There’s, like, ten thousand things I’ve missed posting links to lately, while I’ve been busy painting and working and suchlike. I won’t even attempt to catch up. But here’s a few of the things that are open in my browser right now:
- Over at Cut on the Bias, I’ve been participating in a discussion of art and comics with the (mostly right-wing) group that hangs out there. Right-wing cartoonist Chris Muir, of Day by Day, has also been contributing. (I like Chris’ cartoons better than he likes mine, alas).
(If anyone from Alas comments over there, by the way, please be polite!)
- Susanna linked to this essay about Dave Sim’s misogyny, which I thought was pretty good.
- The Washington Post reports on a study which found that the more people watch FoxNews, the less they’re able to accurately answer factual questions about the war in Iraq.
- You may think you’re geeky, but compared to some people, you’re not a geek at all. Check out this apartment for sale on Ebay.
- Lots of people have linked to this Calpundit post on the Texas Republican party, and rightly so. The Republican party is being taken over by people who are, frankly, scarey.
- Of all the Rush-mocking articles I’ve read lately, this one – If Bill Clinton were an addict, this is how Rush might spin it – is the most on-target.
- Arnold Kling’s much-linked tech-central column criticizing Paul Krugman is fairly on-target, I think. Although Krugman actually uses a lot more “type C” arguments than Kling credits him for. Via Brad DeLong.
- If you haven’t been reading the comments to PDP’s post “Ms. Fat-so,” you should – there’s been some really good discussion there. Fatshadow also added a typically well-written comment on her own blog.
- The best interview with candidates I’ve seen in ages: a local paper uses Philip K. Dick’s Voight-Kampff Test to find out if the candidates are humans or replicants. Via Charles Murtaugh.
- Have you heard of Terri Schiavo? I hadn’t, until yesterday. She’s a woman in a coma (or maybe not, according to some folks) who was taken off her feeding tube yesterday. It’s a fascinating issue, and one that’s apparently very big in some right-wing circles. Amy Welborn has some informative links. Or for a wider range of views, check google news. Via Eve Tushnet.
- “Resolved: It is a complete fabrication that the Bush administration argued in the runup to the war that there was an imminent thread from Iraq.” This question is being debated semi-formally by Jonathan Schwarz and Sebastian Holsclaw on Daniel Drezner’s blog; if you enjoy debate, check it out.
- Will Baude of Crescat Sententia points to an good Dahlia Lithwick article taking apart Greg Easterbrook’s “no doesn’t mean no” argument. There’s much more discussion of this going on – scroll around on Crescat Sententia to find more links.
- Also at Crescat Sententia, Amy Lamboley responds to part of my wage gap series. I don’t really disagree with Amy; obviously (and thanks mainly to feminism), things have improved substantially since Amy’s mother entered the workforce. If Amy’s arguing that discrimination is no longer a significant factor at all, I’d disagree with her, but I’m not sure that is what she’s arguing.
- Eve Tushnet has been arguing against same-sex marriage. I disagree with Eve, but her blog is a good place to go if you want to see the most intelligent, coherent arguments agailable against SSM – just click here and then scroll upwards. I hope to find time to respond to some of Eve’s points in the next week.
Oh, and hey: Congrats to Eve on her new post as editor of the Marriage Deabte blog.
Whoops – time for me to run to work. I haven’t spell-checked this post; hopefully none of my typos will be too humiliating..
hopefully none of my typos will be too humiliating.
You mean like “Deabte”? p
You may think you’re geeky, but compared to some people, you’re not a geek at all. Check out this apartment for sale on Ebay.
Heh, that’s nothing. Apparently this guy has started an entire business doing this sort of thing. Somehow, the idea that there is enough of a market for this sort of thing that a business can survive is even more disturbing than one person building this thing and one crazy person buying it.
There’s no such thing as a humiliating typo.
The Voight-Kampff Test interviews are brilliant.
My dad’s in a rest home, after awakening from a two-month coma, and recently they asked us to sign DNR papers for him. There’s a dilemma, as they presented it: sign DNR and they will never use any means to ressuscitate in a crisis. Don’t sign, and he has to go to hospital for every little thing, and moreover, if he goes on life support for twenty years they cannot pull the plug. I’ve been thinking their review of options was inaccurate, as this news item confirms.
