I went to a concert the other day – The Two Funerals – and the lead singer introduced the most of the songs in this fashion:

“This song’s about how fucked up racism and sexism is.” *feedback* *feedback* *powerchord* *scream*

I feel… elated.

Or something.

I’m beginning to think it’s just the opposite. On the surface, it’s trying to be slightly revolutionary – the first musical show that’s really made it big, a ‘realistic’ portrayal of teenage pregnancy, a gay kid with a supportive jockish dad, Idina Menzel as a surrogate mother for two gay dads.

Wait a second…

See, it’s that last bit where I start to notice a problem. Whatever ‘theatricality’ might have been going on during the rather hyped Lady Gaga episode, I honestly couldn’t make myself care, let alone identify with. I suppose we were supposed to find Rachel’s ‘I am your daughter’ moment moving, or funny, or something. I just rewound and listened to Menzel sing ‘Funny Girl’ twice more (so I’m a bit obsessed – big deal). And then skipped to the commercial and ‘Bad Romance’. (Hulu = very useful!) See, on the surface, there’s the appearance of depth, but it’s really just showtunes all the way down.

The finale was just the same. I suppose they thought intercutting the birth scene with a musical number was cute or artistic. It really wasn’t (I think it’s been done before, just the same way). And then we were back to Emma acting weird, Sue insulting Will to complement him, and the convenient near-reset for next season.

You know what would have been really interesting? Glee club loses, gets shut down, the series ends. Bang. But then we wouldn’t get to hear Lea Michele remake any more pop hits. Which is what it’s all about, campy drama aside.

See, the problem is that most people thinks their own problems are the biggest. Not consciously, of course, but they still think so. And the people who are most like them have the second biggest problems, etc.

Most people (all people) ultimately think this way. I know I do – whatever cause I’m currently worried about (or worse, whatever personal problem I have) is of course the one I care about the most. It’s self-fulfilling.

And self-defeating.

You know, I think most people are trying to save the world. Environmentalists? Certainly. Mainstream liberals or conservatives? Sure. Hardcore evangelical christians? Absolutely. Libertarians? Check. I think that even most Lawyers/Insurance Executives/Politicians/Whoever you happen to dislike honestly think they’re doing the right thing, at least ideologically speaking. (Personal selfishness is another matter entirely…) But all most people/groups/causes do is help a few people, hurt a few other people, and argue a great deal with each other.

That’s why I’m a feminist, actually. It’s not just the gender equality angle, even though that’s vitally important. It’s that modern feminists more than any other group try to deal with race issues, health issues, war, natural disasters, hell – even men’s issues, in addition to their core mission. It’s usually from a feminist point of view, of course, but it’s an excellent start.

I don’t expect everyone to be a third+ wave feminist, though – but this sort of Grand Unified Oppression Theory is something everyone needs to be on board with…

Basically, I’m sick of working with someone to promote education for disabled children, only to have them turn around and insult a transgendered person, dammit!

But that’s where it became… odd. According to this organization’s ideas, ‘retard’ is the most offensive thing anyone could ever say, and in a larger sense they believe that discrimination against ID people is worse by far than discrimination against any other group. At some point it was even said that insulting a Black person wasn’t so bad – after all, a Black person can more easily punch you in the face! Yeah….

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m certainly against using the word ‘retard’. I’m glad they’re trying to draw attention to the offensiveness of it. And the argument for discrimination against ID persons being the worst possible makes some sense on the surface.

BUT. I’m fairly certain that as an able-bodied, reasonably privileged white person, I’m in no position to judge the relative degree of someone else’s oppression – even given the amount of oppression I have endured. I’m just as certain that the (mostly WASP male) leaders in this organization aren’t in such a position either. It all comes across as a minor variation on “We’re the great white heroes, we know what your problems are and how to fix ‘em!”

I mean, really – is ‘retard’ really worse than ‘lame’, worse than ‘gay’ (as used in modern youth culture), worse than ‘bitch’ or ’slut’? If one really is worse, how could it possibly matter?

