involve a villain trying to destroy Earth, over and over again. The action movie crowd remained underwhelmed and Star Trek fans remained bored.

8. Attempts to imitate the style but not substance of TOS movies - From killing off Picard’s family to an action oriented second film, to killing off Data, TNG movies attempted to imitate TOS movies in a formal way without ever doing the hard work of finding their own identity.

9. Failure to respect TV series canon - TOS movies often upstaged series canon, but they usually had a good reason for doing so. By contrast when TNG movies tampered with their own canon, they usually did it senselessly and for the worse. From watering down the Borg by giving them an evil hypersexual queen to introducing a new enemy we don’t care about in the Sona to putting the Romulans aside in favor of a whole new second Romulan race we never met before, TNG’s movies contributed nothing with these additions except to alienate fans who wanted to see the actual Romulans and Borg on screen.

10. Failure to compete- TNG movies were being made in a more competitive marketplace, yet no real acknowledgment was being made of that. Paramount and Rick Berman continued to take audiences for granted, until it was too late, and even when they knew the situation was bad, they chose to release the final film a week before the release of Lord of the Rings The Two Towers. No one could be surprised by the results. The death of the TNG film franchise.

Microsoft’s attempt at seizing Yahoo on the high seas and its introduction of Cashback is casting a sharp light on Microsoft’s desperation to succeed in search. The missteps along the way have been many. Netscape surrendered its portal business to Yahoo. By the time Microsoft has chased down and destroyed Netscape, Yahoo had surrendered its search business to Google. Now Microsoft is trying to chase down Yahoo, even though Yahoo doesn’t have the search business anymore.

Microsoft still doesn’t get it after all these years and that’s not about to change. Google has built its multibillion dollar business by indexing information, using the index to power no frills search and charging money for selling ads on the search results. Google has moved into hosting content with YouTube, Google Video and Blogger and providing apps like Gmail and Google Docs, but with the final goal of generating more content to index and sell adds on. Google has a very simple business that works because of its simplicity and non-intrusiveness.

Microsoft is trying to get into search the way it gets into everything, monopoly bull in china shop style. Microsoft built up its business selling apps to businesses. These apps were typically bloated and required constant upgrades and were built up around a proprietary operating system. When the internet exploded, Microsoft tried to take control by building in a variety of cloned internet access software, from Internet Explorer to MSN Messenger but the software was bloated and second rate and all it did was provide the exit ramp to the internet. Microsoft foolishly believed that controlling the exit ramp meant control of the internet, but it had failed to learn from its old rival Netscape that it doesn’t work that way.

Instead all Microsoft has wound up doing is creating an exit ramp to Google’s websites and services. And Microsoft still can’t understand that to change that it has to genuinely compete by innovating and moving ahead of Google instead of rolling out the same redundant and bloated offerings that are meant to be alternatives to Google and Yahoo sites and services that people are already happy with.

Revisiting one of my old posts, I can’t help but wonder at the persistence of this particular meme, which shifts the responsibility for the rape on the woman. I’ve written about this one more than once, such as over here, Are Women to Blame for Rape, but the meme never really seems to go away.

Maybe it’s because rape is one of the unique crimes where there is a societal incentive to blame the victim, the way gay bashing way a few decades ago or racial attacks. To conservatives, the modern liberated woman is getting “what she asked for” in demanding feminism, equal rights and dressing in less than a burka. To some of the creepier feminist men, equality means equal responsibility for getting raped.

Few mugging victims are ever held to account in the way that rape victims are. Few robbery victims get put on the stand and asked what they did to encourage the robbery. The premise behind the idea that women bear responsibility for being raped though, is that a woman inherently attracts men who want to have sex with her and it’s her duty to keep herself chaste. There’s a story just now about an Iranian man who murdered his 17 year old daughter to protect her honor

My cousin at Sultan Knish likes to deny the fact that this same sort of attitude is prevalent in the West, but it is. It’s no unique Muslim idea that women carry the blame for being raped. It’s a masculine patriarchal idea and it’s hard to get rid of, no matter how seemingly progressive the culture might seem. Underneath it is the basic idea that women are property and that rape is what happens to loose women who deserve it and brought it on by being female.

