Sophianotloren

Ah, Monday.  Very into taking a day off of the “norm” today…though I am fairly humming with impatience and have SO much to do that I am virtually paralyzed.  ‘Tis the month in the plan for the household reversal (me back to the marital home, i.e. Big House; and Manchild back to the small house, i.e. Haven) by August — in which several pieces of heavy furniture must be dragged to the cover of the porch to be refinished.

While said furniture has needed refinished for DECADES, this is basically busy work and thus repellent.  I can’t REALLY begin the transformative transfer until a complex series of things happen, a psychological and physical sort of Tetris game of family dynamics, financial wherewithal and so forth.

The Haven needs some work to make it easier to live in — moving and constructing storage along both long walls.  I have some of the materials necessary, (and a yardsale find this weekend GREATLY assisted with the ‘materials’ bit!) BUT other things need to move to the Big House FIRST.  And therein lies the rub — no place to move things TO presently.  But in July, the Manchild and his Beloved will be house-sitting for the entire month, so at that point their bedroom everything can move to the garage for storage! Then and only then can I paint that room and the bath and turn it back into the shared office for the Minotaur and me.   Thus clearing the Minotaur’s present office space to be my bedroom! (After all, he still snores and we have different sleep schedules!) And at July’s end?  Some money to complete the last relatively minor, but costly bits of the kitchen/family room transformation AND Haven repairs…and a television for out here.

So, yes, this month is bits of drudgery and no fun splashy  bits.  Adulthood sucks.  Patience sucks.  My Inner Child wants to point and shoot muscly men moving things into position and she is being denied.  Also?  I am tripping over everything here in the Haven, suddenly the place that has kept me going for almost three years seems impossibly crowded!  I know this means I am psychologically ready to be back in my home; but couldn’t it have waited just another month before I started going up the walls?

The Minotaur feels it, too.  He is counting down, exhaustedly, to his retirement before Samhain.  He comes home Friday too tired to sleep out here, he falls into his bed in the Big House by eight.  On weekends, he says, “I want you in the House NOW!”  When only a couple months ago, both of us were honeymoonishly delighted with this tiny place and our coffee in bed.  Now, he curses the gas ring as makes morning coffee.

Both the Manchild and I feel temporary where we are, and we are unmotivated.  “Cleaning” has reduced itself, if not quite to Febreze and wine, to litter box maintenance, dish washing, and waving a broom in the general direction of dog hair!  We drag through the necessities of household hygiene like twelve year olds threatened with grounding.

But I did “re-open” the Honey House — that wee building of cordwood and bottle walls in the back corner of the yard.  It is too hot to process the raw was awaiting my care, already.  But the place is re-organized around a $10 yard sale find — a charming round wood table that is very old.  I also bought the Minotaur’s Fathers’ Day gift at an estate sale — a huge oak rolltop desk almost 100 years old.  It needs some refinishing love, too. (And OMGs, when did yard/garage/estate sales start taking CREDIT cards?!!)

 

My impatience to be done with the work and secure back in the Big House before summer’s end still needles me.  I may have to destroy something!  Weed my wardrobe or something.  Make myself get rid of all the battered old sweats type of clothing I have slouched around in here for three years.  Yes, the time of the Refugee Wife is over; but for June?  It is the summer of our discontent.  And impatience.  And drudgery.

Pass me the wine, will you?

 

Tagged: householding, marriage, ptsd

If it wants to, American governments can play an enormous role in improving labor conditions overseas. The federal government could do all sorts of things to regulate the conditions of what comes into this country. At the very least, it could demand the products it purchases itself (mostly for the military) are ethically sourced. Unfortunately it does not.

Even on the local level, government can make a difference. Take Madison:

Last month, to commemorate the anniversary of the deadly Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, the city of Madison, Wisconsin, launched a contracting policy that commits the city’s vendors to promote fair labor standards. The city’s new “sweatfree” contract guidelines aim to eradicate labor abuse from its international supply chains for the production of government uniforms, including the apparel worn by firefighters and other agency personnel. The guidelines build on the city’s existing sweat-free procurement policies, with disclosure and monitoring mechanisms that aim to “[raise] the bar for human rights due diligence in government contracting” by providing a nationwide model, according to the advocacy network Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium (SPC). Similar to living-wage policies for workers on government contracts—which help raise pay scales for low-income workers across the community—the sweat-free contract model for government purchasing can promote standards for more ethical manufacturing across the global apparel market. Madison’s effort builds on model policies developed by advocates and governments of various cities and states through the SPC, which includes Austin, Berkeley and Maine.

