March 2014 – Page 64

The Christianist Closet?

In an angry rant, Dreher accuses me of being “smug and naive” when talking about the crosses that marriage equality opponents have to bear under the “new McCarthyism”:

It’s very, very easy for the self-employed Andrew, who is on the power-holding side of this cultural equation, to demean as “delicate and insensitive” people who face real and significant professional consequences for their religious dissent.

What I find so fascinating about Rod’s deployment of the “you’re too privileged to have a say” argument is that it’s exactly the same debating point once leveled at me by gay leftists. When I basically told gay people to stop thinking of themselves as victims and start thinking of themselves as equal citizens – one part of the case for putting military service and the right to marry at the forefront of the movement – there were howls of derision. But I remain convinced that the only way to escape the victim-trap was to transcend it. And that’s really my advice to Christianists: Get over yourselves and get on with your lives. Rod claims I am blind to terrible discrimination:

Sullivan’s complaint is disingenuous. I hear all the time from religious conservatives in various fields — in particular media and academia — who are afraid to disclose their own beliefs about same-sex marriage because most people within those fields consider opposition to SSM to be driven solely by hatred.

Earlier this year, I had a conversation with a man who is probably the most accomplished and credentialed legal scholar I’ve ever met, someone who is part of this country’s law elite. The fact that I can’t identify him here, or get into specifics of what he told me, indicates something important about the climate within law circles around this issue. On this issue, he lives in the closet, so to speak, within his professional circles, and explained to me why it has become too dangerous to take a traditionalist stand in law circles, unless one is prepared to sabotage one’s career.

Hand me the world’s tiniest violin. If someone is fired for his religious beliefs, he can sue (which is more than can be said for gay people fired for their orientation in many states). The rest is truly spectacular whining. There are always going to be social pressures that favor or disfavor certain views. What about a gun control enthusiast in rural Texas? Or a pro-choicer in Mississippi?

In a polarized polity, this may get worse for both sides. My view – and I don’t see how Rod can have ignored it – is maximal respect for sincerely held opinions. Just as many conservatives over the years have politely acknowledged without endorsing my marriage, so I politely acknowledge the convictions of Christianists, and seek dialogue with them. That’s how I’d like this to shake out. Only recently, for example, I defended Erick Erickson’s point in this debate. And insofar as there is gay intolerance or fanaticism, I oppose it as strongly now as I always have (including opposing outing).

But the hysteria and self-pity among those who, for centuries, enjoyed widespread endorsement for the horrible mistreatment of gay people really is too much. The victimology that was born on the left is now alive and whining on the right. It’s a self-defeating position and a thoroughly unattractive one. In the end, one begins to wonder about the strength of these people’s religious convictions if they are so afraid to voice them, and need the state to reinforce them. Which is one more reason why the decline of Christianism makes the rebirth of Christianity a more exciting prospect. Liberated from the state and social support, Christians may have to become what they once were: outsiders, prophets, the salt of the earth.

(Illustration: Memegenerator)

Mental Health Break

A freelancer’s lament:

Hawking Points

Condoleezza Rice pushes for a tough response to Russia over Ukraine:

The immediate concern must be to show Russia that further moves will not be tolerated and that Ukraine’s territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Diplomatic isolation, asset freezes and travel bans against oligarchs are appropriate. The announcement of air defense exercises with the Baltic states and the movement of a U.S. destroyer to the Black Sea bolster our allies, as does economic help for Ukraine’s embattled leaders, who must put aside their internal divisions and govern their country. …

The events in Ukraine should be a wake-up call to those on both sides of the aisle who believe that the United States should eschew the responsibilities of leadership. If it is not heeded, dictators and extremists across the globe will be emboldened.

Responding to Rice, Larison tears up this notion that American inaction emboldens our rivals:

What Rice et al. perceive as “inaction” in Syria, Russia and Iran likely perceive as ongoing interference and hostility to their interests. The crisis in Ukraine also looks very different to Moscow than it does to the Westerners that have been agitating for an even larger and more active U.S. role.

Western hawks were frustrated by how slow their governments were to throw their full support behind the protesters, and as usual wanted the U.S. and EU to take a much more adversarial and combative approach with Russia because they see Western governments as being far more passive than they want. However, Moscow doesn’t perceive the U.S. role in Ukraine to be a limited or benign one, and the toppling of Yanukovych has been fitted into their view that the protests were a Western-backed plot from the beginning. The idea that Russia would have responded less aggressively to the change in government if the U.S. had been giving the opposition even more encouragement and support is dangerously delusional, but that is what one has to believe in order to argue that the U.S. “emboldened” Moscow in Ukraine.

