Month: December 2008

Caleb Crain explains the value of modern slang:

One comes a little closer to a definition of slang by thinking about context. Dirty words suggest that the audience is no better than the speaker, and vice versa. Slang, on the other hand, usually suggests that speaker and audience share membership in a group. A prostitute who describes a slow-to-satisfaction customer as a thirty-three, thereby analogizing him to the standard speed for long-playing vinyl records, is probably not speaking to a police officer. A gay man who describes a lover with a similar quirk as long-winded is probably not speaking to a heterosexual. The implied identifications are flexible, however. If a gay hairdresser in London offers to zhoosh you, it’s safe to accept his titivation even if you’re a straight man. The word might make you blush, but it won’t compromise your orientation; it merely dignifies you with honorary membership in the group of people who understand how he talks.

Jacob Sullum summarizes the depressing news:

According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report (PDF) released yesterday, 2.3 million Americans were behind bars in 2007, 1.5 percent more than in 2006 and a new record. The number includes about 780,000 people in local jails, 1.4 million in state prisons, and 200,000 in federal prison. Roughly one in five state prisoners and more than half of federal prisoners were serving time for drug offenses. Assuming the percentage of drug offenders in jail is similar to the percentage in state prison, the total is more than half a million. "That is ten times the total in 1980," notes the Drug Policy Alliance, "and more than all of western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for all offenses."

A fascinating little detour through the brilliant design of the Obama campaign. Like the campaign as a whole, it evolved as a result of clear strategy and tactical experimentation. My favorite loser below the fold:

RFK’s son (and a friend), Christopher, is up for Obama’s Senate seat, according to this.

James Frey returns:

Proving both his media savvy and his masochism, Frey volunteered to intern at Gawker, the very site that ruthlessly and relentlessly ridiculed him in the aftermath of that little tiff Frey had with Oprah and the rest of the country a while back. Gawker, another connoisseur of publicity, enthusiastically agreed, and Frey spent yesterday at their offices.

Naturally, he was asked to fact-check several posts…

Bubble wrap protects a framed photograph of President-elect Barack Obama available at Political Americana’s inaugural store near the White House December 12, 2008 in Washington, DC. Opening in time for the holidays, the store carries thousands of items including life-size photographic cutouts of Obama, t-shirts, buttons, mugs and golf balls. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty.

A new study questions the wisdom of graphic anti-meth ads:

Erceg-Hurn told the Sydney Morning Herald that teens “look at those ads and they don’t see themselves or their friends because the first few times they use ice (a nickname for meth), they simply feel euphoria. (Unlike the kids depicted in the ads) they are not becoming prostitutes or killing their parents, so they reject the message. These ads could be backfiring, and it’s time for a new approach.”

The Smoking Gun has found Van Halen’s infamous "no brown M&M’s in the band’s dressing room" rider. Why did the band ask for this?:

While the underlined rider entry has often been described as an example of rock excess, the outlandish demand of multimillionaires, the group has said the M&M provision was included to make sure that promoters had actually read its lengthy rider. If brown M&M’s were in the backstage candy bowl, Van Halen surmised that more important aspects of a performance–lighting, staging, security, ticketing–may have been botched by an inattentive promoter.

(Hat tip: Angry Bear)

Camille Paglia asserts:

Marriage is a religious concept that should be defined and administered only by churches.

This is a very strange reading of Catholic history and American history. Marriage was not a sacrament until the thirteenth century; many Protestants, most famously Luther, denied its sacramental quality through the sixteenth century. The first marriages in America were civil, not religious in nature:

When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, among the first things they did for the well-ordering of their new commonwealth was to institute the Dutch custom of civil marriage with which they had become familiar during their long sojourn in the Netherlands.

The Dutch made civil marriage the law of the land in 1590, and the first marriage in New England, that of Edward Winslow to the widow Susannah White, was performed on May 12, 1621, in Plymouth by Governor William Bradford, in exercise of his office as magistrate.

Now it is true that the churches have conflated civil and religious marriage ever since and this has become part of the messy civil-religious aspect of marriage in contemporary America. And Camille, as usual, has a point: a cleaner solution would be civil unions for everyone, gay and straight, with everyone also free to marry subsequently in a church or synagogue or mosque or temple of their choosing. But given the practical fact that no one is ever going to persuade a majority of Americans to abandon civil marriage as an institution, this is practically speaking what the marriage movement is fighting for. Civil marriage for all; religious marriage for all who want to supplement it with God’s grace. Why is that so hard for some people of faith to grasp? Why are their marriages defined not by the virtues they sustain but the people they exclude?

Most enjoyable:

I realize this is ancient history. As a friend who doesn’t see why I am raking this all up argues, it’s not as if today’s left is bristling with macho streetfighters. It’s hard to imagine anyone now applauding the Manson murders, as Dohrn notoriously did in l969, or dedicating a manifesto to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan. But just because it’s ancient history doesn’t mean you get to rewrite it to make yourself look good, just another idealistic young person upset about the war and racism. We were all upset about the war and racism.

I knew people in the Progressive Labor Party who were so upset they joined the army to radicalize the troops. A freshman in my dorm was so upset she quit college, joined the October League, and went to organize in an auto-parts factory, where last I heard maybe a decade ago, she was still at work. Of the many thousands of people involved in the movement one way or another, only a handful thought the thing to do was to form a tiny sect and blow things up in the service of a ludicrous fantasy : ie, creating a white-youth fighting force that would join up with black nationalists, end the war and overthrow capitalism. Oh, and anyone who didn’t see why that was the right,necessary and indeed only possible course of action was a sellout and a coward.