My nanny, myself
BY JENNIFER BINGHAM HULL
(09/13/99)

Hiring poor women of color to care for the children of privileged white families, paying them poorly and then idealizing these caregivers as more natural, more nurturing and more giving than ourselves is exploitative to say the least -- a problem that Ada's (presumably Latina) grandchild recognizes intuitively in wondering whether her grandmother prefers her high-status white employers' child to herself. When addressing the fundamental need for good, affordable child care for working couples, let us not blind ourselves to other, equally pressing issues of class and ethnicity. If privileged women remain blind to the needs of poor women and women of color, can we really consider ourselves feminists?

-- Tedra Osell
Seattle

As a mom who has had a full-time nanny for most of my children's lives, I agree with Jennifer Bingham Hull on the importance of the nanny in the life of a family, and on the capacity for love and friendship that a nanny brings. But when she says, "I entrust Ada with the most important person in my life, but I pay her less per hour than I pay the handyman," I cannot help but ask why. This person who is so important to her and to her child deserves the respect of earning a living wage! If it means paying more than "market," so be it.

-- C. J. Atsatt

What a self-centered, shallow, Grade-A boomer yuppie stereotype Hull is: one who wants to have children, but not raise them. One who would abandon time with her daughter for the sanctification of her precious "art" (i.e., journalism, whose salaries are notoriously low for all but a tiny few). One who complains because her husband, obviously a tenured professor who works all day and teaches at night (and without whose secure income there would be no healthy, happy child, let alone full-time nanny), seems "uninvolved." Such ethical battles! Such pathetic hypocrisy! Hull is a coward, so lamentably blind she doesn't know how lucky she is.

-- Gary Higgins

Machiavelli personality test
BY RICHARD CHRISTIE
(09/13/99)

Dear oh dear. I read "The Prince" about 12 years ago, and was impressed by what I understood as a clear-eyed analysis of not how politics should be done, but how it tends to be done. And there is a difference.

Similarly, your "personality test" suffers from the usual split-personality problems of the genre: begged questions, overarching assumptions and a complete inadequacy as a test of anything meaningful. Twice it refers to "getting ahead": How culturally specific is that? What does it mean? And why are humble and important automatically diametric opposites -- unless you're already a believer in the "dog-eat-dog" school of life?

There's plenty of research -- which the accompanying article touches on, but doesn't really get to grips with -- covering game theory and the discovery that initial collaboration, coupled with harsh and immediate punishment of betrayal and then a return once more to collaboration, is a more successful evolutionary strategy, at least.

The whole thing feels akin to an IQ test -- a concept which I thought was pretty much exploded outside the Bell Curve constituency -- or, alternatively, the faux-intellectual equivalent of a Cosmo quick quiz. Neither of which exemplars I guess you'd want to follow.

-- Jeremy Scott-Joynt
London

I was pretty disappointed by your Mach test analysis; saying that "High Machs constitute a distinct type: charming, confident and glib" is a pretty big stretch. Many of these people are very socially inept, exuding a sense of self-righteousness or superiority which turns off those around them. Likewise, low Machs can be very socially pleasant and strong people, not "dependent, submissive and socially inept."

People are a lot more complicated than what a 20-point questionnaire loosely based on 16th century ideals can safely analyze.

-- Thane Morgan

The Mach test would have been much nicer had it been a nice clickable form with buttons and auto-scoring, rather than having to write everything down.

-- Stephen Waters
Austin, Texas

Editor's note: The contest format has been adjusted to provide an automatic scoring function. We hope readers will give it another chance.

Broadband warrior
BY MARK GIMEIN
(09/13/99)

Jermoluk asserts that it isn't possible today to switch carriers without a user changing their phone number. Here in Hong Kong we have been doing just that for six months. This past March, the Hong Kong government's telecommunications regulator began implementation of a rule that requires all mobile phone operators to offer number "portability" -- so you can switch to a different operator and keep your old number. Now that mobile phone users can shop around for the best deal without worrying about losing their number, competition among mobile phone operators has greatly intensified. We have seen a dramatic drop in air-time charges, which has led to an even further acceleration of mobile phone usage here. (It is now estimated that more than 50 percent of Hong Kong's entire population has a mobile phone).

Hong Kong has demonstrated that number portability is technically possible -- what is required is a government regulator that demands that it be implemented among the relevant telecommunications companies.

-- Rick Gore
Hong Kong

This article perpetuates a confusion that I'm hearing a lot these days. "Broadband" doesn't simply mean high-bandwidth. Ethernet, from 10 megabit to gigabit, and DSL are both baseband, not broadband. Technically, there may be broadband operation on a cable connection, but it's not really significant to the user, nor is it the sense in which this article (and others) are using "broadband."

-- Jonathan Lundell.

Goodbye, Internet poster boy
BY MARK GIMEIN
(09/11/99)

Mark Gimein, in noting Marc Andreessen's departure as CTO from AOL, has made several leaps of fancy that could have been avoided by straightforward fact-checking.