Drum also doubts Putin was encouraged by American weakness:

Putin didn’t invade Crimea because the decadent West was aimlessly sunning itself on a warm beach somewhere. He invaded Crimea because America and the EU had been vigorously promoting their interests in a country with deep historical ties to Russia. He invaded because his hand-picked Ukrainian prime minister was losing, and the West was winning. He invaded because he felt that he had been outplayed by an aggressive geopolitical opponent and had run out of other options.

None of this justifies Putin’s actions. But to suggest that he was motivated by weakness in US foreign policy is flatly crazy.

Amid the saber-rattling, Adam Gopnik emphasizes the importance of preventing a war:

[W]e should be doing what sane states should always be doing: searching for the most plausible war-avoiding, nonviolent arrangement, even at the cost of looking wishy-washy. … The parallel with the failure of appeasement in the thirties is false, because that circumstance was so particular to its moment. The underlying truth then was that there was no point in appeasing Hitler because there was no possibility of appeasing him. The German Army was the most powerful force in Europe, indeed, in the world, and Hitler had long before decided on a general European war. He wanted one, and for him it was only a question, at best, of delaying it until his odds were marginally better. If Putin wants a general European war, we will know it when he invades a NATO nation. There is no shortage of real trip wires in the region, and no need to discover new ones.

Paul Miller pans the flawed approaches of both the liberal internationalists and the Cold Warriors, and suggests a third way:

The middle course would acknowledge that there are limits to what America can achieve: It cannot stop Russia from believing Crimea is vitally important to Russian security, and it cannot fight a cost-effective war with a nuclear power. The United States should realistically accept some form of Russian presence or influence in the peninsula and not turn this into a litmus test of American credibility.

At the same time, the United States should ask what is right for the Ukrainians, not just for Americans. It should not cynically abandon all Ukraine to Russia’s despotism. That may mean sustaining a large flow of aid to democratic dissidents in a Russian-dominated Ukraine, strengthening U.S. security assurances to the government if it manages to keep Russia at bay, or even bringing Ukraine fully into the orbit of Western institutions while letting Crimea secede or join the Russian Federation.

My take on the hawks’ position is here. Previous Dish on the US response to the Ukraine crisis here, here, and here.

How Much Should We Fear Fascists In Ukraine?

Moynihan rips into Putin’s defenders in the Western press:

Let’s acknowledge that ideologues rarely exist without a certain degree of hypocrisy. But when Viktor Yanukovych’s goon squads were unleashed on protesters in Kiev, wielding truncheons and firing bursts from Kalashnikovs, it was nevertheless disconcerting to see Ukrainian anti-government protesters–of varied political backgrounds and issuing varied demands–blithely dismissed by a significant number of Western journalists as fascists and neo-Nazis, if not stooges of the United States government. Indeed, it all sounded too much like the Soviet reaction to the 1956 Hungarian uprising, when Moscow claimed to have narrowly avoided “the threat of a fascist dictatorship” (which was, of course, precipitated by American interference) by the dispatch of a benevolent invading military force. And like 1956, one didn’t have to look to far to find–from both the fringe left and right, and many ironically self-identifying as anti-imperialist–those ready to “contextualize” the violence visited upon protesters and justifying the arrival of Russian troops on Ukrainian soil.

Remnick provides a reality check:

It is worth remembering that, in the back-and-forth of Ukrainian governments since 1991, both the pro-Russian leaders, like Viktor Yanukovych, and the pro-Europeans, like Yulia Tymoshenko, have been brazen thieves, enriching themselves at fantastical rates. Both sides have played one half of the country against the other. And the fact that the protests in Kiev were not, as Moscow claims, dominated by fascists and ultra-nationalists does not mean that such elements are absent from the scene.

Ukraine has yet to develop the politicians that its fragile condition and its dire economy demand. In December, when John McCain spoke to demonstrators in Kiev’s Independence Square, he stood side by side with Oleh Tyahnybok, who was once expelled from his parliamentary faction after demanding battle with “the Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” Perhaps this was bad advance work from team McCain—much like the advance work on the Sarah Palin nomination—but it did manage to fuel Moscow’s bonfire of suspicion.

