The GOP Can Have Him...

My jaw dropped when I read a recent story in the Raleigh News and Observer, my local paper, about the Esteemed Dullard and likely Closet Case Former Mayor Tom Fetzer, a Republican running for head of the state party, who is planning to sue a Wilmington radio host for libel for forwarding an e-mail alleging that he is gay [ Link ]. I, like most of you, hate e-mail forwards as much as anyone, but this is beyond a bit ridiculous. Fetzer's comments border on dangerously unbalanced.

In a letter to the N&O [ Link ], Fetzer writes,

"The letter is a lie, written by a lying coward. I can't sue the lying coward, but I have authorized my attorneys to sue [radio host] Curtis Wright and the media outlets he works for. ... I am not gay -- never have been -- never will be. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support any of the scurrilous allegations made in the anonymous attack on me. ... The fact that I'm 54 and single does not mean that I have to put up with vicious rumors that I'm gay" [now, time for the coup de grace] ""The fact that I am heterosexual is a matter of public record."

Hold on. Context cues are leading me one way, but content another. From his judicious phrasing, you'd think the man had been accused of torturing puppies while injecting heroin and stealing from orphans, not having sex with a consenting adult human being. Scurrilous! Vicious! Attack!

As an aside, I'm going to hop in here and point out that anyone who is surprised at an e-mail forward (or anything originating online) accusing someone of being "gay" -- EVEN LIFELONG BACHELORS AT 54 WITH ODDLY ACUTE FASHION SENSE AND A NOTED VANITY ABOUT PERSONAL APPEARANCE -- should not be running for head of anything at all. He shouldn't be running. He should be wearing a helmet, like that weird kid who used to wear a Starfleet uniform to school, just after he got new headgear for his orthodonture.

I can't think of anyone in the present day - particularly someone who managed to rise to the esteemed position of Mayor of the City of Oaks (way back before everyone moved here for all the cool jobs in RTP) - who would take this so far. Honestly, the better part of valor would be to ignore the e-mail and tell the Republican party why you're the better candidate for leader, not to engage in a pissing match over who can pretend to be the most out of touch. This isn't even an election of consequence, and if your opponent for state GOP party chair is desperate enough to point fingers at you and yell, "He's gay! I read it in an e-mail forward," then he's already lost.

Then again, so do the rest of us. Dragging the already wounded right wing further right when they seem to be doing that well enough on their own is NOT a good idea.

Again - a side note, do you think it's because they lost the election that this is happening? For the decade or so, Republican strategy seemed to dictate that whenever danger lurked, a candidate needed to run to the right, and this might explain why the party seems to be selecting Rush Limbaugh -- drug addict and college dropout (after two failing his first two semesters at the oh-so-prestigious Southeast Missouri State University) -- as its ideological and intellectual leader over former Secretary of State, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Former Four Star General, MBA from George Washington University-holding Colin Powell. God forbid that someone with the wisdom of Powell's experience and proven track record should actually take the party somewhere slightly left of Genghis Khan.

Indeed, if our electoral process has become so flawed that a minor campaign for a meaningless position should deviate into this stark a revelation of hate spilling onto the landsacape, then our republic is in greater danger than I've ever thought.

I digress (again). The most stunning bit of the whole Fetzer note is his final statement, which I will type once more because it will serve as a perfect summary representative for the entire debacle, encompassing the scope of pure hate, mindless spin control, and complete stupidity: "The fact that I am heterosexual is a matter of public record."

How? There isn't even circumstantial evidence you're straight or gay. For those not in the know about something called privacy and something else called freedom, there shouldn't be, and there should not have to be For it to be a matter of public record, I suppose you took your penis and a woman (with her vagina) to a Notary Public for a documented act of sexual congress, then ensured that everyone signed the "Witness" fields, paid the notary his going rate, and got an official, notarized document of your Straightitude. Still, though, I wanna know how it was done. How did your sex life become public record? OH YEAH -- YOU made it that way with your ASININE babbling about scurrilous attacks...

Ahh well... I suppose someone should notify him that falsely accusing someone of homosexuality is not grounds for libel (1994, NC US Court of appeals), Oh, and while you're at it, that the internet will call you bad names (monitor one active web forum for an hour or two and see how many times the word "faggot" or "fag" is hurled by one poster at another). Finally, that, above all else, I you should know that nobody likes you. That's a matter of public record.

If this is the best the GOP can do to lead their party (and my former party, I might add), perhaps we're better off without them in charge for a while.

23 May, 2009 | Chris |

MPAA Vs. RealDVD Update: The Arguments

I already posted my rant about the DRM wars, but I thought I'd update the discussion by addressing the arguments being made in the case that sparked that entry, the Motion Picture Association of America vs. Real Networks, creators of Real DVD, software that allows users to create a perfect copy of a commercial DVD. Arguments by Real insist that movie studios are trying -- through litigation -- to prevent fair use, which allows digital content owners to create a backup copy of that content. The MPAA's contention? Fair use is not a defense against the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions, since the law makes no reference to such.

This is - like much of the ill conceived Digital Millenium Copyright Act - an untested area of the law. The DMCA, which was, unfortunately, the product of a media frenzy mad Congress ("Downloaded music will destroy the American capitalist system! Aaaaiiigh!") and entertainment lobbyists, has proven itself disturbingly conflicted with many existing laws, especially those pertaining to the rights of the content purchaser.

Real's specific argument is that, by creating a complete archive of the protected DVD on a hard drive, without bypassing CSS encryption [ Wikipedia ], indeed, keeping the encryption intact and adding an extra layer of protection - locking the created files to the user and system on which they were created - all RealDVD does is allow users to create a backup, archival copy, which is permitted under the DMCA.

