Month: June 2011

John Ziegler tells his story:

[I]n spite of being approached by Sarah’s husband Todd only a month ago and specifically discussing the possibility, I won’t be working on any Palin presidential campaign. Why? Well, first of all, contrary to what geniuses like Andrew Sullivan and Howard Dean may want you to believe, there is absolutely no way that she can be elected. I’ve told this to her directly; more than once. While many pundits mistakenly think what she is doing is some Trump-like PR stunt, I’m pretty convinced she is running and in doing so will damage the prospects of any conservative defeating Barack Obama in 2012.

McGinniss says "Ziegler’s defection is just one more indicator that Sarah’s narcissism is so pathological that she can’t even be bothered to keep her acolytes on their knees." Ziegler has put up a "preemptive rebuttal to his critics for his Daily Caller piece" on his own website.

For the record, I still view it as highly unlikely she can win a general election, but I fear unforeseen events – a worsening economy, a new depression, a terror attack, etc. And since I was one of a tiny handful of Villagers believing she was running at all, cut me some slack, wouldya?

Weigel captures Cain's response to a question about his race:

Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Cain last week. Why Cain prefers "black" to "African-American":

“Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America,” he said, hitting those last four words with a hammer. “And then it goes back to slavery. And I’m sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I’m a black man in America.”

Goldberg's take-away:

[I]t is apparent that his popularity, especially among conservatives aligned with the Tea Party, can be traced in large part to his status as the black guy who is not Obama, the Georgia Baptist with the American name. Cain overtly plays this role in front of conservative audiences, offering them public absolution for a sin they don’t believe is a sin: believing that the president is somehow alien to the U.S. and its way of life.

He doubles-down on this point at his blog.

This week is marriage equality week in the Empire State, and the votes are there, it seems, in the State Senate, absent some last minute collywobbles. This, though, is worth re-reading:

Influences contributing to the changes of heart are secret Republican polls showing majority support for gay marriage in key swing districts and the strong possibility that the GOP could lose control of the Senate next year to Democrats campaigning on the issue, sources said.

But the anti-marriage vehemence of the state's Conservative party is still in play. Nonetheless, if the vast and populous state of New York backs equality, we are in a new world. What would stop California then?

"The violent imagery of Tracy’s rant … doesn’t line up with the Tracy Morgan I know, who is not a hateful man and is generally much too sleepy and self-centered to ever hurt another person. I hope for his sake that Tracy’s apology will be accepted as sincere by his gay and lesbian co-workers at ’30 Rock’, without whom Tracy would not have lines to say, clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or a printed-out paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket," – Tina Fey.

A reader writes:

Just some thoughts on this story. Men posing as lesbians in online lesbian communities has been a problem since the inception of the Internet. I learned how to spot a dude in a "women4women" AOL chat room as a teen. Usually they'd give themselves away in the first or second message sent. A rare few would create elaborate back stories, all for the chance of having cybersex with a lesbian or maybe getting a sexually explicit photo. It was so pervasive, some chat rooms on IRC would set up gender checks in the form of questions men would be unlikely to know. (I admittedly failed a check myself because I don't know what sizes pantyhose come in. Call me butch.)

Maybe I'm just a cynical, but I think this Tom fellow was, at least in part, getting off on pretending to be a lesbian.

It feels a little violating and a lot like exploitation. Worst of all, he stole a Syrian lesbian's voice and put LGBT people in the region in danger. My complaining about men pretending to be lesbians online is trivial in comparison.

Whenever a gay person does something risky in the name of activism, gay people may disagree or fret over a backlash, but at least there is a shared risk with the one putting their ass on the line. Tom MacMaster shared no such risk, which allowed him to be as reckless with what he blogged as he wanted. He didn't have to worry about self-preservation in a country that's hostile towards LGBT people. And really, neither do I. As an American lesbian, I've occasionally found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. But even I can't truly appreciate what a Syrian lesbian must experience on a daily basis, much less MacMaster.

I don't know if I'm any closer to understanding, or if "A Gay Girl in Damascus" just fed into some fantasy that a lesbian could be that out and confrontational in such a circumstance.

The Daily What finds a single-serving site:

“Internet K-Hole” — a fascinating, seemingly unceasing time capsule of random, caption-less snapshots and Polaroids from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. The lack of context is what makes this collection far creepier than it would otherwise be. (NSFW, the good ol’ days.)

For those unfamiliar with the term "K-hole":

At sufficiently high doses of the drug ketamine (often .25 grams (0.0088 oz) – .5 grams (0.018 oz) or more), it is common to experience a "K-hole". This is a slang term for a subjective state of dissociation from the body which may mimic the phenomenology of schizophrenia, out of body experiences or near death experiences, and is often accompanied by feelings of extreme derealization, depersonalization and disorientation, as well as temporary memory loss and vivid hallucinations.

Tom Malinowski highlights the unusual nature of the Libyan revolution:

On my first day in Libya, in the town of Derna, one meticulously drawn panel caught my eye: “WE WANT A COUNTRY OF INSTITUTIONS,” it read. In how many revolutions have people marched to such a slogan?

… On Fridays in Benghazi, the main public gathering for prayers takes place not in a mosque but on the public square of the city courthouse. This is where, on February 15, the Libyan uprising began, when people gathered to protest the arrest of a lawyer who represented the families of political prisoners killed in a 1996 massacre. The shrine of Libya’s revolution, upon which people now paste photos of loved ones killed by the Qaddafi regime, is a symbol of law.

Ronald Brownstein finds fault with it:

Since World War II, young people (including those employed part-time in school) have consistently been much more likely to work than older Americans. Federal statistics show that on average during the 1950s, the share of Americans ages 16 to 24 in the labor force (52 percent) was nearly 12 percentage points higher than the share of Americans 55 and older (just under 41 percent). By the 1990s that gap in the labor market participation rate for the youngest and oldest adults had widened to nearly 30 percentage points.

From January 1948 through September 2009, the labor-force-participation rate of older Americans came within 8 percentage points of the rate among younger people in only one month. Since October 2009, the difference between the two groups has been 8 percentage points or less in every month. One side can’t start working; the other can’t stop.

David McCandless examines our problem with over-fishing:

[Today] our fishing policies and environmental activism [are] geared to restoring the oceans to the state we remember they were. That's considered the environmental baseline. The problem is, the sea was already heavily exploited when we were young.

So this is a kind of collective social amnesia that allows over-exploitation to creep up and increase decade-by-decade without anyone truly questioning it. Today's fishing quotas and policies for example are attempting to reset fish stocks to the levels of ten or twenty years ago. But as you can see from the visualization, we were already plenty screwed back then.

The above map compares the biomass of popularly eaten fish in 1900 and 2000.

(Hat tip: Kottke)