Month: September 2010

Avent smacks Gladwell around:

I think Mr Gladwell misses a number of crucial things. One mistake is to assume that social media merely increases weak ties. In my experience, it strengthens ties generally. Networks like Twitter and Facebook reduce the cost of minor interactions, which leads to more minor interactions. Mr Gladwell sees this and notes the rise in minor interactions between thousands of quasi-friends. What he misses is that repeated minor actions are also the means by which stronger relationships are kept strong. These platforms make it easier to maintain friendships through trying times and circumstances.

Alexis rounds up more dissents.

A reader writes:

Dude. The "Read On" feature is something that blogs have been using for years. You act like it's some technical marvel for the times. Love you long time, but I often wonder why you post about new technical improvements on your blog and thank "the team" that worked on them when simple people with no budget or team have been doing what you're doing for years.

I did it in 2002 or 2003 on an old blog I had. Basically, clicking "Read On" would reveal a hidden < DIV > section, if I remember correctly.

I read and love this blog, but calm down. Your blog does a tremendous service to its readers. It does not, however, live on the bleeding edge of technology. I hate raining on the parade because I know you guys have a lot of fun over there, but please.

Oh, I know that. This feature has been around for years on other sites. Our thrill – and that of the readers' – is that finally, eventually, it came about here. That's all.

Jelani Cobb reports on the Atlanta pastor accused of engaging in coercive sex with young men:

Long is arguably the pre-eminent black proponent of the prosperity gospel and his message of financial deliverance dovetailed neatly with Atlanta’s credo of visible black success. More than a handful of his critics have seen New Birth as a counterpoint to Ebenezer Baptist, the church co-pastored by Martin Luther King, Sr. and Jr. Where King led an inner-city congregation and emphasized the biblical mandate to pursue social justice, Long’s sprawling compound is miles outside Atlanta and he is more likely to exalt the possibilities of grand financial success.

Mark Oppenheimer has more. So does Hitchens:

[W]hat offends me is that Long was able to get four presidents of the United States to attend his opulent circus for the funeral of Coretta Scott King in 2006. What a steep and awful decline from the mule cart that carried her husband’s coffin in 1968. And the decline can be measured out in dog collars, from the Rev. Jesse Jackson all the way down to the Rev. Al Sharpton and the venomous Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Many other charlatans have benefited from the clerical racket, and the most notorious of them—Jerry Falwell, Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart—have been white. But there is something especially horrible about the way in which the black pulpit gets a sort of free pass, almost as if white society has assured itself that black Americans just love them some preaching. In this fog of ethnic condescension, it is much easier for mountebanks and demagogues to get away with it.

That may be the fate of earth's oldest tree, and some of its millennia old cousins. This episode of Radio Lab includes a vignette about a scientist who inadvertantly caused what was the oldest living thing on earth to be killed.

Tim Lee follows up on the GOP’s double-standard:

If you’re not worried about the actual jack-booted thugs staging actual midnight raids in America today, you can’t expect to be taken seriously seriously when you warn that some policy you oppose could lead to jack-booted thugs staging midnight raids at some point in the future.

And the party that has pushed relentlessly for warrantless surveillance, imprisonment without trial, and the normalization of torture has no business lecturing us about how the other party’s policies will, eventually, lead us to a police state.

The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is planning new legislation to give the government even-more-sweeping powers to spy on Internet users. It will be interesting to see if Tea Party candidates denounce this proposal, which really could facilitate future tyranny, as vehemently as they’ve denounced Obama’s spending proposals.

A reader writes:

As a gay man, I wear cheap non-graphic t-shirts in the summer and woefully unattractive sweaters in the winter.  I’m less an icon of buff muscle-worship than a happy Buddha who enjoys a beer more than a baguette.  I’m not in the highest-income demographic; I’m actually fairly poor, even if I do currently have the good fortune to be in school rather than struggling in the job market.  And while apparently radical Muslims want to execute me, I hear someone in Saxby Chambliss’s office does too.

So basically what pisses me off about Ann Coulter’s address to homo-con is that it pretends to be pro-gay by saying that all the gays are the same, and that they are what rabid anti-gay bigots always say we are: self-conscious style-hounds awash in money (and therefore decadence) who want to just have sex sex sex.

She makes it even worse by suggesting that gays just looooove politically incorrect jokes – that we just adore a joke about felching and will occasionally say rude things about black people, or whatever.

