Category Archives: along with the unicorns and fairies

March 28, 2013, 1:10 pm

Oh Noes! Success!

From the same genre as “The Democrats should throw the 2008 presidential election and make the GOP handle the economic crisis” and “Roe v. Wade actually hurt abortion rights,” we have the New York Times opining that the political success of the gay rights movement may–GASP!–have negative effects:

But momentum in the political world for gay rights could actually limit momentum in the legal world. While the court may throw out a federal law defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, the justices signaled over two days of arguments that they might not feel compelled to intervene further, since the democratic process seems to be playing out on its own, state by state, elected official by elected official.

The prospect that gay rights advocates may become a victim of their own political success was underscored during arguments on Wednesday over the constitutionality of the…

February 6, 2013, 3:36 pm

Not An Original Thought

By David Silbey

John F. Kennedy really is a blank slate to be used for whatever grand narrative someone wants to tell about 20th century American politics, foreign policy, or just about anything:

Their next hero, two decades later, is President John F. Kennedy. Startled by the Bay of Pigs fiasco two years earlier, Kennedy in 1963 was supposedly on the verge of rejecting cold war orthodoxy and leading “the United States and the world down a…path of peace and prosperity” along the lines that Wallace had prophetically laid out. But JFK, like Wallace before him, “had many enemies who deplored progressive change.” Stone and Kuznick stop just short of blaming Kennedy’s assassination on those hidden enemies, as Stone did in his conspiracy film JFK (1991). But they say his death handed the country back to those who “would systematically destroy the promise of the Kennedy years as they returned th…

September 22, 2009, 9:41 am

The specter of online education: it looms.

By Ari Kelman

I once saw Joel Garreau give a talk in which he promised (promised!) that brick-and-mortar stores would soon be gone (gone!) because everybody (everybody!) would be doing all their shopping online. Big boxes, especially, were dinosaurs (dinosaurs!), he claimed. And one of the major challenges facing urbanists would be what to do with the empty shell of the discarded consumer landscape after all of the consumers had moved to Internet. Garreau told his rapt audience that this process of creative destruction would take less than a decade.*

That was eleven years ago. And Davis’s gigantic new Target, a palace to hyper-modern consumer culture, is slated to open in less than a month.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve long had doubts about the idea that online education will spell the death of brick-and-mortar colleges and universities. But this article, coupled with the…

March 23, 2009, 5:23 pm

You think you know what you mean? I’ll tell you what you mean.

By Scott Kaufman

(There was a post here. Now it’s over here. To me it resembled the first foray into something that might lead to something like this. Apparently not. No big deal. But now you know why I have a complex.)

February 5, 2009, 4:58 pm

100 not 10.

By Ari Kelman

Dave’s post earlier today got me thinking, because it captures a series of ideas that are bouncing around the blogosphere: that Obama, for one reason or another, is getting played by the Republican minority in Congress; that he’s squandering his mandate for real and lasting change because of his rhetoric of bipartisanship; and that, in the end, the Obama administration may be captive to special interests and plutocrats. Let me note that, to some extent at least, I share these concerns.

But I’m equally worried that some people — not Dave, mind you — believe Obama should recapitulate the entire New Deal in one stimulus bill. Actually, that would be so totally awesome I can’t believe it. President Obama should crisscross the country atop a magical redistributionist ponycorn that will crap infrastructure projects here, there, and everywhere, while rejiggering the tax code by whinnying…

January 11, 2009, 5:10 pm

A present for me!

By Dana McCourt

Exhibit; Sentence. I love this list.

January 2, 2009, 8:16 pm

Epistemologists of the Internet, raise your (known) hands!

By Dana McCourt

Actually, Dick Cheney all those white dudes look alike Rumsfeld put his unknown unknowns in with my known unknowns…

I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked, ‘Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?’ To which I replied, ‘If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?’ He smiled knowingly and nodded,
‘That’s why we ask.’

via. (Probably one of those ‘what I should have said was….’ rather than reality. But good!)

(More philosophy blogging as soon as I get an idea, kids.)

October 30, 2008, 8:05 am

You poked the camel in the eye with that needle.

By Dana McCourt

Man, and here I had thought at the time that the title of my earlier post was over the top, but apparently I was just a couple months early. I would advice these gentle folk that there is plenty in the Bible that they were not supposed to do, including:

Slaughter all the first born.
Harden thy heart against the widow and orphan.
Commit adultery and covet thy neighbor’s ass.
Slaughter thy brother and wander the land with a mark upon their forehead.
Put thy God to the test by throwing thyself off the walls of the city.

Though the republic might thank them for the last.

via the godless apostropher.

October 28, 2008, 3:27 pm

Nutpicking, or pearls before swine?

By Dana McCourt

Bear with me, I have a headache. So, as I understand it, Obama’s plan to tax the really wealthy consists largely (or entirely) of letting the Bush tax cuts expire instead of extending them. * This is derided as a socialism; but aside from the ridiculousness of the difference between Real American Taxes and Evil Islamic Arugula Socialism being 3% and roughly half a billion bucks…. does this mean we were already socialist during the Bush administration before the tax cuts and didn’t know it?

I thought the socialist barricades would come with a little flag to wave.

*This is the killing vs. letting die distinction, but for taxes!

October 20, 2008, 12:04 pm

To cure the plague on both your houses costs $500.

By Dana McCourt

From the Boston Globe, a defense of McCain’s health care plan that reviews the history of employer-based medical coverage. I’ve already said what I think the problems with McCain’s plan are, viz., that the $5000 tax credit isn’t even close to the cost of health insurance, plus, without a guarantee of eligibility, lotsa 50-year-olds are going to find they’re not insurable.

That doesn’t mean I like bad arguments against McCain’s plan. And Ezra Klein makes a bad argument here. Americans who have good employer-based health insurance are generally insulated from the actual cost of both their insurance and their medical care. And it’s certainly true that some medical emergencies and diagnoses are not the sorts of things one is inclined to cut corners on.

But Ezra’s mistake is in concluding that price of services isn’t a factor at all, saying “people don’t think much about price,…

September 22, 2008, 8:57 am