All oppression is related.

Specifically, I keep hearing misunderstandings about to what repealing DADT means. The core of the issue is this:

Repealing DADT will not allow gay people to serve in a hitherto straight military. Instead, it will merely allow formally closeted gay people to serve openly in the military.

This is a vital distinction, especially in light of some of the bizarre garbage (read at your own risk) that has been written about DADT.

Gay people are serving in the military, and have done so for years. In fact, allowing gays to serve was the entire point of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’s creation. It was a compromise, put in place to slightly shield gay people from discovery while still technically not allowing them to serve. (A ridiculous contradiction, of course). In other words, the military in no way thinks that being gay prevents someone from being a good soldier.

Repealing DADT, then, is not really about gay people. After all, a gay person is still the same person, whether they’re out or not. It’s about straight people’s reaction to gay people. It’s the Department of Defense saying, “We believe that gay people are fine, but we’re not sure about everyone else’s response.” (I’m simplifying here, of course, but that’s the basic issue.)

I’ve heard any number of people, many of them active or former members of the military, who seem to think that DADT is keeping all gay people out of the military, that letting gay people in will somehow make the military weak, or (like in the article linked above) that there are huge numbers of gay people waiting to assault people, and that DADT is the only thing stopping it.

DADT is not any of this. Its repeal would simply allow gay military personnel to be honest and truthful about themselves.

So, if you know someone (especially a member of the military, as the recent bill relies on a DOD study) who might not understand what DADT is really about, please let them know. Surely the sacrifice – lives, identities, and more – of LGBT servicemembers is worth that much.

(Crossposted on Fourth Wave Feminism)

If you’ll indulge me a moment, this is exactly the sort of thing that bothers me about the internet. Yes, all that information is great. But what happens when the a site owner loses interest or runs out of time or money? Stuff goes away. Huge portions of the internet are just dead links, more and more every day. If it gets too bad, the internet could become almost useless for anything except for the latest couple of years worth.
So far, it’s been containable – archive.org has help that a great deal (s-k.net is on it, for instance). Even the closing of geocities went mostly unnoticed. But I’m not sure archive.org will work so well with modern, ‘Web 2.0′ style sites. What happens when, say, a livejournal-type shuts down? Or worse yet, youtube? Archive.org doesn’t cover videos… It’s kind of depressing, in a it’s-might-be-better-sticking-with-dead-trees sort of way.

In any case, I’m going to try and see if the owners of s-k.net would mind if I opened a mirror/rehosted their site – if anyone knows how to get ahold of them (as whois info is often so out of date), I’d love to know!

Now, I’m the sort of person who tends to be very harsh on the kitten-blogging crowd.. Or I used to, anyway.

The way I see it, here you are. You have the most powerful communication system ever created. Do you use it to do something unique and worthwhile? No! You post pictures of kittens. Kittens! And not just the occasional kitten – kittens every day. What a waste.

I’m just a big hypocrite, of course. I’ve spent plenty of time writing about TV shows and movies, etc. While some of it is honest cultural analysis, plenty is just pointlessness. Kittens are no different.

But I think I understand more now. Kitten pictures, you see, are perhaps the purest form of escapism imaginable. A real kitten isn’t – you have to take care of a real kitten. But when you look at a picture of a kitten, you see a kind of distilled combination of cuteness, wonder, and innocence all rolled up in one ball of fur. People don’t like kitten blogs because of the kittens per se, they like them for the distraction from reality, for the wonder of the animal world without the animal. Other escapist media shrinks before the power of the tiny kitten.

Or something.

The short version is:
For Net Neutrality –> For FCC regulation of internet service providers
Against Net Neutrality –> Approximately for the status quo

Most neo-cons are against, liberals are divided, the usual.

