How to get kids to learn grammar (if their teachers would ever allow the NSFW lyrics):
Previous Dish on Mac Lethal and his "Texts from Bennett" project here, here and here.
Month: May 2012
“A Dark Day For Freedom, And A Day Of Shame For This Administration”
That's what Mitt Romney said about the Obama administration's handling of the Chen Guangchen issue. The blind dissident is now headed with his family to the US. The summit meeting went fine. Even Bill Kristol dissed Mitt at the time. Will Romney now point out that he was wrong and prematurely misjudged a somewhat sleek diplomatic success?
Yeah, right.
The Democracy Of Beer
Anyone can brew:
Without the right soil and good weather, even the most talented vintner can’t produce great wine. Beer offers competitors a level playing field. Most brewers—commercial and amateur—get their hops and malt from a handful of suppliers, so terroir plays a minor role in the quality of the final product. The only real wild card is water, which can always be manipulated with a little chemical know-how. If everyone starts with the same resources, the best brewer should win most of the time.
The judging is more egalitarian as well:
If you Google "beer rankings," the first hit is BeerAdvocate.com, the site that gave [ the unofficial best beer in the world] Pliny the Younger its fame. Although Beer Advocate takes its name from Parker’s Wine Advocate, the approach is entirely different. You won’t get the opinion of a single supertaster, or even a panel of experts. It’s a raucous compilation of thousands of opinions from ordinary schlubs just like you. As the art critic Clement Greenberg noted "[Q]uality in art is not just a matter of private experience. There is a consensus of taste." The beer world takes that consensus seriously.
The View From Your Window
Houston, Texas, 11.30 am
Spitzer Recants; Cameron Comes Out
Good headline, huh? But I’m not talking about Eliot or David, but Robert and Paul. They both have had a major impact on the discussion of homosexuality. Spitzer is an extraordinarily accomplished psychiatrist with an ornery streak. He published a study lending some legitimacy to reparative “cure” therapy for homosexuals, depending on their own self-descriptions. He’s now apologizing for the study’s sloppiness. Here it is:
Basic Research Question. From the beginning it was: “can some version of reparative therapy enable individuals to change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual?” Realizing that the study design made it impossible to answer this question, I suggested that the study could be viewed as answering the question, “how do individuals undergoing reparative therapy describe changes in sexual orientation?” – a not very interesting question.
The Fatal Flaw in the Study – There was no way to judge the credibility of subject reports of change in sexual orientation. I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject’s reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying. But the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.
I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals.
Meanwhile, one of the most pernicious nutball propagandists in the anti-gay underworld, Paul Cameron, has now told us that he started out life as gay:
Cameron acknowledges having been raped as a child and “overcoming” sexual feelings about men as he approached his adolescent years. “I reacted to my environment,” he said. “As you’re probably aware, I was seduced, or raped, as a child … I was raped homosexually. Had that continued, I don’t know where I would’ve ended up.”
The longer I am in this debate, the more something emerges. Most people don’t really care much about gays. The subject doesn’t come up; and most adjusted straight men do not feel passionately on the subject one way or the other. And so you notice patterns. You find that most of the really impassioned anti-gay activists are just as motivated by personal passion – whether as an early victim of sex abuse (Paul Cameron), or as the father of a gay son (Charles Socarides), or as a single mother abandoned by her boyfriend (Maggie Gallagher), or someone fighting to restrain their own gay feelings (Ted Haggard, Larry Craig) – as pro-gay activists are. This is a perfectly legitimate motivation for all sorts of political movements, but on the gay question, one should always be alert to the personal psychological undercurrents. (That goes for us gays as well as out opponents, and I am grateful for the odd psychological diagnoses I receive via email.)
Is it any surprise, for example, that Cameron believes that large numbers of gays are sex abusers, or that we all die young, and other canards he has spread over the years? Is it not relevant that he says he was raped as a child by a man? Any major surprise that one of the very few psychiatrists to advocate reparative therapy, Charles Socarides, blamed it on fathers, while having a gay son, Richard, who went on to become the Clinton administration’s point person on gay issues? You can go all the way up to the current Pope’s absurd obsession with the subject.
What we’re trying to do is change consciousness so that this kind of psychological panic and reaction is less potent today than it was, because that will fuck up fewer people, straight, gay and just frightened. And fewer fucked up people helps for a less fucked up debate.
Well: we’re getting there, aren’t we?
“Originality Is Dangerous”
Salman Rushdie opines on censorship:
Liberty is the air we breathe, and we live in a part of the world where, imperfect as the supply is, it is, nevertheless, freely available, at least to those of us who aren’t black youngsters wearing hoodies in Miami, and broadly breathable, unless, of course,
we’re women in red states trying to make free choices about our own bodies. Imperfectly free, imperfectly breathable, but when it is breathable and free we don’t need to make a song and dance about it. We take it for granted and get on with our day. And at night, as we fall asleep, we assume we will be free tomorrow, because we were free today.
The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free.
(Image from Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, a book he created by cutting chunks of text out of his favorite novel.)
Republicans Crazy; Democrats Stupid
Rick Perlstein summarizes American politics in four words.
Face Of The Day
This Red-legged Seriema just hatched at SeaWorld Orlando on April 30:
The Red-legged Seriema is one of South America's largest terrestrial birds. While it can fly short distances, it prefers to run on its long, powerful legs rather than use its short, stumpy wings. … The current Seriema population in U.S. zoos is only 62, and the last bird was hatched in 2009, so each hatchling is precious to the population.
(Photo by Jason Collier, courtesy of SeaWorld Orlando)
Does It Matter That Wittgenstein Was Gay?
James Garvey ponders whether knowing the biography of great thinkers helps us better understand their ideas:
In recounting the history of philosophy, you bump into a number of stories about philosophers. It’s said that Thales fell into a ditch while stargazing. Diogenes did some fairly revolting stuff in public. Aquinas paced back and forth between scribes, dictating the lines of separate philosophical treatises to them at the same time. Kant held carefully organized house parties, with time allocated to political discussion and the telling of amusing anecdotes. Schopenhauer pushed a woman down a flight of stairs. Suicide runs in Wittgenstein’s family … We shouldn’t wonder about the value of knowing a life in general. Instead we should value biography that describes a life and work in an integrated, interleaving narrative. ‘Catching the tone’, as [Ray Monk] puts it, getting to know a philosopher better, can help us along in particular instances. Not always, not never, but now and then, and in a certain, nuanced way.
The View From Your Window Contest
You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to VFYWcontest@gmail.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book. Have at it.
The Dish 