Archive for the ‘Common-Place Book’ Category
The Long Road
The same is true of the trajectory of the same-sex marriage issue. Gay couples began going to court to claim a right to marry at almost exactly the same time that women began turning to the courts to claim a right to abortion. The student body president of the University of Minnesota Law School brought [...]
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Fear and Prejudice on Trial
We remember during the 2008 campaign in California the remarkable campaign of slurs, innuendo, and outright lies that opponents of marriage equality indulged in. Remarkably–or perhaps it's no surprise at all, really–when it came time for them to make their case in court, under oath, it turned out that there was no understandable, rational reason [...]
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Reagan's Silence on AIDS
Recently I read the news that there was a move afoot to designate a day in California to honor Ronald Reagan; others want to force recognition at a national level. There are so many reasons why he's not worthy of such accolades. The following recounts just one reason, one that, despite my sometimes spotty memory, [...]
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Secretary Clinton (again): "Gay Rights are Human Rights"
But think about what’s happening to people as we speak today. Men and women are harassed, beaten, subjected to sexual violence, even killed, because of who they are and whom they love. Some are driven from their homes or countries, and many who become refugees confront new threats in their countries of asylum. In some [...]
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Hypatia in Texas
Hypatia of Alexandria [c. 370--c. 415] was martyred by being torn to shreds by a Christian mob, partly because she did not adhere to strict Christian principles. She considered herself a neo-Platonist, a pagan, and a follower of Pythagorean ideas. Interestingly, Hypatia is the first woman mathematician in the history of humanity of whom we [...]
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Boxes of the Mind
I just finished watching (h/t Jeff Li) the documentary film "Stanley Kubrick's Boxes", made by Jon Ronson for Channel 4 [UK] and released in 2008. I was captivated by it. Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write War and Peace in [...]
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Gullibility's Price
From Bob Park's What's New for 11 June 2010: 1. FAKE BOMB DETECTOR: THE HIGH COST OF IGNORANCE. According to a story in The Independent (UK) on Tuesday, the investigation into the sale of fake bomb detectors has been expanded to a number of firms in the UK. It seemed comical fourteen years ago when [...]
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H.R.Clinton on Tax Distribution
When I read this I was reminded of a report we watched recently–from a few decades ago–that reported that Swedes were the "happiest" people in the world, because of / despite their much higher tax rate and their solid commitment to a social-welfare state. “The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation [...]
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Amis on Morality
Secularism contains no warrant for action. One can afford to be crude about this. When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the head of hostages, they shout, "God is great!" When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout? [Martin Amis, from The Second Plane; quoted by Richard Dawkins, "I [...]
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Granderson on "Gay Uncle Toms"
The gay and lesbian community has plenty of Uncle Toms trying to blow us up from inside, but what we don't have is our own word or phrase to identify them. Some call them "closet cases," but there is a difference between someone who is unwilling to live openly and honestly, and someone who takes [...]
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A Minuscule Pullum Miscellany
Oh, dear. Again and again and again, American professors with absolutely no background in English grammar insist that their 21st-century college students should study this unpleasantly dogmatic little work, written by men born in the 19th century. But the dictats given in The Elements of Style range from the redundant to the insane. Anyone who [...]
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Beard of the Week LXXXIX: It's Cool that No One's in Charge
I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here. And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences. At least I have. (And in the empirical study I'm performing about interacting with the [...]
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Thoreau on Credulity
It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. –Henry David Thoreau, Walden [Among his many professions Thoreau could claim surveyor. Early in 1846, while he was living at Walden Pond, he surveyed it thoroughly, including measuring its depth. He related that he [...]
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Philip Pullman, Happily Offensive
It seems that Philip Pullman has written a new book published with the title The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In this short video, recorded at an event at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford on 28 March 2010, he responds to a man in the audience who says that, as a christian he finds [...]
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Tutu: Lesbians & Gays in Africa Living in Fear
Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear. And they are living in hiding — away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. [...]
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"Star Wars": Awesome Fathers or Awesome CGI?
From an interesting (and short) essay on the morality–or rather, immorality–of the "Star Wars" films, this piquant observation: But culture and craft aside, I think there’s still a problem of intention. Lucas started out as a rebel against the authoritarian Bad Father. That’s what his movies were about, back before they were about the awesomeness [...]
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Truth in Snark: Justice Stevens on Corporate Personhood
While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics. [US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, dissent to majority opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, quoted by Mary Hall, State of the Union: Obama Walking in the [...]
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Sanders on his Move towards Equality
Jerry Sanders, mayor of San Diego, appeared this week as a witness for plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, and he's written about the experience and his own conversion to equality. The pull-quotes: "I realized that all opposition to same-sex marriage, including my own opposition, was grounded in prejudice." "When government tolerates discrimination against any class [...]
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Merkley on Republican Anti-Science "Political Stunts"
Today one of my Republican colleagues introduced a proposal to brazenly overturn sound scientific work done by our nation's leading public health experts and prohibit the Environment Protection Agency from doing its job to protect the health and welfare of the American people. This extremely damaging proposal is a political stunt designed to effectively strip [...]
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James on Christie
From her new book, Talking About Detective Fiction, P.D. James is quoted in the New York Times* saying, of the overrated Agatha Christie: Perhaps her greatest strength was that she never overstepped the limits of her talent. ———- * Janet Maslin, "Mysteries of Crime Fiction? P. D. James Is on the Case", New York Times, [...]
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