The weirdness starts when the libertarians get involved. Their position?
Screw the politics –> develop an independent, near-unregulated internet

The most vocal element of net neutrality support is represented by savetheinternet.com – they’re a pretty typical liberalish organization, petitioning Congress to enact legislation to allow the FCC to regulate service providers (a power which the Supreme Court has struck down).

They’ve been mostly unsuccessful thus far, partly because of a rather vocal group of libertarians. The libertarian approach is neatly summed up in this post by Eric S. Raymond. The basic idea amounts to this: the telcos have previously used regulation to increase their last-mile monopolies. Thus, more regulation would only increase their hold on the market. The purposed solution is to ignore the entire political situation, de-license the airwaves, and work on wireless mesh networking. (ESR explicitly insists that the political battle is unwinnable.)

Which sounds great to some people’s ears. A year ago, I’d have mostly agreed – who really wants more government regulation?

Except… the current state of wireless mesh networking is nothing more than a lab experiment. Universities are playing with it; there aren’t any real large-scale products available. There aren’t even any official standards for it yet. Other alternatives are much the same way. And in all honesty, to get any sort of distributed networking system working will likely require government support, if only to subsidize widespread adoption.

Which leads me to this conclusion – when your wonderful new wireless system finally becomes feasible, who do you want to be in control of the Internet – The feds, or AT&T/Verizon/Level 3? I’m not saying that regulation is perfect – but let’s face it, the regulation of telephone lines has ensured that you can call someone almost anywhere in the world without difficulty. Why should internet access be any different?

I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Their online videos sound decent, but not incredible, and the album is processed enough that you might question whether they could pull it off live. Besides, even really excellent bands with years and years of experience often sound less than perfect live. It’s just the nature of rock music.

Not to worry – I was completely blown away.

Live, Sick of Sarah sounds every bit as good as on the album, plus all the additional energy you expect from a live performance. It was practically note perfect, but still managed to be spontaneous and plenty indie rockish (not overly glitzy, etc.) The crowd ate up every word, despite being utterly tiny (100ish). Which is why I’m writing this – I don’t know what kind of draw they get elsewhere, but they deserved a much bigger crowd than that! So if you’re considering going to one of their shows, but haven’t decided to yet, here’s five reasons you definitely, absolutely should (slight gush alert!):

• First, there’s Katie: Not just the rhythm guitar, as she’s sometimes listed. (In fact, she seems to play about half the lead parts – you wouldn’t guess it from the album) She’s got an impressive ear for everything she plays, and rocks out in all the appropriate places. Most of all she blends and trades off with Jessie perfectly. I’ve been a huge fan of the ‘two equal guitars’ concept ever since I fell in love with Sleater-Kinney, and they pull it off here while still including a bass. Which brings me to…
• Jamie – she’s so… stoic? serious? Something. Whatever it is, it complements Abisha’s crazy and Jessie’s silly perfectly. I think what I’m trying to say is that she’s a ’statuesque’ bass player. Or something. It looks awesome in any case. And sounds great too.
• Jessica, on the other hand is a much a whirlwind as she looks in the videos, and her drumming is every bit as powerful as you could want (she’s a step up, power-wise, from Brooke), and nuanced enough to make it work live (I’ll be interested to hear how she sounds on the new album).
• Jessie is a consummate rock guitarist. She’s got the hair, the attitude, and the on-stage pose to pull it off. And when she digs into a tricky guitar riff, feet set, fingers flying, it’s something to behold (especially from five feet away!). Not to mention, she’s laid-back, even downright goofy the rest of the time (which also rocks).
• But Jessie’s goofiness is nothing next to Abisha, who I’ve decided is completely insane (in the most positive of ways). She somehow managed to pull off her ‘water spout’ trick, dance all over the stage (and down in the audience), constantly manipulate a reverb unit, and down a remarkably large number of shots, all while hardly missing a note. Not to mention letting a couple of (very inebriated) fans feel her up in the middle of the song, randomly steal one of said fans’ cap (I was a bit confused by that – aren’t baseball caps a big no-no at indie rock shows?) and throwing it across the room. And last but not least, she climbed up on the kick drum, sang through to the climax of the song, and finished by jumping off and doing a 360 degree turn – without getting tangled up in her mic cord. Did I mention she sounds just as awesome live as she does on the record? Incredible.

