Category: Thoughts

My lack of a TV career is the only thing keeping me off this list of the best mustaches on television.

I’m pleased, but not surprised, to see Deval win the Massachusetts Governorship. Hell, I had the champagne (excuse me, California sparkling wine: 2005 Sofia Coppola Blanc de Noirs) in the fridge last night.

But the down-ballot votes really surprised me.

Green/Rainbow candidate Jill Stein got about 18% for Secretary of State, and Working Families Party candidate Rand Wilson got 20% running for Auditor– those are huge numbers for a protest vote.

And then the ballot measures went negative, too. Item 1 would have allowed wine sales in grocery stores, and it seemed like a no-brainer to me, but it’s down by ten or fifteen points. Item 3, allowing child-care workers in state-subsidized operations to unionize, seemed like a shoo-in, too– MA’s an organized-labor state– but it looks like a loser too.

Massachusetts: land of contradictions and weirdness.

Every day or so I get another couple fliers about Somerville Ballot Initiatives 5 and 6. Every day there’s somebody out in front of the T stop urging me to vote yes and/or no on 5 and 6. And dammit, I am sick and tired of people being all high and mighty about it on both sides.

What people are voting on: Measure 5 is a non-binding resolution supporting the right of return for Palestinian refugees: allowing people displaced by the creation of Israel back in ’45 (and their descendants and so forth) back into the country. Measure 6 is a binding measure that would pull the city’s investments (retirement funds, etc.) from Israeli companies and government bonds.

You’d think I would be a natural supporter of those goals. After all, I don’t always (or even usually) agree with the policies of the state of Israel. As a general rule, I don’t like the idea of religious or ethnic city-states. I believe that market-based sanctions are good tools for foreign policy and I believe in voting with my dollar as well as with my ballot. I am sympathetic to refugees. But no, these are stupid laws. Here’s why:
Continue reading “Let me wade into flame-war territory for a minute here”

Just a ways down from my house is The Burren, a rather nice Irish pub in the central business district of Davis Square, Somerville. They’re applying for a 2AM license. Now, normally I’m all in favor of stuff being open late. I like late night stuff. I like business. I like bars.

I do not like people urinating on my house, which they have a tendency to do when they are drunk and walking from the Burren back to Tufts.

And you know that if the Burren gets a late license, Orleans, directly across from my house, will probably get one. As it is, Orleans is such a lame bar that I’m barely willing to tolerate its existence at any hour. But I’m a nice guy and their summer evening tables in the Comcast parking lot are not really all that bad. But I really hate people shrieking as they leave it (WHOOOO YEAH WHOO WHOO!), and I really hate people in trucks with fart-can exhausts and ground effects idling in front of my house with country music at full blast that I can hear all the way in my bedroom with the doors shut and a pillow over my head. I guess they’re picking up their friends working to clean up after close? Irritating.

Don’t get me started on what must have been the Tufts a capella group that got drunk there. I don’t care how good your voice is, a capella sucks at the best of times. It has no place on a residential street at one in the morning.

When I first got to Boston, I wondered why it closed down so early. Now I know: undergrads abuse the responsibility, and prematurely cranky old guys like me (seriously, I’m not even thirty) are jerks about it.

Renew America: The goal of homosexuals is to infiltrate every area of society to force their disgusting sexual lifestyle choices — their perversions — on all Americans. They are doing it through legislation like “hate crimes bills,” and the Courts, using fear and intimidation tactics that would make the Nazis proud.

Where to begin? She thinks all homosexuals have the same goals. She uses a sarcastic rant from the late 80s as evidence of a conspiracy. She tries to blur the differences between teenagers and children, between gays and pedophiles, and between sins and crimes. And she lectures her readers while decrying people who claim to know better than others.

When I come across people running for president on an anti-mind-control-lasers-in-space platform, I pity them. I worry about their health when they begin looking for pliers to remove the tracking devices from their teeth. But when I see people like Madeline Crabb and the folks at PCC Monroe or the Lesbian Studies Institute, I can’t understand it. It can’t be explained as mental illness. It’s just… hateful.

Where do we go from here, America?

Maybe it was originally meant to fix problems with National Guard deployment that were made apparent in New Orleans. Maybe it’s just some panicky anarchists misreading the legalese. Whatever the cause, The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 5122) that passed without much fanfare a few weeks back is getting a lot of heat now. Why? It appears to make martial law that much easier.

The whole martial law story seems to have started with (or near) the folks at IndyMedia. Now, IndyMedia is not the world’s most reliable news source, and it’s far from unbiased, but it doesn’t just blindly make stuff up either.

From there, it’s caught the attention of a few general-audience sites, but nothing genuinely mainstream. Places like BoingBoing, Slashdot, and the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages all hit it, as do political paranoiacs on the right like the John Birch Society and the Rational Review.

But none of the “real” news outlets have touched it. No ink on paper, no mainstream news. Not MSNBC, the NYT, WSJ, IHT…

Probably that’s because it’s a crazy-ass conspiracy theory. Maybe it’s because nobody would believe it, even if it were true.

I guess we’ll find out.