Oleg Shynkarenko recently profiled Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), the far-right group – led by Dmitro Yarosh, seen in the above video – that allegedly threw the first molotovs at EuroMaidan:

The Right Sector trumpets the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism, which reaches its zenith in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which in its heyday was lead by [Stepan] Bandera. (He was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich in 1959.) From 1942 to 1954, the group acted fought against the German and Soviet Armies. Now, its descendent organizations are dedicated to advancing the 20th-century throwback notion of the primacy of the nation-state. Their rhetoric may sound utopian (or dystopian), but it’s actually quite archaic. “If non-Ukrainians understand Ukrainians’ urge towards their nation, and are disposed to it and help in struggle, we are disposed to them too; if they are neutral and don’t prevent us in our struggle, we are neutral to them, too; if they object our right to be a nation-state and work against us, we are hostile to them,” Bandera once said.

But Jamie Dettmer isn’t too worried about the group:

The Kremlin has made much of the vanguard combatant role Right Sector and others of the far-right ilk played in the street battles that raged in Independence Square against Yanukovych’s feared berkut (riot police). And the Western media, when not covering the standoff in Crimea, has been drawn to the ideological menace of Ukraine’s far right and to the swaggering Right Sector fighters and their SS iconography in Kyiv’s Independence Square.

But opposition politician and rights campaigner Lesya Orobets says that while the Right Sector’s part in the ousting of Yanukovych shouldn’t be underestimated, its importance in the country’s future politics shouldn’t be overestimated. “They were a small element in the revolution, although significant, and they were brave enough to do what others wouldn’t,” she says. “But I don’t see much room for their radicalism now in democratic politics. Ukrainians are tolerant. Right Sector will have some small support if it develops as a political party, maybe five to seven percent of the vote. I don’t see a big political future for them.”

Rand Paul, The GOP, And The Young, Ctd

W. James Antle III summarizes the libertarian’s foreign policy approach:

Rather than get into a shouting match with more hawkish Republicans over Russia—though he has condemned Vladimir Putin as often as he has tweaked the thinly-veiled Cold War nostalgia masquerading as foreign-policy thought in some corners of the right—he is making his case from a strong, limited-government conservative perspective.

What Paul has been saying ever since he filibustered John Brennan’s CIA nomination over drones is that the Lindsey Graham view of foreign policy—a permanent war in which the American homeland is a battlefield—is incompatible with constitutionally limited government. You can have a national-security state of that scope or you can have the Bill of Rights, but you can’t have both.

It’s a powerful way of forcing Republicans – and all of us – to confront the core trade-offs in a constantly evolving war on terror. And it compares, starkly, with Marco Rubio’s retread of neconservatism on steroids. It’s a possibly shrewd bet in a crowded field, but it still feels like Rubio is trying to impress Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol and all the other boomers stuck in the 1970s. Pareene nails it:

Take a look at [Rubio’s] handy list of things “Obama must do” about Ukraine, which includes expanding NATO to Georgia and also stating “unequivocally” that Putin is a mean jerk.

(When Tough, Muscular Foreign Policy types think calling for actual war won’t be received well, they usually fall back on demanding that the president say Tough things unequivocally.) Now he’s at CPAC, telling people that North Korea will nuke California as Iran is nuking New York as we wage a global struggle against China and Russia and “totalitarianism.” Sounds like fun!

If this is what the Marco Rubio comeback is going to look like, I’m not convinced it’s a wise strategy. Republicans may be obsessed with the image of our “weak” president “folding” before “tough” Vladimir Putin, but Americans in general are not hugely interested in picking fights with other countries at the moment.

Larison is unimpressed with the argument that Rubio is going to have some kind of broad appeal like Bush II did. Meanwhile, Matt Lewis looks at how Cruz is positioning himself:

Cruz is making a bet that Paul’s more libertarian positions on issues like non-interventionism aren’t a mainstream opinion. So he will set up shop just on the other side of Paul. Anyone who says, “I really like Paul’s position, but I think we need to stand up to Russia,” now has a home. Or the guy who says, “I hate drones, but I don’t want Iran to go nuclear,” has a candidate.

Whoever wins this foreign policy debate may be extraordinarily important for the future of the United States in the world.

