Digging through old unread links, I found this New York Times story on online dating and its failures. Much of what is said is true, although one thing they don’t note is the often depressive and stormy nature of relationships online, which I think is fostered by the lack of emotional warmthy and nuance in text communications. There’s no way you can replicate a light brush on the arm and a smile in e-mail or chat. The best you can manage is often a kind of sappy-depressive-longing mood, which is all well and good every now and then but tends to degenerate into desperation over time. It’s very easy to blow up into fights and very hard to resolve them online.

Not surprisingly, the story also doesn’t stop to question whether there might be other major factors besides the online nature of the relationships – such as the inherent falsity and fabrication built into these kind of anonymous, random matching services. As long as you’re engaging with someone as a filler for some kind of existential placeholder – Date, Lover, Fiance, Spouse – rather than a real, breathing, complex person, I think you will always see these games of false expectations and failed relationships and so on, whether you meet on IRC or in the local bar. The only difference is that in a physical meeting you can’t help but be confronted with the reality of a person, to a much greater degree than online. And, on the other hand, if you really engage with people online as real people and not behind the facade of Hooking Up, then you’re much more likely to have a successful relationship (platonic or otherwise) with them.

Some $600 million of your tax dollars are at work in Colombia funding mercenaries in the Drug War without any accountability to the people or responsibility on the shoulders of the government when they commit human rights abuses [CorpWatch]. At least four Americans employed by DynCorp have died or been killed in action while in Colombia, but since they are not "US military" there aren’t any of those inconvenient body bags on the network news; they may as well be tourists who died abroad. The US sure has learned its lesson from Vietnam: when you get involved in bloody, immoral imperialist wars, outsource it so that you don’t have to deal with hostile US opinion when they see what you’re doing blasted all over the evening news.

A wonderful article by Pagan Kennedy explores the concept of the platonic Boston marriage between two straight women who have committed to living with each other [Ms.]. It also begins to explore the features of the patriarchal world that make this kind of arrangement so hard for so many women. An interesting sidebar: the emergence and sensationalism of lesbianism (we’ll call it pseudolesbian from here on out to distinguish it from actual women-loving-women) in male-dominated culture was emerging precisely at the same time as the most pitched part of the battle for suffrage, and women’s inclusion into the political sphere in general. Pseudolesbianism emerged again as a pornographic staple in the 1970s as the Second Wave entered its most pitched and giddiest phase. It seems like the pornographic sexualization of intimate relationships between women is the primordial Backlash, and is used as a bludgeon to help keep women isolated from one another in the same way that sexualization of intimacy is used to keep men and women from forming deep friendships and the same way that faggot is used to abort any emotional or physical intimacy between men. In each of the cases the relationships formed are then shuttled off into some anonymous-ideal form of relating: through Femininity, through Heterosexuality, through Masculinity. Of course, the effect of each is very different: Masculinity is culturally conditioned to dominance, aggression, authoritarianism, instrumental reason; Femininity to submission, passivity, emotion; Heterosexuality is what you get when you put the two of them together. We need to begin the project that Kennedy evokes so beautifully, of learning to live together and be present to one another, imagining alternative ways without the bludgeon of a patriarchal sexuality invading that life. (Well, hell, you might argue: it’s not just this platonic stuff; we also need to relearn how to have sexual relationships without the bludgeon of a patriarchal sexuality invading that life. And you’d be right).

As leery as I am of the idea that hooking everyone to the Internet is all we need to solve all the economic problems, I do think that this program in Baltimore’s Section VIII housing [NY Times] to provide free computers and high-speed Internet access along with computer literacy training is a nice step in the right direction, and ought to be expanded. One quibble: why doesn’t the housing authority let the residents actually own the computers they give away? Of course, this is a problem that expands to the rental economy of the Section VIII system as a whole. What people in poverty really need is affordable housing that will be their own, not a shelter provided by the government that gives them a cheaper way into the system of rental exploitation.

At the E3 in Los Angeles, one of the world’s biggest orgies of commercial capitalism, Rockstar Games unveiled an upcoming game loosely premised on the violent elements of the anti-WTO mass protests in Seattle [Indymedia Newswire]. Sometimes the world is just so damn surreal that it defies commentary….