Chip Gibbons quotes Andrew Sullivan who quotes a Republic lawyer.#

By including a provision regulating the most intimate of relationships into the Constitution, the traditional analysis that the court has used to limit government power will be fundamentally changed and the right to privacy, if it is not destroyed completely, will be severely curtailed. As a result, decisions like Roe v. Wade, (Abortion), Griswold v. Connecticut (Birth Control), Lawrence v. Texas (Private Sexual Acts), will all be fair game for re-analysis under this new jurisprudential regime as the Constitutional foundation for those decisions will have been altered. A brilliant strategy really, with one amendment the religious right could wipe out access to birth control, abortion, and even non-procreative sex (as Senator Santorum so eagerly wants to do).

Danah explains how social networks are best when there are people like you.#

There's an architectural lesson there... Environment matters because it draws the right people. This is why niche shit works. The biggest joke about the Internet is that the most profitable services are barely public. They address a niche market completely. One of the most unfortunate things about social software is that everyone is trying to court everyone to their service. Frankly, a far more appropriate response would be to try to figure out which users are most suited for your tool given its current state and then try to meet their needs completely. Figure out your audience. And don't simply focus on your desired audience because the tool you created may not have met their needs... be able to shift if you find that you've built something far more appropriate for another group. Cause frankly? If you have, the users know it and are using it more completely there.

Jane has a brilliant idea.#

i want a wedding

... but i don't want to get married. i want to wear a beautiful dress and have a big party with all my friends and family and i want to have a fancy dinner and dancing and strange little rituals and speeches and drunk bridesmaids making out with the groomsmen.

and when i wake up on my honeymoon i want to still be single.

maybe my next birthday party will be a wedding party.

Mike Rogers on arrogant Americans...#

Let me ask you a question: If someone came from a foreign land to America and didn't try to at least minimally accommodate to local ways and customs, you would say, "This is America. This is the way we do things here. If you don't like it go home."

I know the vast majority of Americans would.

Now, what makes some of you hot-shot cowboys think you can do as you please in another country?

Tyler Cowen writes about how the trashy Da Vinci Code became a hit.#

Yes readers love it but Barnes and Noble pushed it. The author, Dan Brown, was largely unknown in the world of publishing. But Doubleday distributed a remarkable 5000 advance reader and review copies. Internal readers in Barnes and Noble loved the story and the bookseller was on board. Advance orders from the store upped the print run from an initial 60,000 to 230,000 copies. Some Barnes and Noble stores hired greeters to tell customers about the novel. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list and has held strong ever since.

The Real Live Preacher has some questions for those who have seen The Passion.#

Where does a story like this come from? It is the most popular story in the history of humanity. Why? How does the story of an obscure death in a remote region of ancient Rome become so important to so many people?

What does this story and our need to tell it say about us? We are obviously a brutal species. Mel Gibson's movie is a reasonable depiction of scourging and crucifixion, a manner of death that was common in the ancient world. A group of humans invented this death, and it's not the worst thing we've ever done. Holocaust is common among us, not a grotesque exception to the rule. Does this story speak to a species-wide desire for redemption?

The Yeti comments on The Passion as well.#

I saw it. It was powerful and moving.

Those who are criticizing it without seeing it are fools.

I saw it as an act of love and a strong expression of faith by Mel Gibson.

Chip Gibbons writes about the disturbing people surrounding the Passion.#

Gibson, Sullivan and the Christian author of his e-mail are all deeply disturbed human beings who, depending on their chosen form of crying-for-attention, waste entire movies, blog postings, and e-mails describing their narcissistic, self-centered, sadomasochistic fantasies. That is all they are describing. Nothing more. They teach us nothing about reality and everything about what is wrong with human minds that are divorced from it.

It is grandiose to believe that you can have knowledge of the unknowable and depressing to want what you cannot have. Grandiosity and depression are symptoms are narcissism, a self-loathing that invites others to hate themselves as well.

There is nothing that can be known about things that don't exist. Period. End of story.

It's time to stop pretending that religious people are sane. They are not!

