Friday links! Look upon me edition

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There is so little Combat! blog today, because I am in the New York Times Magazine doing what I do best: complaining. Check out Letter of Complaint: Cards Against Humanity, the first contribution to a new, recurring feature whose future installments will be written by people more competent than me. Today, though, I am in the Times, and so I must spend all day in a tight reward/conditioning cycle with my phone. While I refresh Twitter, how about you read this rebuttal to my piece by your boy Jeremy Gordon, who is smart and friendly. I mostly agree with him that the social value of the game is great, and that’s what makes it so awful to object. We’ll be back Monday with a top hat and a monocle, probably.

 

Juras revives dispute with defunct student sex column

Montana Supreme Court candidate Kristen Juras

Montana Supreme Court candidate Kristen Juras

Politics is a chess match that attracts the most brilliant tactical minds of our society. Just kidding—it’s a magnet for confident dummies. I bet Kristen Juras is very smart in most situations, but she became her worst self last month, when she revived her dispute with the University of Montana student newspaper over a sex advice column that ran for one semester seven years ago.

As an assistant law professor at UM in 2009, Juras objected to the “Bess Sex” column in the Montana Kaimin, writing letters to the editor and eventually taking her complaint to the president of the university and the dean of the journalism school. Nothing happened, possibly because neither the president nor the dean exercises editorial control over the student newspaper.

“Bess Sex” author Bess Davis (now Bess Pallares) graduated later that year, and the column ended. You’d think that would put the matter to rest, but the Montana Cowgirl Blog brought it up last month, prompting Juras to issue the following statement on Facebook:

The column was discontinued after the United States launched a comprehensive review of the university’s handling of sexual assault and harassment complaints, including a review of student education efforts. Can’t find copies of the columns? That’s because all of the major newspapers refused to publish them.

That just isn’t true. The Department of Justice began its investigation of UM in 2012, three years after “Bess Sex” ended. And major newspapers “refused” to publish it in the same way NBC refuses to broadcast Game of Thrones. It was a Kaimin column, never offered for syndication.

This kind of reasoning suggests Juras might form her opinions first and her reasons second—a questionably desirable quality in a supreme court justice. You can read more instances of her non-standard approach to reasoning in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links, which will include an exciting surprise. Remember last week, when I said the same thing? I mean it this time, probably.

 

 

Close Reading: Yahoo scans emails on behalf of NSA

Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker

Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker

Yesterday, Reuters reported that Yahoo secretly built software to scan its customers’ emails for keywords provided by the NSA and FBI. One can only imagine the number of recipes for bars this program uncovered. Among Americans, at least, a Yahoo account is a badge of unfamiliarity with the contemporary internet second only to Hotmail. But this remains a massive breach of trust. Your aunt might not have signed up for Yahoo mail if she knew all her messages would be scanned and turned over to law enforcement. This may be the secondary infection that kills Yahoo’s ailing business, but I’m more interested in the argument this discovery prompted from Stewart Baker, former general counsel at the NSA. I quote:

“[Email providers] have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies.”

Does it? Close reading after the jump.

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Is this the funniest Holocaust joke?

Norm Macdonald, the master, ages.

Norm Macdonald, the master, in middle age

Whenever someone declares a superlative—the best joke, the worst president, the most boneheaded play of the game—you should ask what the second-most was. Superlatives are dumb. The question of the second-funniest Holocaust joke calls attention to the problems of the genre. The Holocaust was many things, but inherently funny it wasn’t. It was inherently shocking, and most Holocaust jokes focus on audacity—either the audacity in the mere act of telling them or some put-on insensitivity to their subject. That’s cheating. Anyone can find shock humor in history’s worst genocide, but it takes a deft hand to make a Holocaust joke genuinely funny. Enter Norm Macdonald:

That’s the funniest Holocaust joke I’ve ever heard. Dissection after the jump.

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On Twitter with Steve King and emboldened Nazis

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) with far-right Eurotrash Frauke Petry and Geert Wilders

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) with far-right European leaders Frauke Petry and Geert Wilders

This morning finds friend of the blog and all-around badass Gina Patnaik putting it down on Rep. Steve King (R-IA) in the Des Moines Register. Gina is from Denison, in his district, and she is disappointed by King’s decreasingly coded racism:

So when you say that the changing racial demographic of our country is “cultural suicide,” I know what you mean. You mean me.

It’s a great letter, and I urge you to read it. I happened to interact with Rep. King regarding this cultural suicide business last week, when I called him an embarrassment to my home state on Twitter and he retweeted me, for some reason. Behold:

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I wondered why he would do that. Did he not understand that it was criticism? Does he automatically retweet anyone who mentions him? Did he see the white sheet in my avatar and assume we were cool? These questions baffled me for about two minutes. Then came the Twitter Nazis.

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