Give the Audience What It Wants

I learned today that I am the number one search result for the term “horrifying video.”

So, here’s some stuff to make you uncomfortable: riot police and protestors in Cancun, a movie about a far-right children’s summer camp, a drunk falling off a motorcycle, a kid on rollerblades hitting his nuts on a railing, and a kid on rollerblades hitting his nuts on a skate ramp.

There you go, audience. Don’t tell me I never gave you anything.

Vistalicious: So Typical

From C|Net:

Security companies also have been crying foul over the new OS–and they might have been heard if only they had gotten into a meeting scheduled to field their complaints. Microsoft had set up such a meeting with security companies to discuss some of the changes it has promised to make to Windows Vista in response to competitive concerns. But the conference, which used Microsoft’s Live Meeting technology, crashed about 15 minutes after it started, and both Symantec and McAfee were unable to log back in.

Anyone who disagrees with me is wrong

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.

Seriously, can you think of one?

Way back in 2003, (as Brad Delong reminds us often enough), Daniel Drezner asked the following question:

Can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
3. It wasn’t in some important way completely fucked up during the execution.

Well, can you?