The Yeti writes about Same-Sex Marriage in response to Ryan Overbey.#

Marriage is the single most effective way of protecting children. It receives many priviledges because strengthened marriages equal a strengthened society.

Same-sex marriage could have some of those benefits, but the arguments put forth are about loving and legal acceptance - not responsibility to raise children.

Does marriage have problems? Yes. Is the answer changing the legally recognized basis of marriage choice rather than responsibility? Not at all.

Ryan Overbey replies in the comments:

The definition of marriage has changed throughout human culture and civilizations.

In the Bible, which many opponents of gay marriage haven't yet read carefully, if you rape a woman, you are required to pay her father a quantity of silver and take her in marriage. This is a radically different conception of marriage, would you not agree?

In the Bible, marriage is often not the union of one man and one woman. It is the union of one man and as many women as he has the willingness and means to support. Polygamy is all over the place. That has changed.

In 1964 Virginia, marriage was defined as the union of one man and one woman, provided that both were of the same race. That too, was changed, and it was changed by a few judicial activists who offended the religious sensibilities of the populace at large.

Marriage has no fixed definition. Period. Its definition is provisional and highly erratic, subject to the whims of popular and religious culture, the laws of the legislative branch, and the decisions of the courts. Stop treating it as an institution which has not changed at all since the beginning of time.

The Yeti responds...

3. The Constitutional Amendment does not say that gay marriages are banned. You're mixing the Musgrove amendment in. The Amendment is to prevent activist judges from making laws that are wildly out of step with the majority of the American people.

Your use of miscegenation as a flail to try to put this on a equal footing with racism falls short. The Civil Rights Act was a legislative choice. If state legislatures want to make this choice, they should do so right over the heads of the opposition. Judges should be more respectful of the democratic process in a Republic.

And that's a key issue. The people pushing this as a Constitutional issue aren't the strict constructionists. They're conveniently trying to seize on arguments that use the Constitution to get what they want.

Judges don't get to "decide" law based on their personal opinions. I believe that's the reason Democrats are giving for filibustering Appellate Court Nominees.

Ryan Overbey responds...

You're right, of course, that the movement is not about children. From what I understand, most people in the movement see it as relevant to the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Marriage is a privilege of the citizens of the United States, and no state shall make or enforce any law which abridges those privileges. The MA Supreme Court agreed that this was the issue.

You believe that marriage is recognized by the state solely for the efficient production and nurturing of children by one man and one woman. Like I said, there is nothing preventing you from exercising this ethical vision in your personal life. But why would a Federal Marriage Amendment grounded upon protecting children not say "Marriage in the United States shall consist onlly of the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of the production and protection of children"? Musgrove simply says "union of a man and a woman" and leaves it at that.

Furthermore, if you are open to research on the effects of gay marriage on children, if its ability to protect children and conform to your ethical vision is still an open question, why do you seek to prevent gay marriage from ever occurring by force of an amendment? Do you deny the very possibility that a gay marriage can fulfill your ethical vision of marriage? If you don't deny that possibility, what are the grounds for the amendment?

Fontana Labs writes about the well-being of children in same-sex marriages.#

It would be surprising if there's some deep reason why children raised by SS parents would be worse-off than those raised by heterosexual parents. Most of the harm-- he said, from his armchair-- would result from, say, schoolyard taunting, not from the two mommies themselves. And we'd expect this to taper off, since homosexuality has already become the love that won't shut up.

If this is not true, we could, of course, restrict adoption accordingly; this is an issue that's distinct from marriage. I admit I'm being willfully naive here, since it might in fact be hard to resist the pressure to treat all married couples similarly when it comes to adoption, but I'm fairly confident that the empirical claim on which the objection rests is false, so I'm not too worried about this.

But what about if I have a child with my wife then become a widower, and then get remarried to a man? My child will then be in the dumps!

Wings of Change writes about the decline of Adbusters.#

He links to Michael Totten:

A few years ago I was a big fan of Adbusters magazine. I loved the way it mimicked the obnoxious manipulation techniques of TV and magazine ads and flung it all right back at 'em. The skewering of shallow consumer culture really struck a chord with me.

After 9-11 I put this project on my own back burner. It was suddenly all so trivial. The writers, designers, and editors of the magazine must have sensed what they were doing was getting shunted off to the side by momentous events. So they ramped it up. They pushed their previously mild subversion into overdrive.

The current issues of Adbusters would have turned me off even then.

Michael Totten, again, on Kalle Lasn's editorial Why won't anyone say they are Jewish? (Lasn is the editor of Adbusters.)

It hardly matters who he means by "they" in the title. "They" are a group of people who, for whatever reason, Mr. Lasn thinks need to be "outed." Here he is posing as the brave writer bucking the tyranny of political correctness to tell the truth that others dare not say. "They" are Jews. As if this means something important. Aha! he expects his readers to think. They're Jews. That explains it.

"They," by the way, are neoconservative intellectuals. Or, I should say, "they" are half the people on his list of neoconservatives. He has a tidy list of 50 people he labels as neocons. He penciled in a little dot next to all the Jewish names. At least he didn't use a yellow star.

Trey Givens on the libertarian perspective on gay marriage.#

To say that we can't leave it to citizens to arrange their own unions by contractual arrangements because of all the things that depend upon marriage being a privilege granted by the state is foolishness. The so-called benefits listed are all things that should either not be there or could be provided for in a private contract.

And the state doesn't grant benefits, by the way. All it ever does is restrict people.

In proper governance, the restriction is that you're not allowed to initiate the use of force against your fellow man in return for protection against them initiating force against you. In today's world, the government keeps you from doing with your body as you please, doing with your property as you please, saying what you please, thinking what you please, and generally keeping you from the things that please you.

Walt the Revolution writes about The Passion.#

I understand that Mel Gibson wanted to emphasize the suffering Jesus underwent for humanity. The historical Jesus probably did get the dog beat out of him. The Romans didn't fashion an empire based on kindness. But if an emphasis on the suffering of Jesus for humanity was what Gibson intended, the film did not work on that level. The film only emphasized that Jesus got the dog beat out of him.

It would've been nice if the film had focused on the fact that Jesus did other things before he got the dog beat out of him. A few brief flashbacks offered glimpses of some of those other things. One flashback nodded to the Sermon on the Mount. A few others nodded to the Last Supper. Strangely, one even seemed to suggest that, while Jesus was working as a carpenter, he invented the modern dining table. Assuming that Jesus probably did not invent the modern dining table, there really was not much said about why, after 2000 years, Jesus is still perhaps the most significant, influential, and controversial figure in history... other than that he got the ever-loving dog beat out of him.

Dean Esmay weighs in on the torture in The Passion.#

Unfortunately, if you read much on the subject of human torture and human misery--more than most people I mean--you learn a few rather grisley and disturbing things. The main one of which is that what Jesus was put through was relatively tame by Roman standards. Scourging is to literally flay all or most the skin off of someone's back--not usually nicely, with a knife, but with whips and chains and hooks, typically. So long as the back is not broken, people can in fact survive for days after such an experience. It's just brutal and horrible. Similarly, Jesus' crucifixtion itself was relatively tame by Roman standards. He was given something to drink, and he was stabbed, while on the cross. The first alleviated some of his suffering, the second made sure to shorten his suffering if he weren't dead already. It was not unusual for someone crucified to live for a week or two, but Jesus only had to go through it for about a day.

Jay Rosen writes an autopsy of the Dean campaign in early February.#

It contains this brilliant comment from Jeff Jarvis:

One way to be right about what the Internet can do is to lower your expectations. Weblogger Jeff Jarvis, also a journalist and Internet division head for the Newhouse empire, was quoted in Salon on this theme. "We all learned lessons in Iowa," he said. "Howard Dean learned the biggest one -- stop being an asshole. We learned about the insular nature of this medium. We learned not to blow up the bubble, not to put too much emphasis on what this thing can do. It can do miraculous, wonderful things, but it can't win an election. It can change the world, but it can't win an election."

Dean Esmay writes about differences between Western and Eastern story-telling techniques.#

Americans tend to tell stories in an action-oriented fashion. Even our soap operas, our gentle romantic comedies, and our news reports are written this way. We set a scene, and then describe events and reactions.