Upon reading the comic strip discussion, Barry, I am once again struck by what a patient saint you are online.
(Too bad you’re such a pissy curmudgeon in real life.)
Do you think Rush Limbaugh is for mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders now? It’s cray that there’s marijuana offenders rotting in jail on mandatory sentences when rapists get to walk out on parole.
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There are as many intelligent, coherent arguments against preventing marriage between two people who want to be married as there are in preventing women from voting.
And if your right wing fellow cartoonists doesn’t like your cartoons as much as you like his, that should tell you more than you need to know about his ideological bias and whether or not you may be wasting your time trying to be fair and balanced about his work.
You may think you’re geeky, but compared to some people, you’re not a geek at all. Check out this apartment for sale on Ebay.
Wow, I’m stunned with amazement, both that this exists and that someone would willingly live there.
Arnold Kling’s much-linked tech-central column criticizing Paul Krugman is fairly on-target, I think. Although Krugman actually uses a lot more “type C” arguments than Kling credits him for.
Interesting and well argued, but I completely agree with you that Krugman is not as guilty of using only “type M” arguments as Kling maintains. Also, I find “type M” arguments to be extremely useful if they address actual (and not merely assumed) motives (which is typically how Krugman uses them), since there is a signficant difference between isolated actions and actions that are part of a concerted plan. Krugman does an excellent job of laying out this concerted plan and for this I find his “type M” arguments to be useful.
You wrote: Eve Tushnet has been arguing against same-sex marriage. I disagree with Eve, but her blog is a good place to go if you want to see the most intelligent, coherent arguments agailable against SSM
If that’s the best of the arguments out there then opponents of SSM are a sorry lot indeed. The arguments were well written, but honestly that’s about the best that I can say. They are more than simply nonsensical unless one holds exceptionally backwards views on both gender and gender preference (and not terribly sensible even then), they are also deeply bigotted against queer people and deeply anti-feminist.
She wrote: 1) Marriage was not designed to respond to the desires of and pressures on same-sex couples, and we shouldn’t expect it to do so.
By that definition, marriage should be abolished, since families are significantly different now (and in fact have been different ever since the spread of both contraception and feminism) than they were 50 years ago. We are not (thank the gods) in the 1950s anymore and we likely won’t be in that sort of repressive society again. The Victorian model of marriage evolved during an era when gender roles and career choices were very different than they are today. I’d definitely maintain that many (perhaps most, especially given that most married women work outside the home) modern straight marriages are far more different from “traditional” marriages than they are from modern queer relationships. OTOH, this an excellent argument against marriage existing at all in the modern day. I always enjoy seeing people I disagree with shoot themselves in the foot so skillflly.
2) Marriage is an honor certain kinds of relationship earn from society because of what they do for society.
In short, only staights can properly raise children because queer relationships are simply too patholgical to do so. This is the entire basis of this argument. An assumption that queer relationships are both unstable and pathological pervades all of her foolish and bigoted arguments.
3) Same-sex marriage is likely to actively harm heterosexual marriage and family-making.
In other words, unless we restrict people to one limited definition of legally recognized relationships and by extension one set of legally recognized gender roles, society will fall apart. This is perhaps the most bigotted of the arguments and homophobia is only a small portion of the bigotry.
I completely agree with her statement that the debate is more about marriage than about queer people and her vision of marriage is anti-feminist and deeply regressive. Anyone who holds these views is not even remotely a feminist and essentially wishes gender roles and relationship patterns to return the the way they were before feminism and contraception. I find her ideas on SSM, gender, marriage, families, and the entirety of social dynamics to be utterly vile and lacking in any redeeming qualities beyond skilled writing.
“Upon reading the comic strip discussion, Barry, I am once again struck by what a patient saint you are online.
“(Too bad you’re such a pissy curmudgeon in real life.)”
With me, it’s just the opposite. :p
“You may think you’re geeky, but compared to some people, you’re not a geek at all. Check out this apartment for sale on Ebay.”