The so-called Teenage pregnancy pact in Gloucester, MA has unsurprisingly turned out to be nothing more than another wild rumor inflated by the media into hysterical coverage. It’s far from the first such case of the media creating its own story based on an unsubstantiated statement and turning it into a major national story. One of the major reasons the public no longer trusts the press is precisely because reporters and news organizations routinely pull stunts like this without any professional consequences. It’s as close to legitimizing Jason Blair as you can get.

But when it comes to teenagers, then the press really has a field day inventing its own story, trafficking in hysterical rumors meant to panic parents, bringing in self-proclaimed experts to discuss the new phenomenon and if given enough time, putting out books and movies about it. The teenage pregnancy pact is just a minor item in a litany of similar hysterical stories about teenage misbehavior trafficked in by the press, from the supposedly ubiquitous rainbow parties to school shootings, from the manufactured hysteria over anything teenagers do in their free time, from comic books to motorcycles, from D&D (remember the tunnels) to the internet and video games, the media specializes in creating hysteria over teenage violence, sexuality and forms of entertainment.

The Gloucester teenage pregnancy pact hoax promoted by the media is one of the milder and less damaging examples of such stories. In blowing up school shootings to hysterical proportions, it’s safe to say that the media made it very clear to a number of teenagers that killing themselves and shooting up the school would get them extensive media coverage. How much of an incentive this provided, we’ll never know. Just as we’ll never know how many teenage girls were pushed into viewing risky sexual behaviors as normal because of the media’s shrill sensationalistic claims that most teenagers were doing it. Just as we’ll never know how many parents were pushed into stupid and dangerous overreactions by media hysteria. They’re all part of the toll of a media that insists on sensationalizing to the point of outright lying about events in order to sell papers, get a few more Nielsens and make a little more money.

To understand Dave Sim’s mindset and his obsession with the evil power of women, let’s begin here, as Viktor Davis might say. At the heart of every obsessive form of bigotry is the belief that the target of your bigotry is

1. An absolute insidious form of corruption that is parasitical and completely incapable of maintaining any civilization if it was not dependent on you

2. All powerful and secretly controlling the world while destroying it

The two are contradictory but a necessary part of the mindset of the obsessive bigot. The Nazis and most dedicated anti-semites believe this about Jews (note I am not comparing Dave Sim to a Nazi, though in his belief system Jews will actually rank somewhere on the feminine scale and are part of his imagined worldwide corruption of mankind. If you look here, you’ll note that Dave Sim views Jesus as the male principle and Jewish law as the female principle, so I’m likely right)

White racists of course believe that blacks are complete incapable and parasitic and yet somehow have managed to take control of society to benefit themselves. It isn’t even limited to conventional bigotry. Radicals believe this about the CIA or various secret forces controlling our society. As demonstrated this is a common bigot’s mindset. Dave Sim believes this about women. He used Cerebrus, especially the infamous Issue 186 as a platform to express that. Talk about Tangent, but there is a corollary to those two mentioned above. Let’s rehash

1. X’s are parasitical on society and completely worthless in and of themselves

2. X’s nevertheless secretly run the world

3. All thinking and argument that rejects the above 2 is X type thinking.

and

3a: Non X’s can also become infected with X type thinking

This basically creates a closed loop for the bigot’s world that cannot be contradicted as the act of contradicting it itself reveals an X type mindset. Dave Sim uses thinking vs feeling to describe the X type mindset, but it can be reconfigured any number of ways. Cults use this to close down mental options for their followers by automatically labeling any form of thinking that contradicts their premises and conclusions as satanic. Dave Sim would argue that any thinking that contradicts his premises and conclusions is marxist-feminist.