The Madison contract rules cover basic labor protections that reflect International Labour Organization standards. Vendors will be required to disclose detailed information on the entire supply chain, allowing city authorities to oversee factories’ compliance with national rules on wages and benefits, child labor, employment discrimination and maternity leave, fire and building safety codes, and overtime and maternity leave rules. Vendors will be monitored by a Contract Review Panel that includes representatives of the city and international labor experts. And if contractors do not have full disclosure for all their suppliers initially, they must increase disclosure levels annually over the duration of the contract.

Suppliers will also be screened on whether they provide “worker education” and “a grievance process” to help them advocate for their rights at work. There is a special focus on “prevention measures to address health and safety conditions in high-risk areas such as Bangladesh and Pakistan”—two countries associated with “deathtrap” factories that have claimed the lives of hundreds of workers in recent years. The language mirrors provisions of the Bangladesh Accord, an industry-based program for factory health and safety that now has now enrolled about about 170 brands and retailers worldwide.

Moreover, the firms themselves have to pay for the system. This is a very good thing and a good precedent for those fighting for international labor rights.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I suppose, which is why it makes me really angry to see this story from South Carolina, where a lawyer has filed an ethics complaint against a prosecutor and a public defender for being figuratively caught in bed.

This stems from the same district where the prosecutor tried to have a Supreme Court justice recused for having the temerity to remind prosecutors that they shouldn’t be engaging in misconduct. (I wrote about it here and Radley Balko expounded on it here.)

The complaint has been filed by Attorney Desa Ballard:

A former law clerk with the state Supreme Court, Ballard has practiced law for 31 years and serves as an adjunct professor with the University of South Carolina School of Law. She specializes in professional ethics and responsibility.

In the complaint she alleges that Wilson, the prosecutor, has established an atmosphere of getting away with what you can and hiding exculpatory information. For instance:

In that case, involving the 2003 rape and stabbing of Julie Jett in West Ashley, Wilson failed to tell defense attorneys before trial that a boyfriend of Jett’s roommate had a key to the apartment – information they could have used to raise the possibility that someone other than the suspect had access to commit the crime, Ballard said.

Ballard said Wilson also failed to turn over crime scene notes to the defense before another murder case went to trial in Berkeley County in 2009. And she let Tyrone Winslow Jr. spend two years in jail waiting for a 2012 murder trial though her office had ample witness testimony indicating he had acted in self-defense in stabbing another man in McClellanville two years earlier, the complaint stated.

But that’s sadly becoming par for the course. What is shocking are the allegations against the public defender, Pennington. According to the complaint, Pennington is a “vocal supporter” of the prosecutor, who has muzzled his staff from speaking out about injustices committed by the prosecutor’s office and has made that a factor in his performance evaluations:

As for Pennington, Ballard said she was approached by an attorney in his office who complained that the public defender had directly ordered him not to file misconduct complaints against Wilson in 2007 and 2009.  The attorney, who she would not identify, said Pennington also made clear that his performance evaluation would hinge on him ceasing his public criticism of Wilson and her office.

“You are not to speak or convey in any manner to others comments that are critical of (Scarlett Wilson) or her office, especially regarding their ethics or honesty without gaining my permission first,” Pennington stated in a December email to the attorney.

Pennington also refused to join the SC Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ request to have the prosecutor’s office investigated for misconduct, saying he preferred to work issues out on his own.

It’s shocking to me that a prosecutor and public defender seem to be so copacetic. The realities of the criminal justice system are, of course, such that despite the adversarial environment, we are forced to work together on an every day basis at close quarters, so civility and some collegiality are inevitable.

But no defense attorney should ever mistake that collegiality and professionalism for friendship and subjugation of the interests of the client. That should always be foremost and if the allegations against Pennington are true, they’re really disturbing and might hint at an underlying philosophy of making clients’ interests secondary. When that happens – and I’m sure it does in many places where ethics complains aren’t filed – the justice system ceases to become adversarial and you begin to see why public defenders get a bad name.

If you ask me, I’d rather be this guy.

 

Yes, I am asking you to watch 13 minutes of a very funny man being very angry and sarcastic.  Specially you customers of Craptastic Xfinity.  (Is it just me, or is there a reason, that like Blackwater changing its name to Xe, then Comcast changes its name to Xfinity?)

Please take the time to write your comment to the FCC — they need a deluge of complaints to stop the cable companies.