Well, Mrs. Coulter, I don’t wear Burberry and I find racism to be offensive.  Pretending like one gay is more or less just like another is precisely the sort of stereotyping that makes me dislike you and your conservative allies so very much.

That a crowd of gay men invited someone to parlay stereotypes says a lot about where they are coming from. But it would be foolish to over-estimate their clout. The meeting was held in an apartment; it was attended by around 100 people. It was designed solely for publicity, and the cost of entry was $250 to support Coulter’s speaking fee. Another writes:

I am with you that her record is clearly bigoted. GOProud certainly did a disservice to the cause of gay rights.  However, did you really need to pull a Drudge and insinuate that Coulter is trans with the collar bone comment? This is clearly in line with a common attack on her appearance…just google Ann Coulter transsexual.  Why not point out the adams apple too? It was cheap and you let yourself down.

There’s nothing male about collar bones. Everyone has one. Another:

You wrote, “It’s important to note that this bigot was not invited by Log Cabin Republicans (GOProud is a splinter group) and that her words received what Politico called a “mixed response.”

Unfortunately that won’t be noted by most people, in a broader sense. In a country that has slowly (but finally) started recognize both the humanity and the rights of gay people (as reflected by poll numbers that overwhelmingly support the repeal of DADT, and states in surprising places like Iowa that are building the momentum toward gay marriage) many of those people that the gay community as a whole try so hard to reach do not parse the difference between groups. They know no difference between GoProud and Log Cabin Republicans, HRC and some other group. They see the gay community as a collective group.

So when GoProud invited Ann Coulter, I’d venture that the majority of Americans saw a virtual stereotype that the gay community works to undo: A bunch of gays enjoying a performance by a snarking drag queen.

(If that was unkind to Ann – I’m not sorry. I think she’s an awful person.)

Radley Balko goes there:

Obama is arguing the executive has the power to execute American citizens without a trial, without even so much as an airing of the charges against them, and that it can do so in complete secrecy, with no oversight from any court, and that the families of the executed have no legal recourse.

You can’t even make the weak argument that the executive at least has to claim this power in the course of protecting national security. Because it doesn’t matter. Obama is arguing that he has the right to keep everything about these executions secret—including the reasons they were ordered—merely by uttering the magic phrase “state secrets.” In other words, that this power would only arise under a national security context is deemed irrelevant by the fact that not only is Obama claiming the president’s word on what qualifies as “national security” is final, he’s claiming the power in such a way that there’s no audience to whom he would ever need to make that connection.

So yeah. Tyranny. If there’s more tyrannical power a president could possibly claim than the power to execute the citizens of his country at his sole discretion, with no oversight, no due process, and no ability for anyone to question the execution even after the fact . . . I can’t think of it.

Adam Serwer adds:

We're so frightened of terrorism that we forget that there's a reason democracies limit the government's legitimate use of force, particularly against their own citizens. It's hard to imagine a more direct or final deprivation of liberty without due process.

And where, one wonders, are the Tea Partiers on this? About where they were when it was done under Bush.

A reader makes a fascinating point:

You ask "Does the formerly compulsive gambler Bennett recognize any distinction between pleasure and medicine and … hedonism?"

Actually, a compulsive, addictive personality would likely have great trouble making this distinction. You and I could go on a vacation to Las Vegas, plan on risking an amount of money that is reasonable to us, and on this trip we may win but we would more likely lose. However, we would be able to have a good time during our mildly risky behavior. Bennett, as an addict, cannot do this.

If he went to Las Vegas planning to risk a certain amount, he would be very tempted to risk more, and more, and more until it was a truly destructive amount for him to lose. In his psyche, it really is either no dabbling in slightly harmful fun at all, or complete hedonism. Similarly, he may not comprehend the idea of recreational pot use at all. For him it is no acceptable use, or addiction. Now the question he should ask himself is how much he should weigh his own experience on such an issue. After all, if we only thought in terms of addicts, alcohol prohibition would come back.

The even bigger problem with his argument, however, is the assumption that Weeds could not have been on TV in the past. Was not The Godfather saga one of the most popular and the most critically acclaimed movie series of all time? People were certainly emotionally invested in the success of the Corleone family watching those movies. Does this mean that the 1970's households were constantly cheering for the Mafia to beat out police in their home towns?

The better explanation is that television and movie viewers have always been willing to accept non-traditional protagonists if the story is well constructed enough.