Now this addresses the structure of what we’re dealing with in Dave Sim but not the content. Dave Sim throughout this believes that he has compelling and powerful truths that are readily apparent and it takes willful blindness to reject them. But bottom lined, his ideas are as childish as his Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist which he insists on constantly reposting and repeating. But of course it’s a shallow mind that thinks in such simplistic absolutes as to believe that pointing out contradictions and flaws is the same thing as completely proving a point.

Dave Sim claims to be an anti-feminist but it’s more accurate to say that he’s opposed to women in general. If he simply left at a fifteen feminist list, he might pass as an anti-feminist, but the crux of his alternate theology (is it any surprise that at one point Dave Sim identified himself as more Muslim?) is that the female itself is a void that consumes male energy, that marriage is a part of that consuming void and that women are inherently destructive. It isn’t a matter of politics anymore but the obsessive loathing of a gender and the belief that they are responsible for what’s wrong with the world.

So now let’s bypass the usual Gary Groth / Fantagraphics level of argument, is Dave Sim gay, was Dave Sim molested as a child and address the general principle behind obsessive bigotry. Now this isn’t a value judgment or a stoning, obsessive bigotry is a mindset. Divorced from politics, the obsessive bigot identifies an entire race, gender, ethnicity as responsible for all the problems in the world and obsessively focuses on alerting everyone to that fact. By any reasonable standard, Dave Sim fits these parameters.

Now what drives someone to be an obsessive bigot? An ordinary bigot might be someone who just doesn’t like blacks or women or jews or asians or gays. It’s an ordinary enough mindset among the human race. We often don’t like people who are different from us. An obsessive bigot though believes they’re the repository of all that’s wrong with the world. That’s a borderline mentally ill mindset and indeed Dave Sim was diagnosed with schizophrenia but the significance is that to the bigot, X represents all that is evil with the world and all that threatens them.

Cerebrus is a work replete with symbolism and Dave Sim’s theology is developed very much in symbolic terms. Schizophrenics often see the world in terms of a devouring force eager to infect and corrupt them. That is because they are identifying the gap between reality and their own minds and through that distortion see the world as broken, rather than their own thinking. They also often seize on a symbolic target to contain the source of that infection.

Obsessive bigots also very much rely on a symbolic vessel for the world’s corruptions, whether it is the feminine, the jews, “the dark subhuman races” and so on and so forth. Even when they are not mentally ill, they dwell in a Manichean universe, darkness and light, an insidious corrupting force everywhere. The difference between schizophrenics and obsessive bigots, where there is one, is that the schizophrenics are often talented.

It’s too simplistic to say that Dave Sim had a bad marriage. Plenty of guys go through divorce, resent women and even behave abusively toward them. What Dave Sim however has is a worldview, one in which the female is the destructive force. It’s a symbolic idea transmuted into a literal hatred toward women and an obsessive need to tell us that women are destroying everything… especially men.

Viktor Davis’ vision of women gnawing on men is itself a typical vision of schizophrenics who often view ordinary people as vampires or carriers of dangerous diseases or CIA looking to plant devices inside them. Schizophrenics often imagine someone violating their bodily integrity and view the world through a distorted threatening lens. Dave Sim is likely describing an actual vision that he saw at one point, rather than just a metaphor. This would not be atypical.

At the root of all such visions is fear. Both bigots and schizophrenics, where there is a difference, are aware that they are out of step with the world. Bigots fear change, schizophrenics fear the violation of their bodily integrity that will lead others to control them (also an obsession with Dave Sim when it comes to women taking control of men’s minds and his mind specifically) what both have in common is a need to explain why they are out of step with the world by defining the world as evil and identifying an agent of change that is corrupting the world. Jews, women, christians, gays, conservatives, liberals, the cia, marxists, the mafia, psychiatrists, scientology, the media, a secret underground nazi conspiracy; it really doesn’t matter except as a form of symbolism. Schizophrenics and bigots, both live in a world built out of a parallel series of symbolic relationships, a hidden theology, something Dave Sim and Christian Identity for example share in common. Dave Sim’s work is dedicated to translating his symbolic relationships into essay and comic book form. It’s not a unique enterprise. There is no question that Dave Sim is talented but one does not have to be sane or a good person to be talented. Talent is an abstract but so is sanity. Morality is a value judgment.