Gimein writes that "Mozilla.org, the group of Netscape engineers who set out to develop a powerful new open-source version of the Netscape browser, is moribund." Does this explain why the Milestone Builds keep getting better and better, and the only way a developer can currently test their CSS1 compliant pages is by using Mozilla's alpha browser? Why several companies are incorporating Mozilla into their own projects? Sorry, the situation only justifies "moribund" if you're considering a paucity of press releases as such.

"Mozilla.org is working on a messaging application that might compete with AOL's own."

Perhaps if you were getting your news from somewhere other than CNet, the more complex truth would out. First, the client currently buildable with Mozilla is an IRC client, which is not likely to compete with AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ any time soon. Second, one might point out that AOL competes with its own clients. Thirdly, this is an open-source project, which means people can add what they like. This may include features AOL won't do handsprings over, but it also includes important stuff like MathML support coming to Mozilla sooner than anywhere else. With things like XPCOM, standards support and identical cross-platform behavior, Mozilla will revolutionize browsing. Unfortunately, it can do nothing for reporting.

-- Ethan Fremen

Microsoft did win the browser wars and I'm afraid Mozilla is pretty much dead. But without Netscape's contribution, Microsoft would never have felt the threat and would not have poured so much resource into building something better. The winner (for now) is the consumer.

One thing Netscape did champion was the use of open standards for communication on the Internet. With serious competition knocked out of the way, Microsoft is free to pursue its habitual course of perverting open standards into something all its own. Examples of this abound. And this does hurt the consumer.

Microsoft is very adept at running with some else's idea and taking the lion's share of the rewards. But this does not give Gimein the right to be loftily dismisive of those who did take risks and pioneered what we all enjoy today.

-- Charles Razzell

Sharps & Flats: "Bitter"
REVIEWED BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS
(09/10/99)

This personal attack -- thinly veiled as a music review -- only serves to highlight the writer's own angst, reflected in either his pent-up sexuality, frustrations as a wannabe musician or just plain old fucked-upness. It provides little in the way of a coherent, reliable account of what history will surely reveal to be an important and classic musical statement. Ndegeocello has again proven herself to be one of the most important artists of this decade. While she will never sell like those who appear to have Alex Pappademas' approval -- Missy Elliot, Tori Amos, Natalie Merchant -- she will be understood to be an esteemed colleague of John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, Joan Armatrading, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and Prince. Pappademas should be fired; he has no clue about what constitutes good music.

-- Kofi Taha
New York

The American way of bigotry
BY DAVID HOROWITZ
(09/13/99)

The idea of whites being victimized by "black separatism" is a novel way for Horowitz to articulate his hurt feelings but it is historically inaccurate. Furthermore the statement "How can blacks expect justice from whites, if whites cannot expect it from blacks?" is so laced with historical amnesia that it does not serve someone of his intelligence to even utter it. What justice do you speak of, David? Very little reprisal occurred against whites at all after slavery. Did former slaves ever receive their 40 acres and a mule, let alone anything smacking of fair compensation for the theft of their lives? What about the 237 years of slavery and 100 plus years of Jim Crow? Did blacks ever receive justice for any of those heinous periods in America's history?

Japanese-Americans received reparations for their internment in camps during WWII and rightly so. The closest thing to reparations African-Americans received from this country is affirmative action legislation, and the backlash against those programs makes it obvious who the real bigots are.

The history of this country is an explanation, if not justification, for the feelings of bitterness and resentment some black Americans feel. There had to be a racist condition to create a Louis Farrakhan ( in the case of America a particularly harsh racist system). After centuries of mistreatment at the hands of white people, how can you expect black people to hold anything but contempt for their tormentors? What you, David, expect from us requires one thing: trust. And that is something, with few exceptions, that white people in this country have yet to earn.

-- Jamil A. Hamilton

David Horowitz's discussion of the ideal of equality expressed in the Constitution was breathtakingly a-historic. It is true that the words black, white and American were not used. But the words "citizen of the United States" are present. And, the famous compromise in Article 1, Section 2, makes it clear that all persons bound for life (and this presumably meant enslaved blacks, as those who were indentured for a specific period were specifically excluded) were to be counted as only three-fifths of a person, rather than an entire human being. And while the words male and female were not included in the original document, the existence of the 19th amendment would seem to put the lie to the idea that people acted upon any belief the founders may have had in the equal standing of women as citizens.

It is ruthless reinterpretation such as he indulged in in this article that makes me think that David Horowitz is not my friend or ally in the struggle for equality of any kind, however much he might like to be.

