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Veiled
Threats
I linked to "Veil of
Tears," by Anne Hollander, because it is always entertaining to read the
latest misconceptions from the media on Muslim issues. While I was waiting for
the browser to log me on, I thought maybe, this once, from a publication like
Slate
, I would be not amused but happily impressed by a thorough
report. Silly me.
Bemused, I went through the
illogical conclusions plus the tired rhetoric of veil equals oppression, blah,
blah, blah. I laughed out loud when I got to the part where the author insisted
that although the "girls" (uh, we're known as women here in the Islamic world,
too) "claimed" they weren't oppressed by the veil, they, like, really were.
Question: Did the author actually interview any of these "girls"?
One, maybe minor, point that
I feel compelled to clarify has to do with this statement: "It seems suitable
in Saudi Arabia, for example, where women can't vote." A little research here
would show that no one votes in Saudi Arabia, be they men or women, because
it's a monarchy, and voting's not really in.
Oh, by
the way, I happily and quite comfortably wear my veil when I go shopping
downtown. I tie it tight around my
electrical/biomedical-engineering-from-USC-filled head, over my
up-to-the-minute, very fashionable, mostly European designer clothes (sorry,
don't mean to brag, just trying to break that ridiculous stereotype). And my
curvaceous legs certainly don't show.
-- H.A. Dialdin
Tabs of
Steele
Perhaps all the tabloid
reading Emily Yoffe has been doing on behalf of
Slate
has taken a
toll on her logical capacities ("Pay for Say").
There is a very simple reason
why George Stephanopoulos' book contract is less tainting (or less obviously
so, anyway) than Gennifer Flowers' or the Arkansas troopers' lining up for
tabloid/right-wing payouts. For the latter, the only value in their story is in
its salaciousness: If they had told their benefactors that Bill Clinton was an
upright man who never told a lie or looked twice at a woman, they wouldn't have
got a dime.
As senior adviser to the
president during a tempestuous first term, however, Stephanopoulos can provide
insights and behind-the-scenes anecdotes that many readers will find
interesting, even if he didn't see naked interns running up and down the West
Wing. As a result, Flowers and the troopers (and Zercher and McGrath) have a
much greater incentive to spice up the truth or to invent a story out of whole
cloth.
Even Yoffe's example of Julie
Steele backfires on her. After all, Steele wasn't paid for what she
said, but for a picture of Willey and Clinton together. That photo was worth
money to the Enquirer even if Steele claimed Willey was secretly the
Dalai Lama. In fact, Steele probably could have earned more money if she had
volunteered some scandalous yarn.
If your
writer had been really incisive, she might have raised questions in the
opposite direction: Do big advances like the one Stephanopoulos received
increase the pressure on him to include some--perhaps false--"revelation" that
can be used in promoting the book? Yoffe suggests that truth can be found just
as easily in tabloids as in traditional publishing outlets; a less determinedly
shallow analyst might wonder if the dominant role of money is suffocating the
truth in both venues.
-- Chris Kelly
Microsoft Economics
In his "Soft Microeconomics"
piece, Paul Krugman tells us he uses WordPerfect and the Netscape browser. This
may well be, but Internet Explorer is very likely on his computer, and he
certainly paid for it even if he subsequently removed it. The idea that
Internet Explorer is free is silly. It cost millions to develop, and that cost
is amortized in the price of Windows.
This is one way the browser
really is part of the operating system.
I doubt that Microsoft cares
all that much which browser people use as long as they have to pay for Internet
Explorer. In the fullness of time, there will be enough sites only viewable
with Internet Explorer that Krugman and others will switch. Their personal
preferences for Netscape won't be worth the inconvenience.
The same is true for
Microsoft Word. I wouldn't be surprised if Word is already on Krugman's
computer, so he can read all the Microsoft Word 8.0 documents produced by
others, which are unreadable with WordPerfect. Eventually, he will use Word,
even if he doesn't like its equation editor--it will be just too inconvenient
to indulge his personal preferences. Perhaps he'll utter a little grumble of
dissatisfaction, like all those grumbles coming from Mac users being forced to
switch to Windows to be compatible. In the meantime, he has probably paid for
Word, so why should Microsoft care?
There is absolutely no need
for this, of course. Software companies could make their file formats public,
enabling easy exchange of documents. The computer security expert Simson
Garfinkel has provided a thoughtful discussion and interesting recommendations
for government action in his column "Let My Data Go!"
One of the biggest myths
about computer software is that it leads to "natural monopolies." In fact, the
software incompatibilities that tend to create monopolies are carefully
nurtured, precisely because they do create monopolies.
It may be natural for
businesses to create and exploit monopolies whenever they have the opportunity,
but that is why we have, and need to enforce, antitrust legislation. The
software industry, if anything, has a greater need for protection of market
competition.
Incidentally, as an academic, Krugman might be interested in a series of
articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education on how Microsoft is
reducing software competition in universities.
-- John
Franks
Evanston, Ill.
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