[...]

But the Japanese (and other southeast Asian cultures--I just concentrate on Japan because I've seen a lot of Japanese cinema, read a lot of Japanese fiction) have a slightly different frame of reference. It is not alien, nor is it either superior or inferior. It is just different, in an interesting, thought-provoking way. Nor is it difficult to understand. Once you get it, you can appreciate their artistic works more. Furthermore, if you're a creative type, you can draw a good deal of inspiration from it.

So what is the difference? Japanese art tends to put more emphasis on being there rather than getting there. Being somewhere, rather than doing something. There's often a great deal more emphasis on setting a scene, and looking at the scene from different angles.

I finally got around to reading Jim Moore's essay The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head about the power of the Internet.#

As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its power in the world, many people are longing for a "second superpower" that can keep the US in check. Indeed, many people desire a superpower that speaks for the interests of planetary society, for long-term well-being, and that encourages broad participation in the democratic process. Where can the world find such a second superpower? No nation or group of nations seems able to play this role, although the European Union sometimes seeks to, working in concert with a variety of institutions in the field of international law, including the United Nations. But even the common might of the European nations is barely a match for the current power of the United States.

And an interesting image:

How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally. The symbol of the first superpower is the eagle—an awesome predator that rules from the skies, preying on mice and small animals. Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants. Ants rule from below. And while I may be awed seeing eagles in flight, when ants invade my kitchen they command my attention.

Richard and Patrick Logan link to two different reports from a talk that Jared Diamond gave about the decline of societies.#

From The Edge report.

For example, the Easter Islanders, Polynesian people, settled an island that was originally forested, and whose forests included the world's largest palm tree. The Easter Islanders gradually chopped down that forest to use the wood for canoes, firewood, transporting statues, raising statues, and carving and also to protect against soil erosion. Eventually they chopped down all the forests to the point where all the tree species were extinct, which meant that they ran out of canoes, they could no longer erect statues, there were no longer trees to protect the topsoil against erosion, and their society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism that left 90 percent of the islanders dead. The question that most intrigued my UCLA students was one that hadn't registered on me: how on Earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which they depended? For example, my students wondered, what did the Easter Islanders say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? Were they saying, think of our jobs as loggers, not these trees? Were they saying, respect my private property rights? Surely the Easter Islanders, of all people, must have realized the consequences to them of destroying their own forest. It wasn't a subtle mistake. One wonders whether — if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now — people in the next century will be equally astonished about our blindness today as we are today about the blindness of the Easter Islanders.

As always, Jared Diamond is incredibly interesting and insightful.

From the Princeton University lecture.

There's overwhelming recent evidence from archaeology and other disciplines that some of these romantic mystery collapses have been self-inflicted ecological suicides, resulting from inadvertent human impacts on the environment, impacts similar to the impacts causing the problems that we face today. Even though these past societies like the Easter Islanders and Anasazi had far fewer people, and were packing far less potent destructive practices than we do today.

This second article is more detailed, although it has the same examples as the other.

One of the things I like about Jared Diamond is that he does not see technology as a saviour and often more the case than the solution of problems. This is something I feel very strongly about: (1) There's no silver bullet; and, (2) there are laws that cannot be broken, whether we know them yet or not.

Dave Pollard writes about a "Systems Approach" to Population.#

Of all the radical ideas I have espoused in How to Save the World, none has proven to be as controversial as my belief that substantial human population reduction is a necessary condition (I am not sure whether it is a sufficient condition) to prevent ecological catastrophe in this century. The chart above, which I explained in this post, shows the impact of our continued population explosion, far beyond the levels of sustainability represented by the green and red lines on the chart (the green line allows for coexistence with other creatures, the red line hogs all resources on earth for humans).

The chart below right shows the vicious cycle that Daniel Quinn argues, in The Story of B, has led us to this point. The argument is that (a) the exponential curve shown above is creeping up on us so quietly and quickly that if we wait for the first undeniable evidence of cataclysm, it will be too late, and (b) the root cause of the population explosion is excessive and ever-increasing food production, and the paradoxical and counter-intuitive solution to human misery caused by overpopulation and starvation is to cut food production.

