Growing up, half the people I knew swore that a great-uncle or cousin or grandpa was on the bridge that day:
And while I also like the Great Big Sea version this is hard to beat:
Labor Day
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Sep 052011
I kept my face hidden as I rushed through the hospital. Wouldn’t do to be spotted now, the father who lobbied for his daughter’s just-paroled murderer to be allowed a heart transplant, citing Christ’s teachings on forgiveness.
I found the room where they kept the brain-dead donor on machines. Cassie had been about her age when he slaughtered her. My hands shook as I injected her with blood from Cassie’s dog. He died of rabies yesterday.
Soon the transplant doctors would arrive. He would get her heart. And it would come with a parting gift from Cassie.
To everyone’s profound nonsurprise, various pundits and public figures are attributing the UK riots to the old favorites: lack of parental discipline, and the degenerate culture of Those People. (You know; the ones who don’t need as high an SPF rating on their sunscreen.) In typically remote fashion, the Economist goes back through historical Kids These Days panics in recent history.
In talking about the “Negro music” aspect of this panic, dzik makes a spot-on observation about jazz that should be tattooed on the inner eyelids of all cultural snobs:
Of course, the real scandal of Miles, Sun Ra et al was that they took these “deplorable”, “tribal” roots and cultivated an art form capable of engaging with the European classical tradition and commanding respect on its own terms — that is the negro’s revenge and that is the negro’s revenge. To listen to the critics you’d think some people would have been less offended if they’d merely destroyed Western Civilization.
Damn straight.
(First, a note to the media: When you’re writing about a new law, post a link to the text of the new law. It shouldn’t be this hard to find. Kthx.)
What apparently led some of New York’s Republican lawmakers to support the Marriage Equality Act were the religious exemptions, protecting religious groups that object to same-sex marriage. This is one of the most common scare tactics raised by opponents of same-sex marriage, and one of the most dishonest: the Establishment Clause absolutely protects religious groups from having to administer their rites in violation of their faith. Same-sex marriage rites are about civil, not religious, marriage.
The “religious” protections are therefore redundant at best; these protections already exist, and not merely in the area of same-sex marriage. The only useful purpose they serve is cover. Same-sex marriage proponents can assure those who don’t understand the Establishment Clause, and politicians with more conservative constituents can trumpet their protection of the sanctity of marriage. This is particularly true as the law has a poison pill; it states that a court cannot simply overturn part of the law, such as the religious exemptions, but has to decide on the law as an all-or-nothing deal. This uses same-sex marriage as a sort of human shield; try to force a church to rent its gazebo to a gay couple and risk eliminating same-sex marriage entirely.
(Interestingly, groups opposed to same-sex marriage also oppose “religious protection” laws. The ostensible reason is that they don’t want anything that even hints that SSM is okay. The real reason is that it takes away one of their favorite arguments; it’s a lot harder to lie to people and tell them their churches will have to marry gay couples when there’s a law explicitly saying that can’t happen.)
Outside of same-sex marriage,it’s obvious that if you don’t like a religion’s rules, you can shut up and go to a different church, or to City Hall. We would laugh at a couple suing the Catholic Church because a priest refused to perform a marriage ceremony for two Protestants, or for a divorced Catholic seeking to marry a Buddhist. So would the courts. Yet even though there are likely far more interfaith and ‘rulebreaking’ couples who would like to marry than same-sex couples, neither churches nor lawmakers seem particularly concerned about protecting the sanctity of their religious practices.
Yet this seems unfair to religious groups. The Marriage Equality Act spells out quite clearly that it offers protections from civil actions to religious groups that object to same-sex marriage. But most religions have greater limitations on who can marry than “one man and one woman”. Where is the protection for faiths that prohibit interracial marriage? Why is there no protection for a church that refuses to rent “facilities” to interfaith couples? Why does the law exempt a rabbi refusing to marry a woman to a woman, but doesn’t protect a rabbi refusing to marry a Jew to a Gentile?