The MPAA's argument is that this method of copying and archiving is circumvention -- handily bypassing the copyright argument altogether -- fair use rights be damned. In fact, their argument seems to indicate that there can be no fair use of content taken directly from a DVD. This is in line with their previous statements in which they showed government officials how teachers could create a legal clip for a classroom by pointing a camcorder at a video screen that was showing a DVD - for more on this, see the article on ArsTechnica detailing the absurdity [ Link ].

Watching this unfold could make you ill, and the end result could have dire implications for anyone with a DVD, CD, or other digital content collection. What remains to be seen is if the computer savvy Obama administration will keep its head in ways the Bush folks never could - this could be the test case.

22 May, 2009 | Chris |

Turning Away From Academia

When one is engaged in the process of earning a Ph.D., especially in the Humanities & Social Sciences (where opportunities outside the academy, despite programmatic claims to the contrary, are rare), the utterance of one's intention to seek employment outside the academy is often met with incredulous stares and queries to the effect of, "Couldn't you find a tenure-track position?" or assurances that if one keeps trying, "you could at least adjunct for a year, and I'm sure the market will get better." Never is the idea that this is a legitimate choice, one that has been weighed heavily and thought out to the fullest, given any merit. Never mind the fact that the tenure system as we know it is likely dying, as a quick search of sites such as The Chronicle of Higher Education [ Link ] or Inside Higher Ed [ Link ] will reveal. Never mind the fact that the majority of college courses are taught by adjuncts with no benefits, no chance for tenure, no stable setting (search "freeway fliers") at either of the aforementioned sites for more on this), and a semester-to-semester employment that has been likened to wage slavery in the Wal-Mart sense. No, the only worthwhile employment, according to tenured faculty in HSS disciplines, is in the university system, ideally at a Research Intensive university, on the tenure track.

For an outsider to really grasp the indentured servitude that looms for doctoral students who reach for the tenure track, think of the medieval apprenticeship system. You work, for several years, as a nearly unpaid apprentice in a Ph.D. program, "training" for your future employment by teaching introductory courses and writing research papers designed to get you to think in LPI units (Least Publishable Increment) of the smallest scope possible, learning a highly specialized vocabulary that only insiders speak, and placing all your self worth on how well you absorb these lessons: the better you can write and understand articles entitled, "The Ontological Revelations of the Irish-American Epistolary Movement of Boston Between March and May 1904," the more worthy you feel and the more likely it is that you'll feel incredibly important by developing such a minor expertise. Never mind the fact that the entire piece can be summarized by stating, "We can learn a lot about the way Irish immigrants thought by writing letters just by examining two months in 1904," you have to fill 30-plus pages with crap, tripe, and pseudo-insight in order to get your precious research published, this being the only way you can enter a professorship and continue writing such earth-shattering research for the rest of your life. Often, scholars who learn the game well enough can republish the same paper six or seven times, changing only the wording and the importance of a few "insights" around in order to make it seem new and different; after all, only 2-3 other people on earth will ever read your stuff, and the likelihood of them exposing your work, and thereby theirs, as tripe is quite negligible.

After your indentured servitude/Ph.D. program, you'll move on to the equivalent of the medieval "Journeyman" position. Depending on your teaching, as measured by sections of annoyed first year students with no insight as to what makes a good teacher beyond the answer to the statement, "Gives easy A's," and your "scholarship," you'll land a position as either an adjunct, a Visiting Assistant Professor, or an Assistant Professor, with only the latter offering possible tenure. As any one of the above three, you'll work 70 hour weeks, teach the heaviest loads, and sit silently during all discussions of departmental governance (making waves, showing original thought, and challenging authority being anathema to the open thinkers of the tenured faculty, who are, despite the "liberal" label attached to many of them, the most conservative bunch on earth when it comes to their vaunted profession). If you landed either an adjuncting or VAP position, you'll have to try again to reach that Assistant Professorship, but in any case, once you've landed that job, you'll be making less than a public schoolteacher for seven years while you try to prove to your colleagues that you're worth their time. In this case, think fraternity hazing as much as medieval apprenticeship.

I suppose that after a decade of forced self-delusion that "this is all worth it," the attitudes of the professoriate are inevitable. One percent of them, after all, do end up with comfortable positions that allow them to truly experience all that the vaunted tenure system has to offer: a guaranteed job, cushy teaching schedule, and the expectation that one write about that which most interests oneself, as well as a fairly respected title that affords one the opportunity to pontificate about all sorts of subjects from an inscrutable position of intellectual authority. These are the masters of the universe, the Wall Street jocks of the academic world, and it is lives like theirs that the myriad members of the lower rungs of the ladder will think of when they caution you against leaving the academy.

Sorry. I'm not convinced. Teaching the current generation of narcissistic, lazy, perpetual children is not my idea of a great time (for the first time in a long time, full professors will field calls from worried parents, who haven't yet realized that faculty look on students who have mommy intervene as lower than worms). I'm also convinced that I can write and publish, engage in a productive life of the mind, and at the same time enjoy a similar starting salary to that of a fully tenured faculty member in other venues. I didn't just focus on the skills of the graduate student, you see: I broadened my interests, rather than narrowed them, and at the same time learned how to do things that others have dismissed as unnecessary but are, at the same time, valued everywhere but in academia. So in this, the final weeks of my funding as a graduate student, I am finally relinquishing the hold of academia on my mind: faculty positions are now, and will remain, my second choice -- one that I could fulfill ably, but not one that I prefer.

27 Apr, 2009 | Chris |