- Julian on the difference between slippery slopes and reductio ad absurdum.
- Also, Julian defends Noam Chomsky. Okay, not really. Or, he defends Chomsky from one particular attack while maintaining a face-saving disdain for Chomsky in general. Whew!
- Speaking of Chomsky, this letter by Donald Johnson pretty much expresses my own views of Chomsky (so I don’t have to do it myself).
- And via Julian, check out Judge Richard Posner’s opinion in the McFarlane/Gaiman lawsuit (pdf link). Gaiman won (pending further appeals?), which is the outcome I would have hoped for. The decision is entertaining not only for Posner’s discussion of the copyright issues involved with superhero characters, but also for his surprising detailed explanation of Spawn’s origins.
One thing I found intriguing was a reference to a 1954 lawsuit involving Sam Spade: “Hammett was not claiming copyright in Sam Spade—on the contrary, he wanted to reuse his own character but to be able to do so he had to overcome Warner Brothers’ claim to own the copyright.”
- THE PERFECT PLANET: Comics, Games, and World-Building, by Dylan Horrocks, is the best thing I’ve read in ages. Everyone interested in – well, in comics, role-playing games or world-building – should read it. It deserves a blog entry of its own, but who knows when (if) I’ll get around to it, so I’m linking it now. Via Kip.
- Boils and Blinding Torment is the meanest, most cynical, nastiest Buffy site I’ve read. It is of course my new favorite.
- Body and Soul on high class and low class Republicans.
- I always hated Snuffelupagus.
- The Fool’s Blog documents an interesting case of hypocripsy going from one Boy Scout lawsuit to another.
- This debate in Sharleen Mondal’s livejournal – over a silent (or was it?) protest at a Daniel Pipes speech, and what counts as censorship – is quite entertaining. Read this followup post, as well.
- Flea of One Good Thing is the best storyteller in the Blogoverse, bar none. Sure wish she’d get off Blogspot, though – damn thing takes forever to load. Sometimes I think the biggest advantage of Movable Type is being able to link to single blog entries (rather than to somewhere on a loooong, slow-loading page of blog entries).
- A Day in the Life, Feministe, NegroPlease and Diesel Nation discuss sexism and hip-hop.
- A good briefing paper on “Marriage, Poverty, and Public Policy,” by Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre, lays out the arguments against using marriage as a government anti-poverty tool.
- Meanwhile, last Friday in Sudan, over 100 women were raped in an attack by militias. I don’t even know how to respond to events like this; sitting and screaming seems so inadequate, but I don’t have anything constructive or intelligent to say about it, frankly.
- Here’s a bit of good news: The formation of a Democracy Caucus in the UN. Congrats to The Fifty Minute Hour, who had a hand in it.
- Angela’s Math on why you can fit more flat round shapes (like plain M&Ms) than spheres (like peanut M&Ms) into a jar.
- Good Nicholas Kristof essay, “Terrors of Childbirth,” describes several victims of lack of decent maternal care worldwide. Thank goodness we have the pro-life movement around to cause things like this.
- A good Jane Bryant Quinn essay explains why Social Security Isn’t Doomed – in fact, it’s in pretty good shape, assuming none of its “rescuers” manage to kill it off. Via Nathan Newman.
- I wish I could see this all-male production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, which sounds quite neat. (Via MsMusings).
@Dianne: I guess the silver lining with Italy is that it shows that even when fascists can capture the executive…
About difficulties with linking to individual posts on blogspots: I found out, by pure accident, that this works ONLY if you have a proper title for each post ( in the space allotted for titles). After I fixed all my posts, the permalink does work and gives the post linked to on top of the page.
As flea has the same template that I use (great minds and all that :)), I suspect that it’s the same bug with hers. The blogger forums suspected a bug, but the solution is my very own!
Blogspot rules, because it’s FREE!!!! I never have to pay a single cent to blog! And I never have to blog-beg or take ads (other than Blogspot’s banner ad) or anything! Well worth the few extra seconds…
Terrible news from Sudan. That’s a ghastly situation.
And in turn, I wish you’d come to my house and build a shiny new website for me and teach me how to put up pictures and things. And paint the living room. While you’re in the neighborhood. What could it hurt?
Thanks for the kind words, though. :)
This post’s title totally made my day.
“Linkie.” Heh heh.
I really want to be fair to Nicholas Kristof’s stuff, but whenever I read another one of his columns I can’t help but notice just how very much he wants us to know that he REALLY, REALLY cares about the plight Third World women even when nobody else (and especially not ‘mainstream feminists’) does. I appreciate the awareness that he is raising around these issues, but given the five or six columns we read about young Srey Neth and Srey Mom, his incessant posture as the Abe Lincoln of women in the global South, and his blithe disregard for existing organizing work on the ground (here he seems to mention it only to talk about how ineffectual he thinks it has been–rather than, say, using his position as a columnist at the New York Times to drive people to these organizations’ websites and encourage them to contribute desperately-needed funds…).
Maybe I’m just a cynic; maybe I’m still just steamed about his jabs in previous columns. But Kristof almost invariably strikes me as yet another powerful man swooping in to “save” women, rather than making a serious effort to work with women who are trying to solve their own damn problems, thank you very much.
(I think that Katha Pollitt hit the nail on the head in her article for THE NATION: “Kristof to the Rescue?” @ http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040301&s=pollitt …)