Obviously these are rhetorical questions; the reason is bigotry. Opponents of same-sex marriage simply don’t feel the same revulsion toward interfaith or interracial couples. And there’s a strong sense, among the less-zealous, that while a church may decline to marry such couples, that actually condemning those marriage is wrongheaded and, perhaps, even bigoted and unfair.
I look forward to the day when the majority recognizes that trying to stop same-sex couples from marrying at all is also bigoted and unfair.
Jun 162011
(Cross-posted at Alas, A Blog. Thanks Amp!)
Is it really possible for a state to preserve its laws against same-sex marriage, limiting the institution to one man and one woman, in the face of a challenge claiming such laws are discriminatory? As state after state has those laws overturned as unconstitutional, is there no possible way for a state that doesn’t want same-sex marriage to avoid the long arm of the law?
Sure is. All the state has to do is bring back traditional marriage, and the family law that goes with it. To defend opposite-sex-only marriage laws, a state must articulate a valid secular purpose for those laws, and traditional family law is the only way to do it.
Predictable longshot tactic fails predictably
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Jun 142011
To nobody’s surprise, the anti-same-sex marriage contingent’s attempt to retroactively recuse Judge Walker was crushed like an ugly, ugly bug today. And in less than 24 hours. You know how hard it is to get a judge to rule that fast? I, for one, am flush with envy.
There wasn’t anything particularly innovative about this tactic; defense firms use it all the time. Find out that the judge has some vague possible reason that could be inflated into bias, but hold it back in case you lose, at which point you pretend you just found out about it and want a do-over. It almost never works, because judges are presumed impartial and there has to be a very clear, and very direct, showing that the judge got something out of the ruling.
Of course, it did make for some entertaining oral argument, and by “entertaining” I mean “I can’t believe these bozos thought they had an argument.”
Sunday Book Blogging: Starve Better
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Jun 122011
My preorder of Nick Mamatas’s new book on writing, Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life, showed up this week, bearing the dedication “To a future former bestseller”, which in my opinion was pretty much worth the price of the book. But that aside, this is not your average how-to-be-a-rich-and-famous-writer book and is exceptionally informative.
First, because if you are at all familiar with Mamatas and his writing style, you know that he’s blunt, opinionated and not given to telling people what they want to hear. This can be annoying if he in fact tells you something you’d rather not hear, but is very refreshing if you’ve ever gotten the feeling that vague, happyish advice about writing was perhaps not entirely truthful.
For example, here’s Mamatas on the belief that only a select few can actually make a full-time living as a writer:
It is true that only a very few writers do nothing but write; it is not true that they must have another job. Writers choose to have other jobs rather than live humbly. This brings us to the first hidden assumption involved in the question: writing isn’t a job, it is a middle-class profession that should earn the practitioner both petit-bourgeois status and a comfortable income.
A significant fraction of writers who have a day job or a side gig as a teacher could live on their writing; they just don’t want to, as it would mean a smaller house, a less pleasant neighborhood, fewer vacations, or less (perhaps even no) health insurance. That’s an entirely valid choice, of course. Nobody gets any artiste point for eating beans and living in a garret. But wanting to live comfortably is not the same as being unable to live on one’s writing.
Second, because the book is not (as most writing advice tends to be) focused on Writing That Novel, but instead focused on writing short stories and non-fiction articles. Shorter pieces can be finished faster, are easier to market and most importantly, bring in money faster; in the time it takes to write a single novel the writer can most likely produce and sell many shorter works, and possibly even sell them. A hundred dollars today to keep the lights on is better than a theoretical six-figure advance years from now.
Mamatas also talks about work that is profitable, but which most people who want to be writers likely wouldn’t think about or want any part of, unless they were driven by money, like writing term papers (very lucrative, apparently, and the chapter on this work has some exceptional insights into the market; no, the customers are not all bored overprivileged Ivy League kids who’d rather not waste precious kegger time on a term paper). He also warns away from markets that seem like a good idea but aren’t, like content mills.
The only disappointment was the chapter on POD and vanity publishers, which is admittedly many years out of date. It would have been interesting to see an updated take on new incarnations like Smashwords and Lulu.com, even though the underlying structure probably hasn’t changed enormously.