Dave Sim would say that I have engaged in feminine thinking by analyzing him rather than responding to his arguments, but he fails to realize that for decades people have been trying to understand him rather than to win an argument with him. Most people will never believe what he does. His arguments begin with rather garden variety critiques of feminism that plenty of people accept to a distorted belief system that treats women as the ultimate evil leeches on the psyche and society of man that virtually no one would accept. And Dave Sim’s greatest rhetorical weakness has always been to try and suddenly bridge a tenable position with a untenable one.

While misogyny is probably more common than any other form of prejudice, it is also the least accepting to obsessive misogynists because naturally the only truly obsessive misogynist is gay. Celibacy is of course a choice but not one that most would welcome. People can more eagerly embrace obsessive bigotry toward most minority groups because they can be done without. But men are not about to do without women. Had Dave Sim focused on virtually any other group for his obsessive bigotry, he would have still been reviled but he would have also picked up followers. Yet hating women all the time is something that few sane men can or will do for long.

Over at the Guardian’s CommentIsFree, David Cox’s article (Via DollyMix) begins by arguing that date rape is beyond the ability of the courts to handle and concludes with the usual “women need to take responsibility for being raped.”

Yet, why shouldn’t women be encouraged to think twice before visiting footballers’ hotel rooms late at night? Why shouldn’t they be advised that to get themselves into a drunken stupor in the company of a frisky male could carry risks?… Feminists object that even to mention such things constitutes a shift of blame from perpetrator to victim. Yet, when we fit window locks, does this make burglary our fault?

We see arguments like this all the time coming from different quarters and the perversion of logic and responsibility is often very sly. But the problem of rape is not one of responsibility. When a rape or a murder has occurred, arguing that the victim needed to be more careful is utterly besides the point since after the fact, what we are concerned with is justice, not with, what the victim did wrong.

Some crimes are indeed preventable, others are not. Most women who get raped, hard as it may be for David Cox (do I even need to make that joke?) to believe didn’t get drunk in the middle of a crowd of soccer hooligans. Similarly most people who get burglarized didn’t throw open their doors and hang their gold watches in the window.

Crimes happen because their perpetrators want to carry them out. Some crimes of opportunity are preventable, on the other hand it’s pretty hard to do anything about cases like Pamir Safi who came equipped with a rape kit and had a string of women who woke up in bed with him after not remembering a thing. Prevention doesn’t do that much good against predators. Burglars don’t care if you lock your doors. They have tools for that.

Rape isn’t the only crime that’s unresponsive to law enforcement. We don’t imagine that prosecuting drug dealers will solve the drugs problem. We urge their potential victims to “just say no”. We advise that those receiving emails from Nigeria that promise large sums of money in return for smaller upfront payments should exercise caution.

Except the victims of drug dealers aren’t the people who buy drugs from them, that analogy is absurd. The victims of scammers are people who fall for the scam, but there is the Nigerian scam and then there’s the scam your insurance company runs on you when the people in their office do some creative editing of your paperwork. But David Cox always goes for the strawman.

Rape is a crime and like any crime needs to be prosecuted after the fact. Some rapes can be prevented, others can’t. But we don’t tell a mugging victim that he needed to stay out of poor areas or stay home after 11 o’clock. We don’t tell people who have been run over by a truck that it was probably their fault for not looking hard enough. Yet somehow it remains okay to guilt women who are the victims of sexual assaults and demand that they take responsibility for what was done to them and characterize every rape victim as a drunken sorority slut. It’s a disgusting attitude.

There are no easy solutions to crime, any crime, particularly crimes which take place without witnesses and where the rapists have access to the best in legal help. But that doesn’t change the responsibility of the justice system.

