Month: November 2008

Rob Horning bashes Facebook:

In exchange for making our social lives more convenient, Facebook seizes the right to transform our sociality into commercially useful information, turn our relationships into market research and use that data to anticipate and shape our future selves with the ads it calculates that we should be presented with. It manages our friendships and then processes the data interrelationships to guide the process of how we subsequently develop our identities through its site.

Since it is mediating our friendships, and in effect making the effort for us, it is also directing what the fruits of that effort will be, supplying the framework through which friendships develop and making itself the very medium of friendship. At that point Facebook succeeds into making friendship a consumption product, and itself as the service provider. The other friends we have through it, on the other side the screen, are the product it marshalls for us. And our consumption of Facebook, rather than the actual experience of friendship with all the effort that would otherwise require, now shapes our personalities—in accordance with the commercial goals it has set our for ourselves. In that way, it isolates us more by promising to mediating our connections with the rest of the world. It deprives us of the optin [sic] to make more effort, and make our social efforts more meaningful. Is this too pessimistic?

Peter Schiff, mocked for so long, is not exactly reassuring:

My take – if you missed it yesterday – on the Washington Post’s Ben Wittes’ attempt to euphemize away the war crimes of the past seven years.

Nate Silver crunches the regression analysis. But with numbers like these, it’s Florida 2000 all over again.

From NRO’s K-Lo death spiral:

There’s no civil war on the Right. Ramesh Ponnuru, Time.

From the actual article:

Republicans are feuding in the wake of the November election. But they are not descending into civil war. That would be too tidy. What is unfolding instead is an overlapping series of Republican civil wars, each with its own theme.

“Who are we as men to say that we are called by God to the ministry of priesthood, but women are not? That our call is valid, but theirs is not? We profess as Catholics that the invitation to the priesthood comes from God, and it seems to me that we are tampering with the sacred.” – Rev. Roy Bourgeois, who is being threatened with excommunication for ordaining a woman as a priest.

(Hat tip: Simplistic Art)

"What exactly would be lost in our struggle for equal treatment and a bit of respect from voters, if this worthless-for-decades Democratic Party front group were to close up shop?" – Larry Kramer on the Human Rights Campaign.

Meanwhile, JoinTheImpact – the Obama model for gay equality, as opposed to HRC’s Clinton model – is growing. Check out upcoming protests here.

"For many years, I believed it was foolish and faithless to acknowledge all that is wrong with my life. I believed I was a new creation, and admitting anything less was not acceptable. I missed seeing a lot that was wrong with my community, my family, and myself because I thought the Christian thing to do was to emphasize the positive, glory be to God. But Jesus came for the sick, not the healthy–by which he surely meant that he came for those who know they are sick, and not those who, being sick, nonetheless claim they are healthy. Since I took up the habit of lamenting, my life has not improved, at least not directly. But life improvement isn’t the goal. The goal is faithfulness and servanthood–becoming like the image of God in Christ. I’ve come to believe meeting that goal involves severe honesty, self-awareness, and nakedness. There is power in honesty, because it removes any hint of deception, and puts us before our God as we really are," – Patton Dodd, Beliefnet.

Joan Acocella reviews the latest parenting literature:

Marano thinks that the infant-stimulation craze was a scandal. She accepts the idea of brain plasticity, but she believes that the sculpting goes on for many years past infancy and that its primary arena should be self-stimulation, as the child ventures out into the world. While Mother was driving the kid nuts with the eight-hundredth iteration of “This Little Piggy,” she should have been letting him play on his own. Marano assembles her own arsenal of neurological research, guaranteed to scare the pants off any hovering parent. As children explore their environment by themselves—making decisions, taking chances, coping with any attendant anxiety or frustration—their neurological equipment becomes increasingly sophisticated, Marano says. “Dendrites sprout. Synapses form.” If, on the other hand, children are protected from such trial-and-error learning, their nervous systems “literally shrink.”

As gay couples organize and protest, HRC has a California event coming up: go shopping at Bloomingdales to raise money to pay their salaries.