Filed under: Life, Media Morons, Politics Tagged: Craptastic-Comcast, net neutrality

Things are never as simple as they seem. A vagina, for example, is not merely a hole into which one can thrust a penis or penis-shaped object, vibrating or sedentary. There are all kinds of nuances around a vagina, various nerves that need to be stimulated, ways in which one can manipulate the labia and clitoris, the placement of fingers or tongue or lips prior to the introduction of whatever may be used as a phallus. The crudest straight men (and, yes, almost exclusively straight men) miss out on so much because they believe that what one gets out fucking is, in the most literal sense, what one puts into it. That man can claim that he did, indeed, fuck a hole, and if that's all he wants, well, missionary accomplished. It's easier that way, no? It's so much easier to merely worry about the thrusting and the quick squirt than worrying about all that tiresome playing and teasing? But, see, if you believe that the world is not just about you, if you believe that the act of sex with a woman is really about attempting to understand a whole other being, well, hell, man, you have to reckon with the fact that this reality around us is a whole lot more complex than most people even want it to be.

When the Rude Pundit first read about the exchange of five members of the Taliban who had been detained at the prison at Guantanamo Bay for the only American soldier prisoner of war in Afghanistan and then he heard how Republicans were upset at the deal because the released detainees might attack Americans again, he wondered what the Gitmo detainees had been through. That's not to diminish the five years that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl endured as a POW (a real, actual POW, not a "detainee," whatever that bullshit term means in terms of being a prisoner during a war).

Ted Cruz was all concerned about how the soldiers who captured the Taliban members might feel about the exchange: "Can you imagine what [Bergdahl] would say to his fallen comrades who lost their lives to stop these people who were responsible, either directly or indirectly, for threatening or taking U.S. civilian lives." Yes, their feelings matter. Except, of course, that no Americans died capturing them. Yeah, see, Mullah Norullah Noori turned himself in. Mohammed Nabi Omari was tricked into being arrested at an airport. Khirullah Khairkwha was captured by Pakistani forces when he was trying to negotiate a surrender. He was transferred to American custody. Mullah Mohammad Fazl surrendered to U.S. forces. Abdul Haq Wasiq said he could provide the U.S. with Taliban leader Mullah Omar's location, but he was arrested by the U.S. So Cruz can go fuck himself with his sympathy for our troops.

By no stretch of the imagination are these former Gitmo residents good people. They are violent assholes. But they were violent assholes who were part of an army of the then-government of Afghanistan, whether we liked that government or not. And they have been held, without charge, without trial, for 12-13 years. They were tortured (or interrogated in an enhanced way, if that's the lie you tell yourself). At least one, Fazl, is wanted by the United Nations for war crimes, but we haven't allowed him to be charged and tried on that allegation.

John McCain lost his shit, as usual, on Nation, Face Bob Schieffer, in what was the oldest hour of television perhaps ever. Said Sen. McCain, with all the subtlety of the end of last night's Game of Thrones, "It is disturbing that these individuals would have the ability to reenter the fight, and they are big, high level people, possibly responsible for the deaths of thousands." Those "thousands" were Shia Muslims in Afghanistan. So let's get these guys before the Hague for some war crimes proseuctions, right? And you can be sure that the North Vietnamese thought McCain was responsible for many, many deaths, too, but they let him the fuck go after five-and-a-half years as a POW.

That's why nations have the Geneva Conventions. Because this shit is complicated. But we just had to ignore those agreements because we faced a threat that no one had ever faced before in the history of ever and no one ever had it as bad as us. So we have cursed ourselves with Guantanamo Bay, a greater cause of terrorism and anti-Americanism than a 1000 released Taliban fighters

Do a thought experiment. Change Obama to Bush. Change Republicans criticizing the President to Democrats. Now, ask yourself: How many variations on the word "vagina" would Dick Cheney be using to condemn Democrats as hating the troops if they don't want to bring our prisoners home.

In case you missed it, we turned 10 over the weekend and threw ourselves a little party. All your old friends where there:

• Sir Rob Farley
• “Other Scott” Lemieux
• Yours truly
• The mysterious “bean”
• The inimitable bspencer
• The piked Loomis
• English Dave
• American Watkins
• Alaskan Noon
• Paul of the Campos Clan
• The Lance Mannion
• Charli-sans-”e”

It was a party, so shut up, I thought everyone deserved a nickname. Anyhow, you can find all our remembrances of our time here, and you’re more than welcome to link to your own, as I saw a number of you wrote them up in the comments, and it’d be nice to have them in one place too.

