The verdicts are in, and once again half of the country absolutely cannot compass the reasoned values of the other half. You would think that, in the socially liberal America of 2013, gay marriage would be a simple issue. It’s not as if gay people wanted to marry straight people. This question of what liberties the US government will afford is the rare controversy in which the rights of one side overlap not at all on the rights of the other. They don’t even have to eat at the same lunch counter. Yet bigots across the country are scandalized that the Supreme Court has denied them the right to curtail the rights of others. Today is Friday, and some people cannot leave well enough alone. Won’t you condemn them smugly with me?
Category Archives: Friday Links
Friday links! Forced perspective edition
I think it’s fair to say I went a little craze-balls regarding the NSA thing. I maintain that’s because secretly collecting millions of Americans’ phone records is a historically craze-balls thing for the US government to do, but there are good arguments on the other side. Probably, the NSA doesn’t care about anything besides preventing the President from coming down into their spy basement and personally blaming them for another terrorist attack, and most of our metadata is collected by the waste basket. Almost certainly, the hypothetical Fourth Amendment value of our Facebook friends is not so ethically compelling as an explosion-free Boston marathon. Today is Friday, and the week recedes behind us in forced perspective. Won’t you take a step back with me?
Friday links! Total information awareness edition
Who wouldn’t want to know everything? If we could make sure we knew absolutely everything, nothing unfair would ever happen to us again. We would know, for example, whether the federal government’s secret reason why it’s authorized to collect the phone records of every Verizon customer is an airtight legal argument or a drawing of Mayor McCheese having his way with the Hamburglar. If we knew who all the terrorists were and whom they called, and who all those people called, we would have a sort of terrorist social network. I call it Friendsterrorist. It’s a list of everyone who is bad, and once we have it we need only shut those people down and live forever, like Myspace. Today is Friday, and what you don’t know could fill a book you aren’t allowed to read. Won’t you speculate on the contents with me?
Friday links! New world order edition
All the best imaginary worlds are ruled by despotic governments. Your 1984, your Stainless Steel Rat galaxy, and my beloved Aeon Flux all invite the reader to indulge the fantasy of organized repression. And those are mostly just books—you can also find plenty of despotism in other media of fantasy, such as cable news or American political discourse. If you like to pretend that titanic forces are arrayed against you—and really, don’t we all?—now is an exciting time to be alive. Today is Friday, and probably we are not poised on the brink of a new world order. It would be kind of awesome if we were, though, provided the actual despotism never, ever actually happened. Won’t you exercise the imagination/wallow in the disastrous ignorance with me?
Friday links! Catbeard edition
Seen from one angle in a two-dimensional image, a cat looking upward to smell its owner’s face looks like a beard. Seen from another angle, it looks like a person at risk of catching ear mites. If you told Francis Bacon or whomever that images of housecats blocking the lower parts of their owners faces would one day delight millions of people, he would say, “Zounds! Accost me not, gypsy! Forsooth!” He just doesn’t have the interpretive framework. Today is Friday, and so much depends on point of view. Won’t you cherish and/or shatter your illusions with me?





