(Ohman via gocomics.com)
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Anybody got plans for the weekend that don’t involve watching college basketball?
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Reminder: This week’s NIXONLAND book discussion, Sunday afternoon 4pm EDT, chapters 13-15 (“Violence”, “From Miami to the Siege of Chicago”, and “Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1968”). Bring your bad memories…
Archives for March 2011
And a good saloon in every single town
I’m sure you’re tired of us hearing us all whine about minutiae like Bobo’s new book, the comments on this blog, and nuclear radiation, so I thought I’d do a feel good post about wine. I went to a wine dinner last night where I tried wine from Pennsylvania (a Bordeaux blend), Idaho (riesling), Missouri (some kind of weird dessert wine), and Mississippi (a Muscadine, whatever that is). The Mississippi wine was from Natchez. I like that because there’s a Solomon Burke song that mentions Natchez.
There is wine made in all 50 states now. Here’s a cool feature where some guy from Time reviews a wine from each state.
I’m off to watch NCAA basketball.
Have a good Friday!
Lighten Up, Francis (An Illustrated Guide to the Balloon Juice Comment Policy)
I’ve thought about it a bit, and here is the comments policy we will be rocking from now on:
1.) No racist, sexist, or homophobic remarks. Violation equals comment deletion and a warning, second offense is comment deletion and a week vacation, third offense, don’t let the door hit you in the ass.
2.) No divulging people’s personal information (address, phone numbers, employer, etc.)
3.) No Poofters.
That is it. Period. It is simple, it is easy to understand, and it is clear. All the front pagers have the ability to enforce these rules. I know some of you want to make all sorts of bizarre subjective rules about people that offend your delicate sensibilities, but that isn’t happening, as I am an adherent to the KISS principle.
If someone offends you but is not violating those three rules, you have a number of options:
1.) You could ignore them (highly recommended!).
2.) You could insult them back (my personal recommendation!).
3.) You could install Cleek’s pie filter (click on this link, MORANS!) so you never have to read them again (a good solution, but I am too lazy to do it).
4.) Or, in the immortal words of TBOGG, you could try to find this place:
Every year in Happy Gumdrop Fairy-Tale Land all of the sprites and elves and woodland creatures gather together to pick the Rainbow Sunshine Queen. Everyone is there: the Lollipop Guild, the Star-Twinkle Toddlers, the Sparkly Unicorns, the Cookie Baking Apple-cheeked Grandmothers, the Fluffy Bunny Bund, the Rumbly-Tumbly Pupperoos, the Snowflake Princesses, the Baby Duckies All-In-A-Row, the Laughing Babies, and the Dykes on Bikes. They have a big picnic with cupcakes and gumdrops and pudding pops, stopping only to cast their votes by throwing Magic Wishing Rocks into the Well of Laughter, Comity, and Good Intentions. Afterward they spend the rest of the night dancing and singing and waving glow sticks until dawn when they tumble sleepy-eyed into beds made of the purest and whitest goose down where they dream of angels and clouds of spun sugar.
I’ve been to a lot of blogs with comments, and given the open nature of the comments here, I still think the signal to noise ratio is pretty acceptable. Regardless, this is 2011 and this is the internet. There are assholes out there. Someone in your family is going to leave the toilet seat up, someone squeezes the toothpaste from the middle of the tube, someone is going to give your kid a wedgie at school, some shithead will be talking loudly on his cell phone while you eat at a restaurant or chewing with his mouth open, someone is going to cut you off in traffic- somewhere, some prick is drinking your milkshake. It happens. Have a drink. Likewise, there are assholes in the comments section. Deal with it.
If you can’t handle someone on the internet making smartass remarks or don’t have the ability to ignore them or deal with them, I have no idea how you function in society.
But that’s your problem, and not mine, and I’m not going to let you make it mine.
Lighten Up, Francis (An Illustrated Guide to the Balloon Juice Comment Policy)Post + Comments (257)
Darwin hates fags
I’m sure there’s all kinds of wonderful things about evolutionary psychology, but at times its adherents sound a lot like glibertarians. I’ve always liked this quip from Noam Chomsky:
You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s’. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.
This can all dovetail with the kind of brave contrarianism that brings knee-jerk liberals to our knees. Here’s Will Wilkinson on the idea of an evolutionary basis for homophobia:
At his Scientific American blog, evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering discusses the hypothesis that a negative attitude toward homosexuality is a product of natural selection. The argument that it is, due to Gordon Gallup of SUNY-Albany, is basically that parents who actively discourage or stigmatize homosexuality in their kids will have more grandkids, and so on. “In its simplest form,” Gallup conjectures, “parents who showed a concern for their child’s sexual orientation may have left more descendants than those who were indifferent.”
