Month: December 2010

Weigel counts heads:

So the breakdown of the 2012 candidates is now five against the deal, five for the deal, and two undecided. It's important, however, that Sarah Palin's opposition so far has been limited to one retweet of a positive comment about Jim DeMint opposing the deal. Palin doesn't lack for ways of spreading a message, and she's not using any of them to go further in opposing the deal.

Jason Peters offers a somewhat frightening description of how to write like the average undergraduate male. Here's the intro:

The first thing—and this for obvious reasons—is that you must prefer “within” to “in.” “Within” is longer and takes up more space on the page; plus it’s a word that makes you sound smarter because it makes you sound smarter. So you begin thus: “Within the poem …”

That’s auspicious. But you have to produce five hundred words of analysis on “The Road Not Taken,” though had you been listening in class you’d know that that’s the one poem on which you may not write your analysis—and this, again, for obvious reasons: the professor is not interested in reading yet another paper about how deciding to play football your senior year in high school “made all the difference.”

One wonders what book or poem freshmen writing professors least want to read about. Or given some college writing professors among Dish readers, maybe we could find out.

Jason Kuznicki rephrases his argument:

The fear of slippery slopes is not the fear of a legislative or judicial process leading by its own wicked logic to the abandonment of common sense. It’s the fear of cultural change. Or rather, the fear that the future will not always agree with you. Less charitably, it’s the fear that you might just be plumb wrong on a lot of things that you would find highly embarrassing to reconsider.

Working in the neighboring territory, Mark Thompson says there is no reason that religious liberty and marriage equality can't co-exist:  

[T]he conflict here is definitively not between gay marriage and religious liberty.  It is instead between laws regarding private discrimination and freedom of association, or perhaps between licensing laws and freedom of religion.  As they affect the private sphere and specifically religious organizations, gay rights, and specifically same-sex marriage, represent at most an expansion of existing conflicts rather than any new type of conflict.  Even here, the conflict arises not from whether or not same-sex marriage is permitted, but instead from whether or not statutory laws recognize sexual orientation as an impermissible basis for private discrimination (whether in an employment context, public accommodations context, or otherwise), which is independent of whether same-sex marriage is permitted.

Ben Crair profiles the creator of Train, a Holocaust boardgame:

Earlier this year, when Roger Ebert declared that “videogames can never be art,” some gamers sought to change his mind by suggesting he check out Train by game designer Brenda Brathwaite, one of the industry’s trailblazing women. …

Each turn, players can roll a die and choose to advance their boxcar or load it with pawns; alternatively, they can use a card to speed or slow a boxcar’s progress. Brathwaite’s goal, she says, was to make a game about complicity, and so the rules drop the player not in the shoes of a Holocaust victim but a train conductor who helped make the Nazi system run.

In November, I watched three college students play Train at the Euphrat Museum of Art in Cupertino, California. As the game began, a man wandered over and looked at the pawns. “Are those people?” he asked, “in boxcars?”

“They’re traveling first-class,” a student named Jon replied.

At that point, Train had not formally revealed its subject, and Jon and the others played as though it were a normal board game, trying to outrace each other. When Rob was the first to move a boxcar to the end of the line, he followed the rules and drew a Terminus card. Train’s theme was no longer hidden. The card said “Dachau.”

A mega-mashup of 270 movies from 2010:

(Hat tip: Oh No They Didn't)

Polarization can come back to bitecha:

After surveying seven states pitting top Republican candidates against President Obama, the Public Policy Polling group concluded that Palin was “virtually unelectable” thanks to her anemic numbers with Democrats and independents. A Marist poll last week showed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) defeating Obama among independents by 8 percent while Palin lost to the president by 17. In Michigan — the state where Palin famously tried “going rogue” in 2008 — Obama leads Palin by 21 percent. And a poll in North Carolina shows Obama keeping the state blue if Palin were the nominee, thanks to the former Alaska governor’s 19 percent favorability rating in that state.

According to Pollster, Palin's unfavorables are now at a record high of 53 percent. But her favorables have ben gliding upwards as well – to around 39 percent from around 35 percent a few months ago. The more the base rallies to her the more the general public flees. Which is a, er, problem for the GOP, no?

Its final phase was not its finest:

He offended too many of the smaller and more particular people he needed to work with, in the Obama administration and abroad. He clashed famously with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who not entirely without reason thought that Holbrooke wanted him out, as well as with various other personalities in Afghanistan. Pretty soon, it became difficult for the Af-Pak negotiator to spend much productive time in Af-Pak, which wasn't good.

He made an effort to throttle back that magnificent personality — trying not to give too many interviews, trying not to be a dominating presence. It was a hopeless task, like trying to bottle lightning. If he saw something that offended or appealed to him, Holbrooke could not keep his mouth shut.

The saddest clashes to watch were between Holbrooke and National Security Adviser Jim Jones, another big man. They (and even more, their staffs) traded unkind words in one of those Washington feuds that is talked about constantly but written about too little. The tension grew so large that by early this year, Obama reportedly told his subordinates in the White House that he planned to remove Holbrooke. But the veteran negotiator appealed to his boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who knew his value, and he was given a reprieve.

A reader writes:

I found the David Platt video interesting. But one thing occurred to me when I watched it: Jesus never had kids. It’s all well and good for Jesus to say that you should sell all of your belongings, but he never had a child to raise.  How does one balance the austerity teachings of Jesus with the concept of child-rearing? I certainly don’t have any answers.  But I can’t help but wonder if there’s not a path from this dissonance that leads to suburban Christianism.

This is what I call the Jesus Family Problem. Much of the Christianist right is dedicated to the structure of the mid-20th century nuclear patriarchal family. You will find few words mentioned as often as “family” in Christianist circles. And while there is no doubt that the family is a core and vital social institution, and worth defending and expanding (to gays), it has very little backing in the Gospels or New Testament. Jesus was distinct for his refusal to marry and his celibacy. He told all his immediate disciples to drop everything – including abandoning their wives and children – to follow him. The only women in his entourage – even more shockingly – were unmarried. He stayed overnight in the house of two unmarried sisters, Mary and Martha, an act that would have drawn the ire of the Fox News and the mainstream rabbis of the time.

He publicly rebuked his parents when they were completely justified in worrying about him as a young man lost in the Temple. He told his followers that they would have to hate their spouses and family members if they were to follow him. He urged a life totally incompatible with the responsibility of caring for a child or a spouse – a life of homelessness, begging, and indifference to the future, which he predicted would end soon anyway.

This radicalism doesn’t fully permeate the new evangelicalism of David Platt and others. Which is why their radicalism is still helpfully, if less obviously, circumscribed by the contours of mainstream evangelicalism. But Jesus’ message is a dangerous one for the religious left as well as the religious right. It takes you where few want to go. Which was, of course, the point.

It's the music that clinches it: