Posts from — January 2010

A nice piece of satire:

A project from last weekend….
Magicspatula.com Stock Quotes API

It’s entirely free! Take a look and give it a try!

You may find a subtle twist

11 Most Painfully Obvious Newspaper Articles Ever

Google has a page with ways you can help out in Haiti. I know most people who can already have done so, but I took a while to get around to this, so maybe you have to. The google checkout links on that page are extraordinarily easy to use in my experience.

I watched (er, listened to) Glenn Beck’s hour-long interview with Sarah Palin. I’ll save you the time and tell you that it’s almost entirely uninteresting, but there were a couple of things worthy of comment. First, for laughs, my favorite part of the exchange was:

Beck: Who’s your favorite founding father?
Palin: All of them.

The other thing that struck me was her statement that “God played an essential role in the founding of this nation.” Couldn’t the same be said about any other nation? Actually, wouldn’t she say the same thing about literally everything? On a less pedantic note, statements like this attribute God’s favor on certain geopolitical entities. I don’t attribute this to malice on the part of the speaker, but I find it quite discomforting because it sounds too much like something a king or other leader would say to rally people into a war or crusade. Are we really less happy if we’re not “God’s Favorite Country”?

I generally try not to think much about Washington’s grandstanding psuedo-controversies, but something about the reaction to Harry Reid’s remarks struck me.

Some background from this article:

Mark Halperin and John Heliemann report in their new book, “Game Change,” that Reid said during the campaign he thought Obama could win because, while black, he was “light-skinned” and lacked a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

As George Will said, there’s “not a scintilla of racism” in these remarks. Reid’s wording is certainly terrible, but it’s not racist. It’s not unreasonable to say that the shade of Obama’s skin affected the way he was received by the public, nor should it be offensive to say that some speech patterns are prevalent in African-American communities in the U.S., but Obama doesn’t always speak using them.

The Republican reaction is the reason I’m writing about this, though. RNC chairman Michael Steel said that Reid should step down from his position because of these remarks: “I think he should [step down], if the standard is the one set by [Trent Lott],”. Several other Republicans have made the same point (including Sarah Palin, so you know it’s good). But let’s examine what Lott said:

“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”

(source)
To suggest that Thurmond’s explicitly racist pro-segregation platform should have been successful and would have avoided “all these problems over the years” is a far more radical statement than Reid’s. I don’t even like Harry Reid and I look forward to him leaving the Senate, but this criticism is over the top.

I thought I had posted about this earlier, but I can’t seem to find it.

Moon was one of my favorite movies of 2009. It came out on DVD a couple of days ago. I’m not going to write a whole review since it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen it, but I will say that Sam Rockwell was really good in it and the plot avoided some sci-fi cliches in a good way.

The trailer is very well made (in that if the trailer looks interesting to you, you’ll probably like the movie):

Also, they’ve released the first 7 minutes of the movie:

Another guess for my earlier “Generational Shifts” post: marijuana prohibition may, before too long, look like alcohol prohibition looks now.

Lifelong Republican and heterosexual Ted Olson eloquently wrote The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage in Newsweek last week. If you haven’t already, it’s worth a read.

From the essay:

The second argument I often hear is that traditional marriage furthers the state’s interest in procreation—and that opening marriage to same-sex couples would dilute, diminish, and devalue this goal. But that is plainly not the case. Preventing lesbians and gays from marrying does not cause more heterosexuals to marry and conceive more children. Likewise, allowing gays and lesbians to marry someone of the same sex will not discourage heterosexuals from marrying a person of the opposite sex. How, then, would allowing same-sex marriages reduce the number of children that heterosexual couples conceive?

This procreation argument cannot be taken seriously. We do not inquire whether heterosexual couples intend to bear children, or have the capacity to have children, before we allow them to marry. We permit marriage by the elderly, by prison inmates, and by persons who have no intention of having children. What’s more, it is pernicious to think marriage should be limited to heterosexuals because of the state’s desire to promote procreation. We would surely not accept as constitutional a ban on marriage if a state were to decide, as China has done, to discourage procreation.

A while ago a coworker posed an interesting question to me at lunch. Attitudes about social issues have changed a lot in America in the last century. For example, opinions about race shift dramatically between my grandparents’ generation and my parents’ generation, while opinions about gay rights seem to have shifted between my parents’ generation and my own. (Admittedly, these are massive generalizations.) So, the question is, what do you think our children will look back on in 30 years and think we’re wrong about?

My coworker (who isn’t a vegetarian) suggested that it may be ‘eating meat’. That’s possible. Eventually I think this sort of gap will exist around the meaning of the word ‘person’, as that will likely become more complicated as biotechnology and artificial intelligence improves. I think it’ll be more than a generation before that sort of shift happens, though.