More interesting is the question of the intersection between Science Fiction and modern technology. Science Fiction often has the idea right but the implementation wrong. Flying cars and walkie talkie watches were entirely feasible from a technological standpoint. We have them today. We can build them and use them. But they are unworkable from a practical standpoint. A sky full of flying cars would present too many practical problems in an urban environment. A watch we can talk into is an inelegant and awkward solution at best. The cell phone has become the central integrating point for our appliances. The real problem has not been how to miniaturize technology. We’re already there. The problem has been how to make their interfaces accessible despite their miniaturization, a problem that companies like Apple, Motorola and Microsoft are all tackling in different ways.

As we move forward into the future, advancing 5 minutes from now into the future, in every 5 minute increment of our lives, the problems and challenges of technology that are worked out behind the scenes reshape our reality into Science Fiction. A privatized space program now looks likelier than ever while a government space program seems like an outdated fossil. A global data network that can feed us data at a touch is here but has brought as much bad as good with it. People are vanishing into virtual worlds in spirit but not in body leaving behind broken marriages while creating new social relationships.

5 Minutes from Now - How Reality Becomes Science Fiction

The birth of a successful Science Fiction franchise can be a revelation, a transformation that startles people and sweeps a large fan base in its wake. Journalists begin looking to find high minded angles for explaining the phenomenon and its appeal and creators eager to be flattered comply reaching beyond Science Fiction and Fantasy to transform their creation into something philosophical and political, noble minded and distinct from ordinary Science Fiction or even Science Fiction at all. And thus can often begin the doom of a Science Fiction franchise.

Coddling creators rarely leads to much good. Creative people perform best when they are up against the wall, forced to cobble together compromises between their wildest ideas and the more conventional demands of editors and producers. Worship is very bad for creative people. Tell a creative person that he has produced a philosophy that has changed your life and he will take you seriously and you will have created a monster. When creative people begin believing in themselves and stop listening to criticism, the value of their work quickly withers and diminishes.

Star Wars, Star Trek and the Matrix: Three SciFi Creators Who Bought Into Their Own Hype

David Denby, the New Yorker’s film critic, has the usual elegiac and mildly pretentious essay on how the romantic comedy films have gone downhill from the elegance of It Happened One Night to Judd Apatow’s Knocked up, titled, “A Fine Romance: The new comedy of the sexes.”

It’s a pained old man putting an uncomfortable face on the youth culture type essay with Denby noting that what he terms the new romantic comedy celebrates slackers and disdains males who actually are grown up in favor of peter pan’s, slobs who sit around and scratch themselves before finally committing to a woman.

As fascinating and as funny as “Knocked Up” is, it represents what can only be called the disenchantment of romantic comedy, the end point of a progression from Fifth Avenue to the Valley, from tuxedos to tube socks, from a popped champagne cork to a baby crowning. There’s nothing in it that is comparable to the style of the classics—no magic in its settings, no reverberant sense of place, no shared or competitive work for the couple to do.

Ben does come through in the end, yet, if his promise and Alison’s beauty make them equal as a pair, one still wants more out of Alison than the filmmakers are willing to provide. She has a fine fit of hormonal rage, but, like the other heroines in the slacker-striver romances, she isn’t given an idea or a snappy remark or even a sharp perception. All the movies in this genre have been written and directed by men, and it’s as if the filmmakers were saying, “Yes, young men are children now, and women bring home the bacon, but men bring home the soul.”

Of course. Because comedy has gotten lazy. Very lazy. Comedy used to be hard work. And some stars like Jim Carrey really do work hard at it but the writers and the filmmakers increasingly don’t. There is no real ambition or thought put into it. You come up with a gimmick and then you see it through.

But what Denby really fails to see is the split within comedy itself by gender creating female oriented romantic comedy and male oriented slob and body humor comedy. It Happened One Night would no longer exist as it was, it would have to be oriented more strongly to a female audience by ultimately neutering the male and focusing on the female. The result is gender apartheid in comedy. Between the Adam Sandler and the Julia Roberts movies, the two extremes, both of which may regularly feature an element of romance but are miles apart.

