Month: November 2008

A reminder that not all of Utah and not all Mormons are anti-equality. A Prop 8 news round-up is here.

Rob Horning responds to reports of consumers buying more generic products because of the recession:

It seems silly that people would need to discover that there’s little qualitative difference between branded and unbranded goods. But perhaps what makes this discovery so salient for consumers is the reassurance it provides that their changing spending behavior won’t lead inevitably to a decreased standard of living. You can kept the same sort of stuff, only cheaper, when you go generic. People generally choose to fail to recognize this discovery in flush times because it impedes the chief appeal of brands, which is to serve as a vector for the consumer to experience the lifestyle marketing for various products vicariously—brands allows us to turn the soap we use into an expression of our inner truth, to make buying a new shirt our momentary entrée into a world of glamor, to make a richer identity for ourselves through the myriad associations brands can be made to bear.

From last weekend’s NYT magazine, Katherine Zoepf tries to understand what motivates Jihadists:

Today [Abu Sulayman] notes that the Qaeda camps where he worked as a training instructor offered him clear professional advancement. His new life — in a middle-class Jeddah suburb, doing shift work at an electrical company — doesn’t provide the same sense of purpose. Even so, he has little regard for those who have followed in his footsteps.

“Most people just want to carry weapons,” Abu Sulayman said. They do not, as he put it, have especially sophisticated religious arguments. “For me, it was always more about the feeling that I wanted to help the Muslims. But jihad is complicated. If you’re heading to Afghanistan or Iraq, do you really have the facts you need to get involved on the right side?

A Congolese boy, ill with Cholera, is treated in a clinic at the Don Bosko orphanage November 10, 2008 in the town of Goma, Congo. Over 250,000 people have been displaced after fighting erupted between the rebel CNDP and the army in the last several weeks. According to reports, violence continues despite a cease fire declared by (CNDP) rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda, whose stated goal is to defend Congo’s Tutsi minority from Hutu militias and to bring down a corrupt government. By Uriel Sinai/Getty.

Ta-Nehisi was up at 5 am this morning.

A cat and a diet soda box:

A reader writes:

For several weeks up to and thru the election I was dead set against dealing back with Joe Leiberman.  Now, I find myself thinking, well, this is what BHO might actually mean by conciliation, compassion, political-pragmatic smarts. It’s not like this Joe is a war criminal —though he may have been palling around with some —he was/is a political turncoat, working in opposition but — apparently following his own moral-policy judgment in doing so — so now he may get to come back around.

Keeping him in the the Dems caucus indeed would signal the new politics. So, as has happened so often, Obama’s temperament and judgement trumps the knee-jerk reaction.

I understand the anger in the gay community right now but this isn’t productive:

Gay rights activist John Aravosis, whose well-trafficked AmericaBlog.com is urging the boycott, is unapologetic about targeting Utah rather than California, where voters defined marriage in the state Constitution as a heterosexual act. Utah, Aravosis said, “is a hate state,” and on this issue, “at a fundamental level, the Utah Mormons crossed the line. . . . They just took marriage away from 20,000 couples and made their children bastards. You don’t do that and get away with it.”

Jim Burroway responds:

There are businesses I refuse to patronize on principle, even though I’m sure they don’t miss my dollars much. While I question the effectiveness of boycotts as a tactic, I’m all for it in principle as long as the target is appropriate.  But boycotting an entire state? I’m not so sure what that will accomplish. It seems to me we risk harming those who had nothing to do with this, while letting others — businesses in California, Arizona and elsewhere — off the hook.

Look, guys: we lost an initiative. We lost it by a much smaller margin than in the past, and the next generation will pass it. Boycott as you feel like; protest by all means. But in the end, even constitutional protections require popular support. We have come from nowhere to a near-majority in less than fifteen years since the first marriage case. We have marriage equality in two states, and civil unions in many others. We are winning. If we do not blow it in a hissy-fit that borders on intolerance.