And that’s why you should go see Sick of Sarah.

(Killola, by the way, was pretty decent too – although Lisa’s own attempt at kick drum climbing was a bit, ummm, shaky and unimpressive. If you ever see them, though, you really should bring ear plugs – I can tolerate some pretty loud music (I was a couple feet in front of a PA speaker for all of Sick of Sarah’s set) – but Killola made my head hurt from the back of the room. I would have enjoyed it a good deal more if my hearing hadn’t been deadened by the first song!)

So I disappeared again, real life exploded on me, blah, blah, blah. I could go on and on about why, or why not, but not only does nobody care, it wouldn’t even really be true. The truth is, I got a bit fed up with the Internet, blogging, everything computer-related (rather ironic for someone whose future career relies almost entirely on computers…). I burnt out without the excuse of having burning sufficiently beforehand.

About three months ago, I even made a blogging schedule – one day I was going to write about technology, one day politics, one day crosspost from Fourth Wave. It lasted for one day. Lovely. General weirdness/fights across teh interwebs only made things worse, first with a bunch of feminist blogs shutting down or going on hiatus (I know, I know…), and secondly the weirdness surrounding the lesbianish web-sphere (someday I’ll put all my feelings on Afterellen vs. Shewired vs. Autostraddle vs. the world down, but not now…)

I still haven’t completely gotten over it all, either, but I also miss writing rather badly. So here I am.

At the risk of setting myself up for failure, I’m going to set a goal – write something, anything, every day. Just to do it. I think the problem with my previous schedule was that it was too complex to make a habit of it (it involved rotating weekly schedules!). Perhaps I’ll do better if I just go for regularity. Or not. But I’m going to try. (Aviva – if you’re still subscribed to this, I’m going to get something up on fwf soon too, I promise…) I’ve got a ton of more-to-less interesting ideas, as usual. I just need to put them to work.

So in the interest of putting something in this post not completely introverted: I think one of the big fears I have about writing on the web is, well, sounding stupid. It’s not as silly as it sounds – I think a good deal of the failed attempts, the blogs with 30 posts, the video blogs with two episodes, the podcasts that last all of a week, are caused, not by a lack of time, but by the author’s suddenly realizing that there’s a dozen people on the internet, working on the same subject. Except, they’re an order of magnitude more intelligent, interesting, and so on. It’s enough to make anyone want to spend all their free time staring at the ceiling.

Actually, this is true of everything everywhere. I even ran across it in local volunteering of all places. You’d think a small non-profit, in need of endless amounts of help, would welcome anybody and anyone. Not so much. Instead, the two or three highly competent people unintentionally make everyone else feel useless. Now the organization is nearly gone from a lack of help.

According to lots of people, the antidote for all this is to specialize, to make sure you’re so good at what you do that you stop feeling so inadequate. But then, you end up looking stupid unintentionally. Worse yet, you don’t know it – you’re the expert, after all. Take ‘Joel on Software’, one of my my favorite examples. Joel’s blog was a big deal – it still is, for that matter. But I, and thousands of other people, won’t touch it with a very long stick. His various dogmas and strange ideas built up over the years make him impossible to take seriously, even if he is some sort of software expert. This isn’t new or special, of course. The story of Einstein’s various errors (and failure to see them) while working on a unified theory of physics is well known. And on and on it goes. The lesson, I suppose, is rather nihilist – the wise person really is the person who realizes they know nothing.

Not that it makes me feel and better about my own personal failings, of course.

I was going to end this by working collectivist cultural theory into it (less judgment! less stress! more productive!), but I’m just rambling anyway. More coherence tomorrow.