The Raven

Friday, November 22, 2002

The Bluestockings

For some reason, the government thinks we're all children. After Madonna, after Howard Stern, after years of virtually non-stop sex and violence on TV, cable, and video, all of a sudden the FCC decides to call for a "re-examination of the agency's definition of indecency."

The catalyst for this, evidently, was yesterday's airing on CBS of the 2002 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. As you can see at left, some of the outfits were rather racy, like this model showing off the new VS line of comfy sleepwear. Viewers overwhelmed the FCC's offices with phone calls and their e-mail system "was overloaded, and crashed."

"Too many indecency complaints from consumers and too many truly indecent broadcasts are falling through the cracks."

Indecent. Since when has the American public been interested in decency? Look right here on salonblogs—smut generates more traffic than all the kultur we can post in apposition to it. One clown posted a link to a Fox broadcaster's Freudian slip of "blowjob" and got a few hundred hits within hours. I linked to a woman beating her child and I'm still getting hits on that. The message couldn't be clearer: We want trash and skanky porn. But what does the FCC think?

"You can't tell me this is what the pioneers of the great broadcast industry had in mind when they brought radio and TV to us."

No, they thought we wanted Uncle Miltie and Howdy Doody. Tastes today are somewhat more recherche, if my cable channel TV guide is any indication. I get this listing of adult films I can order every time I watch the channel selections cycle. "Hot Sorority Vixens," "Lust Taboo Sinning Housewives," I tell you, these titles say it all. People love this stuff. They just want to pretend they don't when they're in mixed company. Which brings us to our next item...

I, Hypocrite

Y'know, if you came up to me in person and asked me point-blank, "Do you pre-judge people?" I know what I'd say. I'd put on this angelic mien and answer in all earnestness, "Oh, no. I make no assumptions about anyone until I know them personally. You can't judge a book by its cover, after all." Then we'd smile, and laugh, and stroll off into a wonderful world where everyone is disconnected from their image.

Life isn't like that. We don't act that way. We judge people on sight. In less than half a second, when you see somebody, you size 'em up and you size 'em up good. Height, weight, hair color. Dress, age, sex. Comportment, tone of voice, body language. You read it all instantly. And most of us go past that and pick up the vibes people put out. In less than a second.

So don't give me that "I don't judge anybody based on their appearance" hooey. Look, if you see some shambling urine-soaked bum who's weaving up the street and muttering to himself, you start looking for an exit strategy—you don't bet the bank that this might be the long-lost King of Azerbaijani.

8:04:56 PM

The Lost and the Lazy

As much as I'd like to highlight the geniuses in our midst, they tend to be hard to find. So we often turn our attention to the darker regions of the philosophical cosmos, and focus on people like this bunch of yahoos:

The Man Who Tried to Drink a River

That's my impression of Gregg Easterbrook, who has an article in Wired today titled The New Convergence. The author here pulls the classic "bait-and-switch" routine, promising to explore a "grand unified theory of everything" and then delivering a truckload of meaningless styrofoam platitudes and half-baked conceptual fiddle-faddle.

In recent years, Allan Sandage, one of the world's leading astronomers, has declared that the big bang can be understood only as a "miracle."

And there's his thesis in a nutshell. Science, lacking all the answers for everything, is now throwing up its collective hands and turning to religion for comfort. But scientific inquiry doesn't work that way and doesn't try. Karl Popper's falsificationism, for instance, is the idea that "science advances by unjustified, exaggerated guesses followed by unstinting criticism." Religion does the same thing, yes, but without that pesky criticism.

Easterbrook goes wrong in virtually every other premise he presents, thrashing theories and fumbling fundamentals. We're supposed to buy into noodlebrained ideas like this:

In philosophy, metaphysics is making a comeback after decades ruled by positivism and analytical theory of language. These restrained, empirically based ideas have run their course...

I don't think so. No scientist anywhere has ever believed that "we'll have all the answers." What may be happening is that our classically trained philosophers are dying off and today's less-rigorous educational system is churning out mental lightweights to replace them. "Empirically based ideas" are, after all, truth, which never goes out of fashion.

Space may be infinite—not merely vast, but infinite—encompassing an infinite number of galaxies with an infinite number of stars...Set aside the many competing explanations of the big bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing.

An infinite universe is one possibility, among many, but Easterbrook conveys this bombshell in the awestruck tones of a stoned adolescent babbling past his bedtime, then trots out the hackneyed "something out of nothing" logic that only works on illiterate cajuns and impressionable children. One expects him to continue with Zen koans at this point: Where did the first acorn come from?

Explanations of how the mass of an entire universe could pop out of a void are especially unsatisfying.

We'll stop at this point. Since the curvature of space is beyond his ken, there isn't anything else he can say and he pretty much doesn't. The remaining 1,500 words or so amount to the noise you get when you shoot up a Jehovah's Witness full of speed and lock him in a tool shed. Wired should be ashamed of running this tripe and they owe us an apology.

Hold the Presses

Were you as worried as I was that the felt-covered hand known as Kermit the Frog wouldn't get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? Yesterday they gave it number 2,208, proving beyond all doubt that this venerable institution is now completely meaningless. Hey—while they're at it, how 'bout one for the Pillsbury Doughboy? And Toucan Sam, and that Quaker Oats dude—damn, you guys better hustle it up!

A Bucket of Weasel Guts

Which is how I think about Alan Ralsky, otherwise known as the King of Spam. Let me start with a warning: Do not follow that link unless you want to get explosively livid with rage. This man, Ralsky, is responsible for something like half the spam e-mail you get. And he's making good money off it, seeing as how he's putting the finishing touches on his "brand new 8,000-square-foot" $740,000 luxury home. He's got 20 computers and a T1 line, which can do a lot of damage:

The computers in Ralsky's basement control 190 e-mail servers—110 located in Southfield, 50 in Dallas and 30 more in Canada, China, Russia and India. Each computer, he said, is capable of sending out 650,000 messages every hour—more than a billion a day.

Does he like what he does for a living?

"I'll never quit," said the 57-year-old master of spam. "I like what I do. This is the greatest business in the world."

Yeah, and according to the article, when people have discovered his address, they tend to leave "bags of feces" on his doorstep.

11:06:03 AM