Highly recommended for anyone who would actually like to write and sell their writing. Not recommended for anyone who just wants to sigh about the novel they’re going to write “someday” or whose entire writing output consists of a couple of stories that got shelved after Asimov’s rejected them.
Ladies Against Women (Gay Men’s Edition)
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Jun 122011
Apparently figuring that “gay man against gays” is a man-bites-dog article no editor can resist, Jonathan Soroff writes a facile article about why there shouldn’t be same-sex marriage. If you’d rather not wade through this tripe, the arguments boil down this:
1) My family won’t stop nagging me to marry my boyfriend!
2) Marriage is a man and a woman. It just is, all right? Plus, babies.
3) Let’s just not use the M-word, and then straights will give us all the exact same rights and everything will be wine and roses. We can even call it something stupid, like “floogle”. Then we will totally fly under the radar!
4) Did I mention that my family won’t stop nagging me to get married? I hope you’re reading this, Mr. Would-Be-Father-In-Law.
I trust I don’t have to explain why points 1 and 4 are stupid.
Point 2 is a tautology: marriage has always been a man and a woman because marriage has always been a man and a woman. It’s also, until quite recently (less than half a century) been an institution where the wife was largely the husband’s property, in law and in fact, and one where childbearing was central and the lack thereof a reason to forbid or end a marriage. Funnily, Soroff, like his straight counterparts on the anti-same-sex marriage reservation, seem to skip over that part. (Not that they are all opposed to the traditional model, of course. But it isn’t good PR to suggest that America should return to the good old days where a woman couldn’t hold property in her own name without her husband’s consent.)
Point 3 is one Soroff doesn’t argue much, probably because he has some inkling of how ignorant he is of the fact that marriage is, like, laws and stuff. And in the law, words have meaning. Laws are also very complicated, being a confusing overlay of federal and individual state laws. It is literally impossible for the President to issue a proclamation saying “From now on, every law everywhere that says ‘marriage’ also includes civil unions.” Individual states might have a little issue with that, and they would be in the right to do so. And anyone could challenge this proclamation by saying that a particular law contemplated, and depends on, the ‘traditional’ view of marriage and can’t possible be extended to anything else.
The easiest, and obvious, way to expand the rights and responsibilities of marriage is to allow same-sex couples to marry, too. But I guess that allowing same-sex couples to have full civil rights is not nearly as important as getting Soroff’s family to stop nagging him about the wedding.
Modern economy for a postmodern world
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Apr 262011
So I’ve been gradually picking away at disaster preparedness for some time, with a more recent nudge thanks to Ceredwyn: got the water storage containers, got some MREs so we have instant meals for 72 hours, waiting for the go-bags and some other miscellaneous stuff to arrive.
I’ve picked up some disaster prep books on what I would dub the non-crazy end of the spectrum, which are very helpful, but many are written by people approaching life from a rural/Mormon/farming approach, where you not only buy stuff but make stuff.
Now, I do know how to slaughter animals (highest grade in Butchershop class in chef school) and how to can things. I’m not above making and putting up jam, and I think I still have a tiny jar of jam with “Grandma’s Jam” written on it in a four-year-old’s scrawl. But we don’t have that much growing space here; my gardening mostly consists of growing things that are expensive and/or lower in quality if you buy them, like tomatoes, or that I want to grow so I can grab a few vegetables for dinner, like snap peas. There’s not really enough to grow acres of produce to put up in the fall.
And more importantly, as I considered the idea of ‘putting up food for a disaster,’ and setting aside the capital investment of picking up a pressure canner and associated equipment….you know, you can just BUY canned goods. They’re not as delicious and personally tailored as cucumbers from the garden or chickens from the coop, but they’re also considerably easier and cheaper if you do count in the capital investment. Isn’t it just, well, more efficient for me to buy a few flats of canned and packaged goods? And to instead direct my labor to my distinctly non-agricultural work in order to more efficiently generate income?
Next thing you know I’ll be quoting Keynes.
NaNoWriMo Wordle
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Jan 012011
It choked, but Wordle sailed bravely on and managed to map out 51k+ words.
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