Judd Apatow’s geek cred exists for a reason. He does not make movies for or about women. He makes them for men. For a certain type of men. You should no more expect to find a woman who can equal his main characters in humor and energy, than you should expect to find a man with a mind of his own in a Meg Ryan movie.

Gender Apartheid in comedy segregates the sexes, creating not films but pastries, feeding men heavy doses of slob comedy and feeding women, fantasies about working women ‘like them’ who find true love. Movies like When Harry Met Sally were as close as modern comedies get to gender parity and a romantic comedy with two sides to them. From then on the gap widens again.

So how can he not know that the key to making a great romantic comedy is to create heroines equal in wit to men? They don’t have to dress for dinner, but they should challenge the men intellectually and spiritually, rather than simply offering their bodies as a way of dragging the clods out of their adolescent stupor.

Because gender apartheid ensures that equality is kept out of the picture. Classic repartee challenges both partners. The whole point of segregated comedies are to coddle rather than challenge the audience. The irony of the barrier is that movies about finding relationships ultimately divide the sexes more than anything else. A man has no place in the audience of a Julia Roberts movie, anymore than a woman has in the audience of an Adam Sandler movie. Oh they come no doubt, some because of a date or to please their date and some because they genuinely like them, but those movies are not intended for them.

When Robert Rodriguez signed on last week to direct Universal’s “Barbarella,” it marked a rare instance of a female-led action film getting off the ground. Recent history has left a graveyard of tombstones reading such names as “Elektra,” “Catwoman” and “Aeon Flux,” while mausoleums house “Tank Girl” and “Barb Wire.” There are exceptions, of course, such as the “Tomb Raider” and “Underworld” movies, but their sequels failed to capitalize on any goodwill created by the first movies.

On the small screen, female-starring genre stories become buzzworthy cult hits, such as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Alias” and “Veronica Mars.”

Now the question is what do all those movies have in common and how do they differ from the TV shows listed here. It’s that the movies here rarely have a female character, what they have is a female figure. A female body in an action outfit and very little clothing doing her thing. That didn’t work for Dead or Alive and it won’t work period. No matter what.

The TV shows by contrast had female characters not just female bodies. Buffy and Sydney Bristow and Veronica Mars are people with complex lives, reluctant heroines tossed into a battle they never really wanted but are surprisingly good at.

The female action movie isn’t entirely at fault because it’s essentially a translation of the male action movie, just with less clothing. But that approach doesn’t work and won’t work with female characters. You can’t produce a female Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwartzengger. The closest movies came to that was Geena Davis and Long Kiss Goodnight was pretty cool but it didn’t work either. Barbarella won’t work either.

Charlie’s Angels did work (a glaring omission in the article) but it did it by not remotely taking the material seriously. That’s in line with movies which star women in action roles. But for a woman to carry an action movie, she has to be more Sydney, Buffy and Veronica and less Barb Wire, Tomb Raider and Barbarella.

The question of gay characters on Star Trek has been bouncing around ever since the original series. Star Trek: The Next Generation was supposed to feature gay characters but controversy remains over whether it ever did. David Gerrold’s AIDS script, Blood and Fire was never filmed. Succeeding spinoffs, particularly Star Trek: Deep Space Nine featured lesbian kisses but then again a kiss between two women has always been more acceptable to a male dominated popular culture than one between two men since the former serves as sexually arousing material for male viewers and the latter as sexually threatening to male viewers. This same split has regularly occurred all across network television and Hollywood movies which will feature lesbian kisses and sexual encounters as titillating while suppressing homosexual displays of affection.

Star Trek’s gay legacy began with Star Trek The Original Series and the birth of the K\S or Kirk and Spock relationshipping. This involved stories and fan artwork featuring a romantic and sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock.Such stories involving desired relationships between characters have since then become commonplace in fandom and entire websites today exist built around proposed heterosexual and homosexual pairings between couples both within Star Trek’s varied spinoffs and in other Science Fiction and Fantasy TV series including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Farscape. These pairings run the gamut from existing relationships that the producers eventually acted on such as P/T Paris and Torres to extremely unlikely ones such as Wesley Crusher and Commander Worf.

