Month: June 2010

Steinglass artfully counters Thomas Messner et al:

Opponents of same-sex marriage may feel, subjectively, that something would be imposed on them by the state's decision to recognise same-sex marriages. But what is that something, exactly? It's much easier to show how the state is concretely imposing on gays by denying recognition for same-sex marriages. In a pluralistic society, you can't claim to have been harmed when the state declines to impose your religious norms on those who don't share them. And without some such claim to justify it, Proposition 8 is looking pretty constitutionally shaky right now.

Publisher's Weekly interviews Clay Shirky. He is asked when the book trade will suffer the same fate as the music industry:

I think someone will make the imprint that bypasses the traditional distribution networks. Right now the big bottleneck is the head buyer at Barnes & Noble. That’s the seawall holding back the flood in publishing. Someone’s going to say, “I can do a business book or a vampire book or a romance novel, whatever, that might sell 60% of the units it would sell if I had full distribution and a multimillion dollar marketing campaign—but I can do it for 1% percent of the cost.” It has already happened a couple of times with specialty books. The moment of tip happens when enough things get joined up to create their own feedback loop, and the feedback loop in publishing changes when someone at Barnes & Noble says: “We can’t afford not to stock this particular book or series from an independent publisher.” It could be on Lulu, or iUniverse, whatever. And, I feel pretty confident saying it’s going to happen in the next five years.

Here's hoping. It's time we destroyed the archaic, corrupt, bloated, celebrity-marketing industry now known as publishing.

And he's still in high school:

(Hat tip: HuffPo)

Yes, we've posted this inspired Tumblr collection before. But it was just made reality, with some cops in Maryland.

Ackerman leafs through the DOJ indictment of Faisal Shahza:

So for $12,000, the Pakistani Taliban thought it could demonstrate global reach. And it clearly found a contractor in Shahzad. It’s tempting to say, in the wake of the plot’s failure, that the TTP got what it paid for. But the failure is less important than the demonstration that attempts at terrorism plotted halfway around the world are extraordinarily inexpensive, while the tools of counterterrorists — war, surveillance, homeland security — are stunningly costly.

A reader writes:

There is an American Catholic tradition that for decades has stood athwart dumb churchly authoritarianism, yelling "stop, and go forward!" The shorthand term for this tradition is "Commonweal Catholicism", and I was raised in it. 

My parents were devout enough to ensure that the family attended mass every Sunday, and had meatless Fridays. They made sure that the kids attended the parish schools, and grew into all of the sacraments in mandated order.  They took the Diocesan newspaper, but also subscribed to Commonweal, The Catholic Worker, and America.

When my father got a job teaching at NYU, we lived in Montclair, New Jersey, and went to church and school in the parish that Stephen Colbert now attends.

It gave my parents great pleasure to meet the father of my classmate John Skillin, since the father edited Commonweal.  You might say that Ed Skillin WAS the magazine.  He arrived a decade after its 1924 founding, and served as assistant editor, editor, publisher, part-owner, and I'm not sure what other capacities, until his death in 2000. 

Commonweal Catholicism is a great tradition, and it's been on the 'right' side of most social and political issues for as long as I can remember.  And it drives the current crop of John-Paul retrogrades nuts, because it beats with an original American pulse, and is deaf to authoritarian drums.  So if you take a slice in history and compare Commonweal's position and the Bishops' position, you'll find that the average modern American Catholic is way closer to what the Commonweal said than what the Bishops said, way back then.  Except for that (seems all too brief) period, in the afterglow of Vatican II. 

Do you know that the church filed an Amicus brief in Loving v. Virginia?  In support of the Lovings.

She strongly backed expanding it – at the expense of gay rights:

“I’m the biggest fan of [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] (now [the Religious Liberty Protection Act]) in this building, but you should not take this advice right now,” Kagan wrote in a May 20, 1999 memo to Ron Klain, then the chief of staff to Al Gore, the vice president. “You’ll have a gay/lesbian firestorm on your hands. (Alternatively, if you come out for a version of RFRA that has a civil rights carve-out, you’ll have a religious groups firestorm on your hands.)” …

Kagan, who worked in the Clinton White House from 1995 to 1999, urged the administration in a 1996 memo to join religious conservatives in asking the US Supreme Court to review and reverse a California Supreme Court ruling that found that a landlord’s religious objections to renting to an unmarried couple were trumped by that state’s anti-discrimination law noting “the danger this decision poses to RFRA’s guarantee of religious freedom in the State of California.”

Amsterdam considers employing "decoy Jews" to flush out anti-Semitism on the streets.