-- Adrienne York-Minor

I personally agree with Horowitz's point of view that the NAACP case against gun manufacturers is entirely specious, but the lawsuit is emblematic of a general victim complex that pervades our litigious society. This is manifest in other phenomena -- such as the lawsuits against tobacco companies over smokers' health problems. But I also agree with the White observation that Horowitz's seemingly reasonable premise launches into unrepentant racist diatribe about black character in general. Horowitz flippantly dismisses the idea of a criminal justice system skewed in regards to race, despite ample evidence that blacks are prosecuted and punished blatantly disproportionately to whites for the same crimes. Also the "why isn't there a black exodus?" and "why do so many Haitians want to come here?" is as boorish and ignorant an utterance as ever could be heard from Archie Bunker. At the very least, if Horowitz wants to raise questions about blacks' ability to parent, he should expect some equally strident criticism of himself.

-- Eric Whitcombe

Horowitz doesn't acknowledge the real problem with "racial" segregation" -- that it's based on the myth that a scientific measurement called "race" even exists. I won't mention the indisputable fact that most so-called "black" Americans also have European and American Indian ancestry, just as most so-called "white" Americans, if they dare look into it, will find a galaxy of "non-white" forebears.

The Eurocentric model of four or five tidy "racial" categories, into which all humans can fit, is more than 200 years old and disastrously outmoded. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach formulated this taxonomy in 1776 in his seminal work, "De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa" (On the Natural Variety of Mankind). As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his essay "The Geometer of Race" (Discover magazine, November 1994), Blumenbach believed that people from the Caucasus were the most perfectly beautiful on earth, and therefore were created first at the point of origin of all mankind. In Blumenbach's taxonomy, all racial variations are degenerations from the Caucasian ideal.

Science has moved on. So why don't we? Why do we still use non-scientific artifacts like "white" and "black" to describe the minor facts of our variation? Why do we continue to subscribe legally to 18th century notions that limit our horizons and describe distinctions without a difference? In 200 years, when everyone in America looks pretty much alike because, simply put, people like to mate, our descendents are going to laugh at all our quaint ideas about "black" and "white" races. And they'll finally understand the only useful fact about the subject: There is just one race in the world, and it's called "human." Any other talk of "race" is a waste of breath.

-- Mark Hoffman

As a black man, I've heard the type of statements put forth by the black female reader Horowitz quotes all my life in one form or another. Too many of us still subscribe to this way of thinking and it's unfortunate. We need to learn that incisive criticism from any quarter is priceless. Sometimes those outside of your group are the in best position to point out where you are. I don't at all consider Horowitz a racist just because he points out unflattering things about black people. In fact I admire his willingness to express himself on this subject, which others stay silent on.

-- Andrew Ricks
Houston

I keep thinking that David Horowitz has tongue stuck firmly in cheek as he writes this stuff, that he can't really believe what he claims. He complains that whites can't criticize blacks, but he's made a living out of doing just that. He whines that he's being called a racist, but disagree with him and you're accused of the vilest motives in the most inflammatory language.

Let's get back to this idea that blacks are immune to criticism; this is where you realize he is kidding. As Ishmael Reed has said, there's a virtual "industry of pathology" when it comes to blacks. The sociology of black deficits has permeated academia as well as the news media. Where Horowitz and I would probably agree is that it doesn't differ much in whether the media is "liberal" or "conservative." So the New Republic (conservative?) runs a piece about condemning blacks for objecting to police brutality and racial profiling in the wake of the Diallo killing and the (liberal?) Washington Post does the same.

Now Horowitz wants the world to know that separatism and lack of moral courage are "our fault." Funny thing, this has been the fundamental criticism of black people since time immemorial; I have a copy of the famed entry on "Negroes" in the 1924 Encyclopedia Britannica, which describes us as child-like, incapable of moral decision-making and fun-loving. I must concede that people like Horowitz have taken the fun part out -- unless it's implied in that some of us still make lots of illegitimate babies.

One has to really question Horowitz's motives when he fails to address the issue of access to media. Being heard is fundamental in defining public dialogue, but his assumption is that we all have equal access, which is of course generally untrue. I think he was really shocked that Jack White, a black writer, was as free to express his opinion as Horowitz does all the time -- and in a major media vehicle at that. In fact, months go by without black thinkers appearing on the op-ed pages or in the shrinking number of magazines that still deal with issues.

Whites begin believing that people like Farrakhan or Sharpton have vast followings because they get better press coverage than the heads of the Urban League, the NAACP or black elected officials. If we're losing a "communal" voice, as Mr. Horowitz complains, it's because there aren't a lot of venues where we can have a real discussion, where the views of black folks are heard in context and in detail.

But here I go being serious again. I'm convinced Horowitz is kidding us all because he played that favorite trump card of people who want to put blacks up against the wall (metaphorically only, I hope): O.J. A lot of black people didn't really cheer for O.J. (he never had much to do with blacks anyway); they cheered for a justice system that had finally moved closer to real parity. If you're a celebrity and you have enough money, you can get away with murder -- even if you're black.

-- Joel Dreyfuss