Gay Characters and Star Trek

Thirty-four first-year business graduate students at Duke University cheated on a take-home final exam, a judicial board has found, in what officials called the most widespread cheating episode in the business school’s history.

The final was an open-book test in a required course in March, with students told to take the exam on their own. But many students collaborated, in violation of the school’s honor code, according to a ruling last week by the judicial board of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke.

Well I’m shocked now! Students cheated on a take home exam. And business school students at that. Truly, truly shocking. Almost as shocking as the earth revolving around the sun.

Honor code at a business school? Who are we kidding now. The greatest ambition of business school students is to become a CEO, get a few hundred million dollars in stock options and a huge parachute, build themselves an Al Lord style castle and golf course and milk it for all it’s worth. Compared to the ongoing fraud in the corporate world, teaming up on an exam is practically a virtue. After all it shows teamwork and cooperation– something corporate leadership could use more of.

In general, fewer than 10 students a year at the business school are found guilty of cheating, and some years no accusations are brought to the judicial board, said Michael Hemmerich, associate dean for marketing and communications at the business school.

And in those years they sacrifice a goat to the heathen gods of accounting and promise they’ll do better next year.

National surveys have suggested that cheating is widespread among graduate students. In a survey released last September by a Rutgers University professor, 56 percent of business graduate students admitted having cheated, compared with 54 percent in engineering, 48 percent in education and 45 percent in law school.

And the surprise is what exactly? Business today doesn’t even operate under the pretense of an ethical code anymore. Neither does society. Our last two Presidents openly lied in office and only became more popular for it. And these students are battling in a competitive field for their future. Stopping cheating is going to take a lot more than a lecture on ethics. It requires serious changes in social values.

“I would say at many business schools it is a part of the culture,” Dr. McCabe said. “You want to talk rationalizations? I could give you thousands of them: everybody else does it, it’s the teachers’ fault, you have to do it to get ahead.”

The latter one certainly does. Business school, most real schools, are premised on a Darwinian competition that determines if you’ll have a rich successful life or not. These schools themselves represent investments of student loans ranging anywhere from the tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand dollars from lenders tied up with the schools themselves, exchanging kickbacks to loan officers. If these students find themselves unable to get a good job after they graduate, they will be carrying a loan burden with no celling that they can’t escape even with bankruptcy or permanent disability.

You want a motivation to get ahead by any means? There it is. Get ahead or you’ll be paying the vast majority of your paycheck to Sallie Mae for the rest of your life.

Many of the country’s leading business schools, including Duke’s, have been emphasizing honesty and ethical conduct, introducing new courses in business ethics and creating tough honor codes.

Which of course aren’t going to do squat. It’s not a lack of student knowledge, it’s a lack of student ethics. You can’t teach ethics, you can only live it. At a time when political and business leaders don’t live it… why should students? Unless those courses can come up with a comprehensive answer for why students aiming for leadership should ignore how our leaders actually act– they’re a waste of time meant to whitewash the universities themselves.

A fundamental function of the presence of the Oceanic Flight 815 survivors on the Island is not merely to follow a well trodden path, but to evaluate the choices they made in their lives and break those patterns. While Mr. Eko had faith and while he had broken with his old life and remade himself anew, he had not broken with the same attitude that had determined the choices he had made to reach this point. Mr. Eko’s defiance of the Smoke Monster \ The Angel telling him he must repent is rooted in his belief that he never truly had the ability to choose and he therefore has nothing to repent for.

When God challenges Adam and Eve in the Garden, both blame others for their actions, claiming that it is not they who are responsible for what they did. If Lost’s Island is once again a second chance for mankind to return to the Garden of Eden and this time learn to use free will wisely, Eko’s attitude completely frustrates that design. Rather than repenting of his choices, Mr. Eko insists he had no choice and thereby proved himself unable to reach the plateau needed for the spiritual path of the Island, the Garden of Eden.

TV’s Lost and Mr. Eko’s Journey of Faith