Local Eagle Scout Returns Medal In Protest Of Anti-Gay Policy

Glenn Greenwald writes of Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes:

The highest compliment one can give a writer is not to say that one wholeheartedly agrees with his observations, but that he provoked — really, forced — difficult thinking about consequential matters and internal questioning of one’s own assumptions, often without quick or clear resolution.

At the beginning of our monthly Socrates Café meetings I suggest to participants that our goal for the evening is not to find answers or to come to conclusions, but rather to engage ourselves in exploration of a question and to reach for understanding of how our fellow partiicpants do so.

Greenwald says it better.

From The Paris Review, No. 59, Fall 1974 interview with Gore Vidal:

Doubtless a misunderstanding. I had assumed that Burr would be unpopular. My view of American history is much too realistic. Happily, Nixon, who made me a popular playwright (the worst man in The Best Man was based on him), again came to the rescue. Watergate so shook the three percent of our population who read books that they accepted Burr, a book that ordinarily they would have burned while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.

That’s more for you to determine than for me. I have my theories, no doubt wrong. I suspect that the range of my activity is unbearable to people who write about books. Lenny Bernstein is not reviewed in The New York Times by an unsuccessful composer or by a student at Julliard. He might be better off if he were, but he isn’t. Writers are the only people who are reviewed by people of their own kind. And their own kind can often be reasonably generous—if you stay in your category. I don’t. I do many different things rather better than most people do one thing. And envy is the central fact of American life. Then, of course, I am the enemy to so many. I have attacked both Nixon and the Kennedys—as well as the American empire. I’ve also made the case that American literature has been second-rate from the beginning. This caused distress in book-chat land. They knew I was wrong, but since they don’t read foreign or old books, they were forced to write things like “Vidal thinks Victor Hugo is better than Faulkner.” Well, Hugo is better than Faulkner, but to the residents of book-chat land Hugo is just a man with a funny name who wrote Les Misérables, a movie on the late show. Finally, I am proud to say that I am most disliked because for twenty-six years I have been in open rebellion against the heterosexual dictatorship in the United States. Fortunately, I have lived long enough to see the dictatorship Continue Reading »

Cavana Faithwalker writes:

If we can change our language we can redirect our thoughts and actual talk to people toward consensus, understanding and a more sustainable and livable society. The term “quality of life” comes to mind. I’m not saying lets all hold hands and kumbaya. I am saying there is a big difference between saying “if you are a Republican you are an idiot,” and “I perceive Republican ideology to be thus and so and I disagree with it on points a,b,c for reasons e, f, g.”

In the past I’ve tried to excuse myself and others for sensationalism because it is just a statement that gets attention and starts a conversation, blah, blah, blah but I think we should develop a distaste for such language in public forum and shy away from it. It may be that many who engage in this language have an aversion to truth and knowledge and a diverse points of view endeavoring to put themselves at the center of their universes and yours too….ergo no win-win.

How well am I doing? I have a ways to go or I would have left out the HNIC comment.

So I perhaps said all of this to conclude that I write using social media to change things for the better and probably to leave my mark.

So I am waiting with proverbial baited breath to hear why you do social media voodoo you do so well.

I am sick and tired of the 1 percent’s fear mongering drum beat of which this video is the latest from Pat Cadell: secureamericanow scareamericanow.

In England — you know, that country where the civilian population actually endured years of aerial bombing and kept a stiff upper lip — they created a ubiquitous sign that read: Keep Calm And Carry On. That’s what I do. That’s what you should do. That’s what we all should do.

But the 1 percent would much prefer we emulate another British model so that we’re too frightened of the bogeyman to notice their continued looting of our national wealth.

Grow a pair, people…!

And those hilarious unintended associations…

From the Burlington Free Press:

Burlington[, Vermont,] police in riot gear shot protesters with what they described as “pepper balls” and “stingball pellets” as a large, peaceful demonstration turned violent and ugly Sunday afternoon.

No arrests were made. It was unclear if any of the protesters were seriously injured.

Six New England governors and five premiers from Canada’s eastern provinces were nowhere to be seen during the melee. There were roughly 500 demonstrators, assembling under the banner “Convergence on the Conference.”

At 3:30 Sunday afternoon they were in front of Burlington’s Hilton Hotel on Battery Street to make their voices heard, “No tar sand pipeline.” They flattened themselves on the pavement to create a symbolic human oil spill.

The protest ended without incident at about 3:45 in front of the hotel, but a smaller number of protesters later blocked the side driveway to the Hilton on College Street. Several said they had heard that buses were arriving to take the governors and premiers to a dinner at Shelburne Farms.

The violence erupted shortly before 5 p.m.

Demonstrators said police in riot gear, about 25 of them, cleared the driveway forcefully, pushing people into the street. At least two individuals were shot with with the non-lethal rounds, and at least two others were hit with pepper spray, according to witnesses.

Kyle Wiens writes:

If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.

Some might call my approach to grammar extreme, but I prefer Lynne Truss’s more cuddly phraseology: I am a grammar “stickler.” And, like Truss — author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves — I have a “zero tolerance approach” to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid.

Now, Truss and I disagree on what it means to have “zero tolerance.” She thinks that people who mix up their itses “deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave,” while I just think they deserve to be passed over for a job — even if they are otherwise qualified for the position.

Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.), if job hopefuls can’t distinguish between “to” and “too,” their applications go into the bin.

Via Andrew Sullivan by way of Adam Harvey…

1010: The mixed effects of political satire

Also…

Glenn Greenwald writes:

The attribute of writing on the Internet that I’ve always valued most is that any errors I make — factual, logical or otherwise — will be very short-lived because they will be exposed by commenters, tweeters, emailers, etc., rather than days or weeks later (if at all) in the form of a Letter to the Editor that can be (and usually is) easily ignored. And this interactive process will also immediately bring to my attention facts and evidence that bolster what I’ve written but of which I was unaware. That’s why the first step I took when I had suspicions about the Keller column was to go and ask thousands of people about it using Twitter, knowing that other people would have knowledge that I lacked. This collaborative model enabled by the Internet strengthens every aspect of journalism and, as today’s episode shows, obliterates errors quickly and definitively.

For anyone who still believes that traditional journalism is inherently more reliable than the Internet, just follow the excellent suggestion this morning from Alexa O’Brien: just compare the duration and seriousness of the frauds and fakes enabled by the model of traditional journalism. Long before the Internet — in 1938 — a dramatized radio broadcast by Orson Wells (“The War of the Worlds”) of Martians landing on Earth spawned mass panic. More recently, consider the fraud of Iraqi WMDs and the Saddam-Al Qaeda alliance propagated by the nation’s leading traditional media outlets, or the fraudulent story they perpetrated of how grateful Iraqis spontaneously pulled down the Saddam statue, or the fraudulent tales they told of Jessica Lynch engaging in a heroic firefight with menacing Iraqis and Pat Tillman standing up to Al Qaeda fighters before they gunned him down. And that’s to say nothing of the Jayson-Blair-type of rogue, outright fabrications.

The key, of course, is to take nothing at face value, check, recheck and check again.

Trust no one.

Via Wyl Villacres…

From Jill Stein For President…

Congratulations to the Pacific Green Party of Oregon for their success in qualifying for the 2012 ballot. [T]he Pacific Greens received a notice from the Oregon Secretary of State’s office to the effect that the party, “is [now] eligible to nominate candidates for the 2012 General Election.” To attain ballot status, the Greens had to register at least 10,600 Oregon voters as members of their party.

Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala are proud of the work of their friends in Oregon to overcome this hurdle.

Dr. Stein and her staff visited Oregon earlier this year to rally support for the ballot drive. But Oregon’s success is almost entirely its own in that Oregon is one of a dozen states that the Stein campaign has identified as self-sufficient for ballot access purposes. The Stein campaign is directing volunteers and supporters to states like Oregon, but our major financial resources are being deployed elsewhere, to states where the gap between Green Party strength and the ballot access threshold requires our direct intervention.

Once we have this view, the first aspect of the Noble Eightfold Path, then the other aspects of the Path easily follow. Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Diligence, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration all arise when we have Right view. p. 11

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Julia Bond writes:

This started as part of the previous answer I was giving to what Occupy would look like if we focused on something (and how we still stay identifiably Occupy while doing that). I turned it into a separate post because it kind of took on a life of it’s own:

We’re going to have to continue to fight for our our futures in ways that non-violently resist the existing system, because those who pay for power deny us effective access to that system by design. So one thing we bring to any issue are the lessons we (hopefully) learned from what was so effective nationally about the *tactic* of occupation:

– Choose the battleground instead of fighting on our opponents’ home turf. We will NEVER be able to afford to out-lobby big business in Washington. We will never be able to buy enough advertising space to drown out the voices trying to tell us to just buy some more stuff and don’t think too much about the world outside our personal bubbles. Instead, make them talk about us and come to our spaces to do it. Leave them confused about how to handle a group that won’t give you ‘someone in charge of all this’ to talk to, and that directs its energy towards repairing problems instead of making demands of the people who created them.

– Refuse to designate leaders for opponents to tear apart and get the media to interview a diverse group that is composed of as many people as possible, letting everyone speak for themselves and letting no one become the voice of the group. (Also, realize that some stuff just makes you sound delusionally paranoid, and isn’t good to talk to reporters about – especially when it’s really happening – because Continue Reading »

One of the we must vote for President Barack Hussein Obama or face ruin memes revolves around how electing President George W. Bush resulted in two wars and the deaths of thousands of American military personnel and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians who would be alive today if Al Gore had become president.

Jeffrey Goldberg makes the case, in a good way, that President Obama is more likely to be the president who will go where President Bush did not: Iran.

Glenn Greenwald agrees:

Obama will be freer to attack Iran than Romney would be because Democrats, progressives, and the “international community” (that’s neocon for: Europeans) passively accept or even cheer for violence, aggression and executive power abuses when ordered by a sophisticated, urbane, Constitutional Law Professor with Good Progressivism in his heart, and only cause a messy ruckus when done by an icky, religious, overtly nationalistic Republican.

To see how true that is, just compare the years-long screeching over President Bush’s mere eavesdropping and detentions without any judicial review or transparency — he’s assaulting the Constitution and Our Values! – compared with the reaction to Obama’s more extremist assassinations without any judicial review or transparency. Or consider how a high-level aide to John Ashcroft marveled with envy over Obama’s ability to prosecute whistleblowers with such abandon, noting to The New York Times that the Ashcroft DOJ was deterred by the prospect of a political storm that Obama simply does not face: ”We,” lamented the Ashcroft aide, “would have gotten hammered for it.”

I can just hear the drum beats: but President Obama supports gay rights and is pro-choice!

Personally, I don’t trust either man to keep us out of another adventurist war.

That’s why I’ll be casting my vote for a woman in November.