I wasn't on Twitter for very long, and one of the reasons I jumped off that apparently sinking ship was the tendency of Twitterers to gush. Bloggers do it, too — everything is "the best [X] in the history of human endeavor," and everyone is "brilliant," "inimitable," or "freakishly...
Friday, July 31, 2009
"My misandry is just a subset of my misanthropy."
Feministing has drawn attention to a new study:Despite the popular belief that feminists dislike men, few studies have actually examined the empirical accuracy of this stereotype. The present study examined self-identified feminists' and nonfeminists' attitudes toward men. An...
Are You Conservative, Yet Attracted by the Idea of Class War?
Your opportunity may have arrived! North Carolina passed an indoor smoking ban in May with the following exceptions:The new law permits cigar bars and private clubs to continue operating. However, Bliss said it would not be possible to change his business to fit under either...
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Bookbag: William F. Buckley on the Republican Party in New York State
It wasn't ego that made William F. Buckley run for mayor in 1965. He just wanted to put a dent in John Lindsay's career, which he worried would drag the Republican Party to the left. With that in mind, here is his description of the New York 17th (in Manhattan), the unlikeliest...
Bookbag: Machine Politicians vs. Yippies
From Bill & Lori Granger's Lords of the Last Machine, this paragraph about the '68 Chicago convention:What the hard-ball players in City Hall did not understand, or did not wish to understand, was that the rhetoric of confrontation that people like [Abbie] Hoffman delighted...
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Lovers Laughing in Their Amateur Hour, Holding Hands in the Corridors of Power
The American Conservative has a nice article up about "Samantha Power and the weaponization of human rights." Since Samantha Power has been at the NSC, there's already been one human rights crisis that, ideally, could have served as an indication of how we could expect her...
The Only Way I Could Like This Clip More Would Be If Tuesday Weld Put On Dobie's Boxing Gloves
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis has not yet been released on DVD, but someone has just put up several episodes on YouTube, including this one, "The Fist Fighter," about a boxing match between Dobie Gillis and Milton Armitage (Warren Beatty, looking about fifteen). Old-timey...
Letter to a Fanzine, circa 1841
From A History of American Labor by Joseph Rayback, this description of two oddly zine-like publications:In 1841 there had appeared in Massachusetts the Lowell Offering, a magazine dedicated to the principle that the lot of the factory girl was a veritable heaven on earth. ...
Friday, July 24, 2009
Up is Down, Black is White: Media History Edition
Freedom is slavery, says Tim Crouse in Boys on the Bus:"Freedom" scared a reporter out of his mind, because it wasn't really freedom at all. "Freedom" simply meant that nobody had clearly marked all the pitfalls and booby traps, so the reporter became cautious as a blind man...
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Truth is Bad and There Should Be Less of It: A Continuing Series
First installment here.From Charles Walton's Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech:[François] Dareau understood the risks to individual honor in the courtroom, which is why he downplayed the importance of discovering...
"I fear that if I went before the Holy Father with a blossoming rod it would turn at once into an umbrella."
The Daily Mail and the Times are both surprised that L'Osservatore Romano would say nice things about Oscar Wilde. The Times explains its surprise:Wilde, who was married and had two children, was arrested and tried in 1895 over his relationship with Lord Douglas (known as Bosie),...
"I've never taken boxing promoter Don King too seriously as a self-proclaimed Republican."
But the new concert documentary Soul Power made J.R. Taylor of RightWingTrash change his mind:There are still two fine political moments. One has King and fellow Republican James Brown discussing the importance of capitalism in liberating a minority—in this case, black men named...
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby: A Meet-Cute Case Study
I saw Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby at the Black Cat last week, and they told a very sweet story about the first time they met. Eric had gone to see Amy play at some bar in Britain, where he was dismayed to discover that, for her cover of "Whole Wide World," she changed the...
An Affirmative Action/Corruption/Patronage Intermezzo
This from the blog of Yale professor Chris Blattman, in the context of Obama's Africa speech (h/t Dara):The puritanical quest to fight corruption is not a terrible one. It is merely insufficient. I hate corruption. It makes my blood boil. I want to punch someone if the nose...
Bookbag: "...he should, at the end of his indoctrination, become Irish."
From Thomas R. Brooks's Commentary article "New York's Finest" (August 1965):Richard Dougherty, who spent some time as the Deputy Commissioner in charge of public relations for the Department, explains in his perceptive novel, The Commissioner, that "it was a phenomenon of the...
Monday, July 20, 2009
In Defense of Corruption
This from Vincent Cannato's The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York:Wagner made a point to have union officials over to Gracie Mansion for drinks, invite them and their wives to formal diners and parties, and do favors for their families. This...
Rick Perlstein's Secret Plan for GOP Resurgence
I saw Rick Perlstein speak at this year's America's Future Now! conference (formerly Take Back America), and he began with three stories from 2008 that proved to him that the "conservative machine" has lost its discipline. The most important was the time McCain disavowed radio...
Bookbag: Edward Banfield's Here the People Rule
Banfield defends corruption in this footnote from "Corruption as a Feature of Governmental Organization":The construction industry provides a case in point. New York City has a 843-page building code; a builder is required to get at least 40-50 permits and licenses — for a...
Corpulent Dane Proves Power of Etiquette
To qualify as hard-nosed, a person has to believe that social problems aren't caused by cultural decadence, family breakdown, and solo bowling, but are mostly, if not exclusively, a function of economics and other quantifiables. A hard-nosed pragmatist wouldn't suggest, say,...
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