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Maybe a little light on the butternut squash. Ask me anything
Maybe a little light on the butternut squash. Ask me anything
May 18, 2012
May 15, 2012
Our real first gay president
The new issue of Newsweek features a cover photo of President Obama topped by a rainbow-colored halo and captioned “The First Gay President.” The halo and caption strike me as cheap sensationalism. I realize airport travelers look at a magazine for 2.2 seconds before moving on to the next one. I grant that this cover will probably get Newsweek a 4.4 second glance. I also understand that Newsweek is desperate for sales. Nevertheless, I doubt that the Newsweek of old, before it was sold for a dollar, would have pandered as shallowly.
The caption is a superficial way to characterize an important development of thought that the president — along with the country — has been making over recent years. It is also entirely wrong. Like the mini-furor a couple of months back about the claim that Richard Nixon was our first gay president, the story simply ignores that the U.S. already had a gay president more than a century ago.
There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.
Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:
I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.
Tl;dr Newsweek go fuck yourself. We’ve had a gay president before. Stop being a sensationalist piece of shit.
May 15, 2012
Via We, the Women.
May 11, 2012
Richard Stallman in the Doctor’s Office
A few points of reference:
- For some years, Richard Stallman was something of a hero to my young techie self.
- After a while, however, Richard Stallman seemed at best cuckoo and at worst not very good at what he thinks he’s good at anymore.
- Then I learned that Richard Stallman may well be a pedophile. If nothing else, he is on record questioning whether “voluntary pedophilia” should be illegal. (As well as offering guidelines for best practices in incest (use a condom) and necrophilia (get permission from next-of-kin), among others.)
So, my esteem of him has been in pretty much steady decline since the early 90s.
However, his legacy to the world may well be his transformation of contract law to support intellectual property protection for open source software. Thus, this account of Richard Stallman actually asking to see the privacy notice in a doctor’s office is pretty funny. It always bugs me when I am asked to sign that I accept a privacy policy or other form of license without actually being provided with the appropriate document. To learn that said document may not even exist and/or be available is almost laughably unsurprising.
I don’t want to do it, but I love the idea that there is someone going through life calling bullshit on these guys. I may not love much else about Stallman any more, but for a minute, he’s my hero again.
May 4, 2012
Common Sense and Theoretical Physics
There are a lot of smart crackpots out there who regularly publish refutations of relativity and quantum mechanics. There are good reasons to do so: both theories are highly counter-intuitive. There are good reasons not to do so: both theories have consistently held up under experimental scrutiny. There’s a big problem: these two theories contradict each other.
Nonetheless, they are the cornerstones of contemporary physics, upon which far more grandiose (and far less stable) theories have been built.
So, it’s absolutely delightful to see one of the grandfathers of contemporary physics apply the common sense “sniff test” to the whole grand edifice: Behold, Roger Penrose.
Pretty much every word he utters in this interview is something I think on a regular basis, when I think about theoretical physics. That doesn’t mean I’m worthy to fetch the man his evening scotch-on-the-rocks, but it is very gratifying to learn that it’s going on.
May 3, 2012
Your brain literally gets bored and starts scaring you
When I tried the image they have set up to demonstrate the Troxler effect, where the outer circle is supposed to disappear? I was literally trying to make it happen and I couldn’t seem to. I would get a hint of the fading out and then I would feel compelled to blink or shake my head or something and would go right back to seeing the outer circle.
Is this why I can never see those “Magic Eye” pictures? Does my brain panic when stuff starts to disappear? I don’t know!
I simply couldn’t repro. I stared at that red dot for like two minutes. Felt dizzy, the blue circle blurred from time to time, sometimes there was a little wave in which one eye or the other seemed to lose part of it, but it never disappeared.
I really want to do that staring at my face in the mirror experiment however. I am pretty sure that the monster that appears is interesting information about what the brain thinks of its own identity. I’m hoping my mishap with the dot and the circle is not indicative of an inability to view myself as a monster!
May 3, 2012
College Sucks
My friend McJulie posted a link about education. It’s an interesting article, and McJulie’s response is spot on. I started to repost it, but realized I have more to say on the subject.
Much more.
The main point is simple: University as vocational training is a new concept, and I suspect it is one that is about to make an exit. It’s simply not the right tool for the job.
May 2, 2012
May 1, 2012
Giving Conservatives Exactly What They Want
This is B.S.
I was once a young man who thought anarchy was cool. (Until I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s marvelously nuanced The Dispossessed.) I get it that young people want to rebel, and get arrested and get photographed and generally express their (justifiable) outrage at a crazy world that makes no sense and which does not seem to welcome their input.
I just wish they understood that this is exactly what conservatives want to happen, because it marginalizes liberals and forces even hippy mayors like McGinn to hand power over to the police. More importanly, it reinforces the fear that the center has of any kind of counter cultural expression of anger, and at least in the current environment, pushes the center to the right.
Some broken car windows, some slashed tires, a few broken bank windows, some minor damage to government buildings is trivial in the long run, but it’s just a huge hassle to everyone in the short run.
So, while they want to be changing the world, what they are really accomplishing is solidifying the status-quo as an increasingly stratified, polarized entity. Given enough time and dedication, efforts like these could even topple our democracy — and replace it with the dictatorship they pretend we have today.
I was really impressed with the occupy movement last year which accomodated the punk anarchist crowd without empowering it to violence. Unfortunately, there was no such moderation today.
April 30, 2012
John Cleese has done a lot of consulting and advising over the years. This is one of the better clips I’ve encountered, especially for people who need a creative boost. Some of it is pretty well-understood common sense amongst the creative, but he brings such a clear and persuasive manner of expression to it that it’s worth revisiting.
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The Anatomy of a Wasp.
(via Reddit)
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Scarlet
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Wow if this is how the next generation writes, I am scared for the future.
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But in these past few months, even he may be...
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i don’t understand why anybody bothers to argue about why they do or don’t use trigger/content warnings i mean don’t they...
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