He makes this point beautifully about the events of around 4000 BCE:

Now note well that no one thought that the appearance of states and armies was a bad sign -- a sign of distress. They thought it was a good sign. They thought the states and the armies represented an improvement. The water was just getting delightfully warm, and no one worried about a few little bubbles.

And slowly things get hotter in the cauldron:

What do I need to say about the water steaming in our cauldron in this era? Is it boiling yet, do you think? Does the first global economic collapse, beginning in 1929, look like a sign of distress to you? Do two cataclysmic world wars look like signs of distress to you? Stand off a few thousand miles and watch from outer space as 65,000,000 are slaughtered on battlefields or blasted to bits in bombing strikes, as another 100,000,000 count themselves lucky to escape merely blinded, maimed, or crippled. I'm talking about a number of people equal to the entire human population in the Golden Age of classical Greece. I'm talking about the number of people you would destroy if today you dropped hydrogen bombs on Berlin, Paris, Rome, London, New York City, and Hong Kong.

Dave talks about how the best thing to is stop producing more and more food and find a equilibrium. He has this comment about "the starving millions:"

And of course I have to deal with the starving millions. Don't we have to continue to increase food production in order to feed the starving millions? There are two things to understand here. The first is that the excess that we produce each year does not go to feed the starving millions. It didn't go to feed the starving millions in 2003, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 2001, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 2000, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 1999 -- and it won't go to feed the starving millions in 2004. Where did it go? It went to fuel our population explosion.

It's still unclear how to do this however.

Next, I get around to reading Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy paper.#

The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. Traditional forms of representative democracy are barely able to manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are very limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus. Emergent democracy has the potential to solve many of the problems we face in the exceedingly complex world at both the national and global scale. The community of toolmakers should be encouraged to consider their possible positive effect on the democratic process as well as the risk of enabling emergent terrorism, mob rule and a surveillance society.

We must protect the ability of these tools to be available to the public by protecting the commons. We must open the spectrum and make it available to the people, while resisting increased control of intellectual property, and the implementation of architectures that are not inclusive and open. We must work to provide access to the Net for more people by making the tools and infrastructure cheaper and easier to use.

Richard links to a study from James W. Prescot about pleasure and pain.#

The basics of the idea is that pleasure and pain are inversely related and the increased incidence of pain in the world is because pleasure, particularly in childhood and with regards to sexuality, is being repressed.

Richard does a great job of summarizing:

The article, with the emphasis in the original, covers a lot of ground: it attacks the Judeo-Christian basis for the denial of bodily pleasure; the way the culture and laws of the United States allows some addictive drugs that give people competitive edges (more in the culture than law) or that either deny pleasure or encourage violence and bans the drugs that enhance pleasure; the relationship between sexual repressive cultures and the amount of pornography (in place of normal sexual expressions); the relationship between sexually repressive cultures and incidents of rape; the inverse relationship between corporate business structures and family closeness; that it's best not to let babies cry themselves to sleep but see to their needs in order to build a relationship based on trust; and much more. It doesn't go into much detail about the above, but much conventional wisdom—wisdom still "true" today—is called into question. It is a remarkable article.

This note about promiscuity is intriguing and likely to be important to opponents of Prescot's theory:

If we accept the theory that the lack of sufficient somatosensory pleasure is a principal cause of violence, we can work toward promoting pleasure and encouraging affectionate interpersonal relationships as a means of combatting aggression. We should give high priority to body pleasure in the context of meaningful human relationships. Such body pleasure is very different from promiscuity, which reflects a basic inability to experience pleasure. If a sexual relationship is not pleasurable, the individual looks for another partner. A continuing failure to find sexual satisfaction leads to a continuing search for new partners, that is, to promiscuous behavior. Affectionately shared physical pleasure, on the other hand, tends to stabilize a relationship and eliminate the search. However, a variety of sexual experiences seems to be normal in cultures which permit its expression, and this may be important for optimizing pleasure and affection in sexual relationships.