A Pixelated Palette

Artist Ed Spence re-works his photographs by cutting them up into small “pixels”:

In an intricate juxtaposition of elements, Vancouver-based artist Ed Spence handcrafts “pixelized” images in his series Dataforms. For almost a decade Spence has painstakingly cut apart large photographs and prints of paintings, reassembling them into gorgeous and colorful hybrids. Whether utterly transformed or partially split in a captivating state of before and after, each collage remains somehow imbued with the emotive quality of its previous form. Bursting with vivid expression, Spence’s abstractions are a calculated process that includes dozens of sketches and lengthy planning. After cutting hundreds of one-inch squares by hand, the broken pieces are reassembled in ways both complex and compelling. It is the duality of opposites—analog vs. digital, representational vs. abstract, chaos vs. order—that makes Dataforms a truly fascinating body of work.

See more images from the series here.

What’s The Best Way To Combat Military Rape?

Last Thursday, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s bill to reform military sexual assault policies failed to overcome a filibuster against stiff opposition from Senator Claire McCaskill, whose alternative bill passed cloture 100-0. Amy Davidson explains the shortcomings of Gillibrand’s effort to remove rape investigations from the chain of command:

McCaskill, who has prosecuted sexual-assault cases herself, has argued that, as well-meaning as it sounds, pulling out sexual assault in this way would result in fewer prosecutions. Part of the reasoning is technical and structural: while commanders are motivated by discipline and order (as well as, one hopes, respect for the law and concern for and loyalty to all their troops), prosecutors are often looking for cases that they can win. If it is left up to the prosecutors alone, they might have a more jaundiced view of how a jury would hear a witness than does a commander—again, no longer the unit commander, and no longer alone.

And part has to do with the changing culture of the military: McCaskill and others have fought hard to make commanders more responsible for addressing the crisis of sexual assault in their ranks, not less so.

Marcotte’s verdict: both bills were good, but not great:

While both bills have a lot to offer victims, including more direct assistance and more assurance that their charges will be taken seriously, in the end it seems that there just may not be a perfect policy solution to the problem of sexual assault in the military.

As with the civilian world, the obstacles to getting justice for victims are more about culture than about the structure of the justice system: reflexive victim-blaming, the difficulties in distinguishing rape from consensual sex when there are no outside witnesses, and the myth that false rape accusations are more common than they are. Regardless of their differences, both McCaskill and Gillibrand have done a great service in keeping this debate in the public eye, which will go a long way toward changing the culture so that victims of sexual assault are taken more seriously by everyone.

Meanwhile:

Just as the chain of command provision failed in the Senate, news broke that the top Army prosecutor for sex assault cases had been suspended after a lawyer who worked for him alleged that he had tried to grope her at a military legal conference.

Ugh. To read more on the subject, check out the long Dish thread on military rape from last year.

Rand Paul, The GOP, And The Young, Ctd

Bouncing off Paul’s CPAC barn-burner, Philip Klein wonders if the GOP would regress on civil liberties under a Republican president:

Following Paul’s speech, I spoke with Matt Kibbe, president of the limited-government activist group FreedomWorks, about whether the momentum for a greater focus on civil liberties would be stopped if Republicans recaptured the White House.

“The younger people that are joining either the Republican Party or the conservative movement care about civil liberties a lot,” Kibbe argued. “And so it’s going to be hard to put the genie back in the bottle unless you want the party to die out.”

My view is that under a Republican president, criticism of any perceived overreaching on surveillance would be greater than it was under Bush, but not nearly as fierce as it is under Obama.

That’s a pretty inarguable fact. If he wins the nomination, of course, all this would be moot, and we’d finally be able to see what might happen in a genuine libertarian were to become president. But even if Paul loses, he will surely open the debate in the primaries on this subject, and as Klein notes, be a thorn in the side of any future surveillance state enthusiasm in a Republican administration. And indications of a genuine libertarian resurgence in the GOP are increasing:

Today on the main stage [at CPAC] in front of a packed audience of several hundred I watched a Republican governor from Texas brag about closing prisons while mocking California’s woefully over-stuffed corrections facilities. Rick Perry’s criminal justice record is by no means angelic, but he is at or near the head of the gubernatorial class when it comes to meaningful reform.)