(sorry…I have no blog etiquette – how do you do those quote things?)
Good god almighty. I like to imagine what this place will look like with a few empty pizza boxes and dirty socks scattered around.
There’s a hotel in Wisconsin that needs this room (I think Captain Kirk would be more at home there than Captain Picard).
http://www.lileks.com/institute/motel/dine2.html
A bit after that Krugman article was published decrying his use of “Type M” arguments, Crooked Timber posted a good rebuttal. I couldn’t find the post itself, as I’m in a hurry, but that link goes to their main site. Browse around in early to mid October and you’ll find it.
PinkDreamPoppies,
I think you are talking about this 10/09 post (“De motivis nil nisi bonum”) by Henry Farrell.
Arnold Kling has been responding in the comments.
The Dave Sim article was interesting. My first husband was a comic book artist (we self-published our books) who idolized Dave Sim. We saw him at conventions, hung out, they talked. Sim once remarked that “women suck the creativity out of men.” My husband latched onto that, as well as other Simian thoughts (pun absolutely intended). Needless to say, we didn’t stay married.
We are not here because we are free.
We are here because we are not free.
There’s no escaping reason, no denying purpose.
Without purpose, we would not exist.
It is purpose that created us. Purpose that connects us.
Purpose that pulls us, guides us, drives us.
It is purpose that defines us.
It is purpose that binds us.
We are here because of you Mr. Anderson,
we’re here to take from you what you tried to take from us: Purpose.
(sorry…I have no blog etiquette – how do you do those quote things?)
Mary,
I have been wondering about it for a long time, too. Therefore, I feel particularly sympathetic with your interrogation. I have been asking the same question, but never got anybody to answer and finally found it googling. Here is a Complete Index of HTML Tags. Click on “Anchor” to learn how to create the mysterious “clickable link”.
N. B.: capitalizing is optional (of course, it goes faster without).
Thank you Jimmy Ho! MG
You may think you’re geeky, but compared to some people, you’re not a geek at all. Check out this apartment for sale on Ebay.
If it’s got an honest-to-goodness replicator in the kitchen, I’ll take it!
To do the quotes in italics (like this) then put <i> and </i> around the quote.
To quote things in an indented paragraph:
Type <blockquote> and </blockquote> around the quote you want to put in a block quote.
To do a link to another site, like this one to Google, then type <a href=”X”> and </a> around the words you want to be the link with X being the address of the site (including the http:// part).
Bolding is done with <b> and </b>.
These can, of course, be nested to apply more than one type of formatting to a piece of text. So if I wanted to have a bold, italicised, block quoted link to Google I’d type <a href=”http://www.google.com”><blockquote><b><i>Take me to your Google!</i></b></blockquote></a>
And it would look like this:
Of course, Jimmy Ho linked to a great site to help you learn some more html (just be aware that not all html tags seem to work in the comments threads, so preview before you post). Cheers.
If it’s got an honest-to-goodness replicator in the kitchen, I’ll take it!
You have two million dollars?!?
Thanks for the great info, PDP. I’ve cut and pasted it for later reference. I should be embarrassed, since I actually design and maintain a web site as part of my job, but Dreamweaver makes one lazy. For some reason, it didn’t occur to me that html tags would do the trick.
Cheers also! MG
I think the criticism of Krugman’s M argument is incorrect. Krugman is making the case that the Bush Administration consistently makes bad policy decisions because it is driven by bad motives. Krugman’s theory about this might be wrong, but it is silly to say it shouldn’t even be raised.
It’s also a little strange coming from an economist, when mainstream economists generally assume people are driven by self-interest and often criticize this or that government program (especially welfare programs) because the incentives are wrong.
So it’s okay to tacitly assume the worst about ordinary people, especially the poor, but our great elected leaders must be assumed to be made of purer stuff. To make my point in a slightly less demagogic way, one should take into account people’s baser motives in designing a welfare program, but the same is true when analyzing the behavior of politicians.
Hmm…I think there certainly was an “ongoing thread” from Iraq – you just had to check out any discussion forum!