Month: April 2009

Waste Is Bad, M-kay?

Matt Steinglass breaks with Krugman:

I’ve been waiting for the moment where I have a conservative-ish disagreement with the liberal orthodoxy in this time of crisis, and this seems to be it. Wasting money on government programs is bad, not just because it’s wrong to spend people’s tax dollars in ways that don’t maximize the return, but because in the long run it damages the effectiveness of government. If you want to destroy a government agency, or a regional government tout court, walk in, hand them a bunch of money and tell them you don’t care how they spend it. Within a couple of years of that, you’ll have a government agency that is no longer capable of performing its mission when it has to. And this isn’t just true of government; it’s true of any kind of organization when it’s made unaccountable.

When The Gay Left Demonized Me

Ann Althouse remembers the period Johann Hari recounts:

Sullivan wrote the first major article in America calling for gay people to be given the right to marry—and he was savaged by other gays. His talks were picketed by a group called the Lesbian Avengers, who waved signs with Sullivan’s head in the crosshairs of a gun. In gay bars he was denounced as a “collaborator” and physically attacked. He was anathemised by mainstream gay-rights organisations, who refused to engage with him. Why?

But she adds:

Now, I think there still is an undercurrent of hating heterosexuals out there, and I often feel it coming from Andrew Sullivan, but I’m not going to elaborate on that now.

Please do. You can’t throw that out there with no back-up. I’m sorry if my perhaps uncharitable snark about her impending marriage offended her. Probably not my best moment. But the notion that I somehow “hate heterosexuals” is so nutty, not to say meaningless, that I don’t know how to respond. I hate 97 percent of humanity? I hate my mum and dad and brother and sister? I hate my co-workers? Just because I think Sarah Palin is a whack-job makes me a heterophobe? Please, Ann. You don’t campaign for twenty years to enter a heterosexual institution because you hate heterosexuals. You don’t argue for social integration of gays and straights because you hate straights. You don’t write a book urging that sexual orientation cease to be a defining social divide if you are a gay separatist. And it takes Goldstein-level dishonesty to say as much.

The Cannabis Closet

A reader writes:

I was raised in a virulently Mormon community.  I served two years as a missionary, but left the faith soon after returning home.  My first encounter with herb was in Taiwan in 1994, with some friends over the holidays.  That first high was simply amusing, but I continued to used cannabis over the years.  While in Banares, India, I smoked Bhang and talked religion with a wandering Sadhu.  In Goa, southern India, I rolled spliffs with a crowd of East Germans.  I arrived late to the Camel festival in Pushkar, Rajasthan.  All the rooms were sold out, and I was graciously given the personal quarters of a hotel owner.  We spent many evenings over the next two weeks conversing.  He would bring in a bit of hash, and we would puff and talk – a better cultural exchange I cannot imagine.

I was in Jamaica and in my quest for the perfect cup of coffee visited the famous Blue Mountain. While I was there I was invited to smoke ganja with some traditional Rastafari.  One of our party – a 60 something woman from London who had never smoked before and decided it was time to try – was convinced by the sincerity of our guests.  The experience that day is still vivid in my mind.

I’ve been through Anchorage, Key West, Seattle, Tucson, Salt Lake City, and everywhere I go I find that people enjoy lighting up and settling down, into conversation. In short, in each place I’ve traveled I’m confronted by the availability of herb.  People like it, and for strangers, it is one of the best barrier-breakers I’ve yet to encounter.