Groups like Right on Crime now compete for booth space with Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Justice Fellowship, and—shockingly to those of us of a certain age—Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. The libertarian project of criminal justice reform is coming to this country in 2014, and though some important impetus has come from self-identified libertarian Republicans …, much of it has also come from social conservatives with hearts open to redemption, and fiscal conservatives shocked at the bottom line. Libertarian projects become viable when non-libertarians (and even anti-libertarians) embrace them.

I just wonder how the absence of Obama will impact the Republican id in these matters.

(Photo: Students Dragana Bozic (L) of New York City and Pi Praveen of Durham, NC, pose for a photograph with a life-size cutout photo of Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) at the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord International Hotel and Conference Center in National Harbor, Maryland on March 7, 2014 . By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Babies And Abortions, Inc.

Marcotte calls the opening of the country’s first abortion clinic/birthing center in Buffalo “a major step in the right direction”:

“In our clinic, we have RNs, LPNs, social workers, counselors, and trained medical personnel, in addition to our physicians, to assist our patients,” the general information page reads. But having a single clinic provide both birthing and abortion services doesn’t need to be rooted in feminist ideology. Having a single place to go for all your pregnancy needs instead of sorting patients out depending on their preconceptions about outcome is just plain common sense. Being able to go to the same doctor to give birth and have an abortion at different times in your life is likely comforting for patients.

Because as Verónica Bayetti Flores notes, “one in three women will have had an abortion in their lifetime, and most either are mothers already or go on to become mothers.” Meanwhile, Caitlin Keefe Moran, who volunteers as a patient escort at a different abortion clinic, offers insight into the fraught dynamics between patients, anti-abortion protestors, and the escorts who act as a buffer:

Laughter is our only power.

When we greet patients with a smile and calmly walk them to the clinic door, unruffled by the screaming and pamphlets thrust into their hands and graphic signs lining the sidewalk, we win a small victory. When a patient smiles back at me, or tries to make a little joke, I feel like throwing a parade. Smiling in the face of unmitigated hostility is both a method of self-preservation and an act of defiance.

On one of these occasions, I greet a patient with what can only be described as the Hugh Grant two-handed wave from Love Actually. As [clinic volunteer] Ruby and I laugh about it afterward, an older protester, a woman I don’t recognize, corners me against the wall, her finger in my face, to tell me that all the babies I have helped kill will dance around me on Judgment Day. I let her talk. This is another strategy: we engage the protesters, encourage them to shame and bully and taunt us, to distract them from the patients.

“And all of those babies will be black!” she adds. Black genocide is a favorite topic among the protesters. Their leaflets on the genocidal elimination of babies of color drive Ruby, the mixed-race daughter of a black woman, cross-eyed with rage. It’s an easy way to demonize everyone involved: to the protesters, the white escorts like me invade minority neighborhoods to kill black babies, and the escorts of color like Ruby are traitors to their race. So are the patients of color seeking abortion. And the green grass grows all around all around and we’re all murderers and racists.

How Much Do Ads Annoy You?

Strong words from @sullydish on native advertising, contrasting Guardian & Buzzfeed with S Times approach. http://t.co/jGY2eYHwgi

— Giles Wilson (@gillis) March 9, 2014

A reader writes:

I’m sure you have well-thought-out opinions on this, but I’m not sure why you are so committed to not having advertising on your site. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t miss it … but I don’t begrudge it either. No more complicated than I don’t care that Tiffany’s has a longstanding corner ad in the NYT, or the luxury jewelry/car ads in between. Are readers really put off by ads? I’ll agree that you don’t want some sort of advertising control of content, but can that be a concern? Just don’t make them annoying Internet pop-up ads requiring people to “close/X” them away. But do use “banner ads” all you want.

The truth is: we’re not opposed to ads in principle and never have been. And my long-standing stance against sponsored content is not about ads, but dishonest ones. So why don’t we have them? It’s partly a function of being a tiny little company with no publisher. But it also comes from a sense that readers are prepared to pay for the site in part because it has such a high signal-to-noise ratio. As the rest of the web becomes insanely cluttered and distracting, we hope the Dish will become even more distinctive with our white space, and simple design. What we are actively considering, however, is serving ads for non-subscribers. That would give us another revenue stream, while still retaining an ad-free site for committed subscribers. Another reader is even less averse to ads:

What is wrong with putting Google Ads (or equivalent) on the top or right side of the page, get the income you’d get, and whatever the shortfall is, ask your readers to cover? What’s the harm? The ads are clearly labeled as such (check), and the advertisers are not trying to influence your content (check). Further – Google Ads are actually often helpful – Google (for better or worse) knows our interests well, and the ads they serve up to me on various websites are often quite useful alerting me that favorite website is having a sale on XYZ.