So, okay. This is a fine hypothesis. Is there any evidence for it? Well, no. There isn’t. This is not to say that Gallup conducted no studies in the attempt to test his hypotheses. He did a bunch of them fifteen or so years ago. Bering lays these out in detail, resurrecting what had been a dormant line of argument in the hope that “it might spark new research.” Noting that Gallup’s “studies are imperfect, ” he goes on to praise Gallup for his courage willingness to do science that is “exceedingly rude—unpalatable, even,” implying, it seems, that there has been little follow-up on this question due to the weak-kneed liberal fear that experimental confirmation would help “antisocial conservatives to promote further intolerance against gays.”
A graduate student summarizes the lack of evidence:
If you’ve noticed that this doesn’t mention evidence of heritability or a fitness benefit to homophobia, that’s not because I left it out—that’s because Gallup’s work contains no data to support either.
What this amounts to is arguing that homophobia is an adaptation favored by natural selection because homophobia is a thing that exists.
I write about this, because, you guessed it, of Bobo. The point of his new fascination with what he calls neuroscience is to show readers that there are hard, scientific truths about the awesomeness of conservative values and that liberals have to accept them, or they’re no better than flat-earthers. His argument will generally be: a) there is a social order, b) since there is a social order, there is a scientific reason for it, and c) if liberals want to change the social order to be more fair, they are going against nature. David Koch’s primal scent is why he is more powerful than you; you mock him at our species’ peril.
Of course there are a few things about our current society for which there is no good scientific reason: unions, public schools, etc.
Something Has To Give
I can not spend the rest of my life fielding emails and policing bullshit behaviors in the comments section or reading emails from people who are offended by such and such. I can’t, and I won’t.
Something has to give. I don’t know what has gotten into everyone, or what has happened, but between the spamming threads with comments, the creepy racist and misogynistic bullshit, the sock-puppeting, and then the delicate flowers who are deeply offended by anything and everything, I’m tired of dealing with your bullshit. I’m sick of it, and I don’t know what to do. I have no idea why half of you get offended by what random people on the internet say about you, and I don’t know why the other half of you insist on being assholes.
You tell me what I am supposed to do, because I am sick of the damned whining. My gmail account has turned into fucking Heathers- “I’m not reading your blog any more because people are mean and bullies!” “Why don’t you do something about X?” “Why did you ban me for making repeated creepy statements?” “OMG- someone is a sock puppet!” “Someone said something mean to me!” And that doesn’t even go into the spam I now receive from everyone’s favorite cudlip-basher, accusing me of single-handedly elevating Erik Kain to a premier punditry position where he can spew glibertarianism.
I’m sick of it. Tell me what to do. Or- toughen up and grow up and learn how to use Cleek’s spam filter. I’m at my god damned breaking point with you drama queens. Knock it off.
And now I will get 100 more emails, each from different people who think this post is all about them. You are right.
Not so fast
Maybe things are even less over in Wisconsin than I thought (via):
Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi issued a temporary restraining order Friday, barring the publication of a controversial new law that would sharply curtail collective bargaining for public employees.
Sumi’s order will prevent Secretary of State Doug La Follette from publishing the law until she can rule on the merits of the case. Dane County Ismael Ozanne is seeking to block the law because he says a legislative committee violated the state’s open meetings law.
Sumi said Ozanne was likely to succeed on the merits.
“It seems to me the public policy behind effective enforcement of the open meeting law is so strong that it does outweigh the interest, at least at this time, which may exist in favor of sustaining the validity of the (law),” she said.
Bedding down
Few things amuse me more than pundits trying to use hip lingo. From today’s Bobo blog:
Impulsive people might sleep with each other faster and also behave in other ways that damage relationships. On the other hand, if you took impulsive people and surrounded them in a culture that strongly discouraged bedding down on the first date, would this by itself improve relationship quality?
The question I have for conservatives is always this: how would you create this “culture that strongly discouraged” whatever bad thing you think people shouldn’t do? I’m afraid that the answer is always going to involve some form of government enforcement.
I doubt there are many people who base their personal mores on what they read in New York Times columns. I certainly hope there aren’t!
Update. Bad news from Steve M.
May I tell you something horrible? The Brooks book hit #1 on the Times bestseller list. (The list will be on the site this weekend—I get it by email.)