About “journalists” like Chana Joffe-Walt, do they even bother doing any goddamn research anymore at all, or do they just go ahead and write what their corporate masters tell them straight away?

Seems like the latter to me.

Of the many times I’ve been banned from Pandagon, one of the earliest was for espousing the ideas of Shulamith Firestone, by far my favorite feminist thinker and writer, and probably the most underappreciated.

Apparently, in the Pandagonian world of feminism, feminism so radical is itself oppressive to women because they can “never live up to such a standard of feminism.” Who knew our goal should be to aim as low as possible!

Regardless, Firestone’s ideas appealed to me both because they make sense and that I thought of many of them before I’d read Firestone’s work (thought of course she thought of them all years before I was born!).

Pandagon is a site I read but frequently mourn reading as it more reinforces the status quo than attempts to break it down. The reason is that you usually can’t show up on your enemy’s well-prepared and booby-trapped battlefield and expect to win all that often.

Damn, we really need more people like Firestone. She was one of the people I had picked in one of those, “Which three historical people would you like to meet and have dinner with in their prime?” questions. The other two were Charles Darwin and Laura Veirs (hey, no one said they had to be dead or even not current).

I found The New Yorker article over at Sarcozona’s blur blog.

I am still an iPad skeptic, even though I own one and use it frequently.

Nearly all I do with mine is to read books with it due to the gorgeous screen. It is exceptionally good at that; however, at everything else, like all tablets, it’s a nearly-total failure.

The screen is too small to read webpages very well.

I can type 100wpm+ on a real keyboard. On the iPad keyboard, maybe 4-5wpm if I really get going.

It’s too slow to process photos, and won’t handle raw files anyway.

It’s designed for content consumption, not creation.

Its screen isn’t large enough to do any real work.

It multitasks like crap.

Etc.

It is a really great e-reader. For anything else, it is far and away trumped by a desktop PC. I am glad I got it, but the only thing it will or ever could be for me is a very expensive book reading device.