Another, on the other hand, isn’t a fan of ad networks like Google Ads:

I resubscribed for $250 a year. I will renew hubby’s as well; it’s a toss-up which of us is on the site more of the day. I thought of my renewal in a couple of ways: First, as a donation, similar to how I’d support any cause I believe in and/or benefit from (without the tax deduction, but who cares.) And I really appreciate no ads. That can not be understated.

This morning I was scrolling through my local paper, The Brattleboro Reformer (of which you posted a great mistake headline from last year) and was once again confronted by an absolutely disgusting photo of toe nail fungus. There is no way to get the ad not to show up. Perhaps this is your best advertisement for folks to willingly renew. So they are not confronted with this photo in exchange for reading some news??

Thanks for all you do, and for steering clear of Google Ads.

Several more readers weigh in:

As my re-up date approached, I remained somewhat ambivalent. Then, the other day, I went to the newly reconfigured and utterly awful New York Times page. Blown-up fonts surrounded by distracting, flashing ads – I’ve really cut down on going there as a result. And it reminded me of what I was already taking for granted: The Dish’s clean, non-distracting appearance, where your eyes don’t work overtime so that your brain can be more fully engaged.

So I just doubled my subscription rate, for a number of reasons: For your commitment to honest debate, for the great flow of content (including the Saturday and Sunday themes), for the recognition of the vital role of poetry, for your “long” pieces – especially your essay on Francis – and for saying “fuck you” to the ever-encroaching corrosiveness of advertising. I’m looking forward to another good year.

Another in the “no ads” camp:

This founding member doubled his initial subscription amount. If I can afford to give NPR $5 a month, I can afford to pay the Dish $50 a year, when you all are working your asses off, and, better than that, doing it with integrity and no advertising. I hate fucking advertising.

Another:

After a year as a “founding member”, I was nevertheless hesitant to renew again. While I fully supported the experiment that you were undertaking, I’d hoped, perhaps against reason, that more of your audience would be willing to follow suit and would give you the funds required to launch the kinds of independent reporting and commissioned pieces that you’d described in your initial pitch. I was thrilled by the first release of Deep Dish, “I Was Wrong“, even though I never got through it – the concept alone was enlivening. But as the year ended without entirely reaching your goal, I couldn’t shake a feeling that maybe you’d pushed as far as your audience was willing to go.

Last week, however, I signed into the New York Times website to see a Verizon ad taking up a the entire right-hand side of my screen, jammed into the spot just below where the Opinion section ordinarily goes. This is not the only time that this has happened. Like many of your readers, I run Ad Block Plus constantly, and have grown accustomed to an ad-free Internet. The umbrage I felt at seeing this Times ad shoehorned into empty space helped me to realize what several of your readers feel when they claim, insanely, that the Internet should remain free. It’s difficult to change how people approach these things, and difficult to appreciate when different realities might require different strategies. What I admire most about your work is that you understand this, that you welcome it, and that you’re open and honest about it.

The Times, meanwhile, isn’t. The fact is that I’m asked to pay the Times $15 every four weeks (not even a month mind you) in order, in theory, to keep animated GIFs of Marshall Faulk plugging Verizon to a minimum. Since this has happened more than once, I imagine that the Times and their advertisers have gone out of their way to make sure that these ads can be snuck around AdBlock. But even if not, shouldn’t my subscription buy me this much? The Times wants their cake and everything else too. Whose approach would I prefer – yours or theirs?

So as of this moment, I’m canceling my subscription to the New York Times, taking a quarter of the money that I’d pay them in a given year, rounding it up to make it a clean $50, and giving it to you. I’ll plan to distribute the rest in gifts to friends and family throughout the year, but I hope that this is enough for now to move you towards your goal.

One more:

I’m happy to renew and threw in a few extra bucks because you asked politely and with good reason. I think there is value to an independent site that does not rely on advertising bucks. And I hope it stays that way, but I can imagine the lure as you continue to fight to gain traction. Hopefully you will openly share with us as you wrestle with the advertising demon.

(Images: Three network ads that have run on the Dish in the past)