Less than a week after I said that mocking religion was a bad idea, I mocked religion in an email and offended a friend of mine. Let’s go back to mocking journalism and blogs:

• NY Metro piece on the “Ultra Extreme Calorie Restriction Diet” of… nearly 2000 calories a day? That’s not very restricted at all. Quit whining.
• On the MA governor’s race, RedState asks What if Kerry Healy Loses? She’s nearly twenty points back in the polls, she’s running a divisive and bitter campaign, her major proposal is to cut tolls on the pike, and her legacy is collapsing tunnels and an endorsement by someone who spends all his time going around saying how much Massachusetts sucks. She’s going to lose, the only question is the margin.

I don’t often watch movies, so when I set up to watch two versions of the same plot, you know something serious is on. First, Dawn of the Dead (2004) next in the Netflix queue is the original Dawn of the Dead (1978). I just finished reading The Road, and I’m halfway through World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars.

A whole swarm of fantasies about the end of the world, self-sufficiency, loneliness, and human weakness.

Part of my job is sorting the wheat from the chaff of the internet. That means I come across some pretty brilliant chaff, like this Conservababes Forum discussion of next month’s elections:

IF THE SOCIALIST DEMOCRATS WIN IN 2006 AND 2008:

YOUR INCOME AND PAYROLL TAXES WILL GO UP

THE US WILL LOSE THE WAR AGAINST ISLAMOFASCISTS AROUND THE GLOBE

3 OR 4 NEW SUPREME COURT JUDGES AND DOZENS OF FEDERAL DISTRICT JUDGES WILL BE LEFTISTS

ABORTIONS WILL INCREASE

HEALTHCARE WILL BE NATIONALIZED BRINGING ON FORCED EUTHANIZATION OF THE AGING

HUMAN CLONING AND EMBRYONIC STEM CELL FARMING WILL BE LEGALIZED

PUBLIC EDUCATION QUALITY WILL CONTINUE TO DECLINE
…
FREE TRADE WILL BE RESTRICTED BY TARIFFS AND REGULATIONS FAVORING UNIONS

AT LEAST ONE MAJOR US CITY WILL BE VAPORIZED BY TERRORISTS

AT LEAST 10 LARGE SCHOOLS WILL BE DESTROYED BY ISLAMOFASCIST TERRORISM
…
GUN MANUFACTURERS WILL BE SUED, POSSIBLY INTO BANKRUPTCY

GAY MARRIAGE AND POLYGAMY WILL BE LEGALIZED AND NORMALIZED

FAST-FOOD CHAINS WILL BE SUED, POSSIBLY INTO BANKRUPTCY

THESE ARE THE ELEMENTS OF THE SOCIALIST AGENDA… AND THEY WILL BE SUCCESSFUL. FORGIVE ME IF I LEFT ANY OUT.

I just can’t tell if they’re serious. I mean, you can argue about Bush’s record on the economy and on security, but forced euthanasia and polygamy? And there’s some stuff in there that really seems out of place– regulations on the Panama canal? And why would blowing up cities be part of the Democratic agenda? Not to mention the panicky fear of “socialism,” which I thought the US grew out of at about the same time I grew out of being afraid of monsters under the bed.

They just are.

I’ve started a page on gay marriage and I’m having a hard time being balanced about it– the vast majority of arguments against it are “I HATE GAYS.”

One that almost makes sense is pointing out the fact that health insurance is tied in to marriage and employment, and that gay marriage could increase insurance costs borne by employers — at least, those that have a lot of married same-sex employees. But that’s a problem that needs to be fixed in the insurance policy, not in marriage policy. (That sounds like a software engineer blaming the hardware, but it’s true. As an aside, I wonder whether a better health system in the US would reduce the urgency of the gay marriage fight.)

I did, however, find one old article in the Weekly Standard, that brings up points I hadn’t thought of before. It’s a pretty conservative magazine, and I expected it to be full of the same “the queers are trying to push religion around” vitriol that everyone else spouts. But instead it starts with Catholic Charities, the Boston-based adoption agency that shut down rather than comply with the anti-discrimination laws of the state, and moves on to a Catholic high school that expelled a couple of homosexual students. If a religious school can’t prohibit actions and proclamations that it believes to be sinful, is it even a religious school any more?

Well, maybe. There are, after all, still segregated groups and schools which oppose interracial dating. Awhile back, Bob Jones University lost tax-exempt status over its (now, finally, abandoned) policy of prohibiting interracial dating. Before that, back in the 50s, there was a program of massive resistance to integration, which led several Virginia school systems to close down completely rather than integrate. Private, segregated schools (often supported by early school-voucher programs) cropped up in their place. But as segregation became less acceptable to the world, and as the IRS started taxing them like for-profit enterprises they closed or integrated.

Just like racism hasn’t disappeared, anti-discrimination law will never force groups to abandon their beliefs that homosexuality is a sin. But groups that actually do discriminate against same-sex couples will have to do so without state recognition, without state favors like tax-exemption, and without sympathy from the public. In the long run, people who don’t accept the equality of same-sex unions will be regarded in the same way that we now regard the segregationists of the past.