As part of a post arguing (correctly) that Obama’s environmental record has, on balance, been excellent, Jon Chait has some links to people assuming that the regulations issued today would never come:

The lingering conclusion that Obama simply did not care about the environment made many of my fellow liberals doubt that Obama would ever take such a risky step. “I think this has the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell of actually happening, but don’t let anyone tell you Obama has no options,” wrote Matthew Yglesias. The failure of the EPA to immediately produce regulations prompted Joe Romm to conclude Obama was “delaying action.” When Obama’s budget did not include power plant regulations — which are not a budgetary item — Ryan Lizza wrote, “Nothing in his new budget follows through on that promise. And if that doesn’t, what will?” in a column headlined, “Has Obama Already Given Up on Climate Change.”

As Chait implies earlier, I assume this ultimately baseless pessimism has essentially Green Laternist roots. To some people, the fact that climate change legislation didn’t pass can be taken as ipso facto evidence that Obama didn’t really want it to pass. At any rate, we can now presumably proceed to an argument that the standards are inadequate, which you can bet will mostly ignore the Anthony Kennedy’s veto power over them.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein, while (again, correctly) noting that the regulations are “probably at the outer limit of what can be done,” argues that there’s some basis for optimism in that they’re less ambitious than what Republicans nominally favored a few years ago:

The power plant regulations the Obama administration will announce today are far less ambitious than the proposal McCain offered in Oregon in 2008. They’re less ambitious than the proposals Newt Gingrich championed through the Aughts. They’re far less than what’s required to keep the rise in temperatures to two degrees Celsius.

But they’re probably at the outer limit of what can be done so long as the Republican Party refuses to even believe in climate change, much less work with the Obama administration on a bill. The good news, if there is any, is that the Republican Party hasn’t always refused to believe in climate change. There was even a time when its key national leaders were committed to doing something about it. Those leaders are still around today. They could still do something about it today.

I think the problem here is the word “committed.” Given Republican control of the government from 2001-06, plus (on this issue) a Congress that would have worked with Republicans on climate change in 2007-8, we can have a very good idea of what Republican elites actually favored on climate change. Their actually policy preference on climate change, like their policy preference for health care reform, is “worse than nothing.” The record of the Republican Congress on climate change under George W. Bush was terrible, as was the record of George W. Bush’s EPA. There is less than no chance that a McCain or Romney administration would have issued anything like these regulations. The fact that the McCain campaign pretended to favor some good climate change action and the fact that a notably uninfluential Republican buffoon favored some decent policy proposals while the Republicans who actually governed the country were making things worse is really neither here nor there, and it’s hard to imagine this changing anytime soon.

Saul Bellow’s 1978 story “A Silver Dish“ has been has been re-released over at the New Yorker. The piece follows Woody Seblst, a successful businessman, before abandoning its conventional plot structure entirely; Bellow’s prose seeps into the Great Depression, the rise of gateway psychedelics, and Woody’s bleeding relationship with a “dying and picturesque father”:

There were Woody’s two sisters as well, unmarried, in their fifties, very Christian, very straight, still living with Mama in an entirely Christian bungalow. Woody, who took full responsibility for them all, occasionally had to put one of the girls (they had become sick girls) in a mental institution. Nothing severe. The sisters were wonderful women, both of them gorgeous once, but neither of the poor things was playing with a full deck. And all the factions had to be kept separate—Mama, the Christian convert; the fundamentalist sisters; Pop, who read the Yiddish paper as long as he could still see print; Halina, a good Catholic. Woody, the seminary forty years behind him, described himself as an agnostic. Pop had no more religion than you could find in the Yiddish paper, but he made Woody promise to bury him among Jews, and that was where he lay now, in the Hawaiian shirt Woody had bought for him at the tilers’ convention in Honolulu. Woody would allow no undertaker’s assistant to dress him but came to the parlor and buttoned the stiff into the shirt himself, and the old man went down looking like Ben-Gurion in a simple wooden coffin, sure to rot fast. That was how Woody wanted it all.

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I’m on the RNC’s blast email distribution list, so I get an involuntary daily glimpse into the workings of The Scream Machine (I rarely read the emails themselves, but the subject lines are invariably masterworks of terse meaning, much in the way the title “Snakes On a Plane” tells you all you need to know about the essential mise en scene of that film in four monosyllables).

Without bothering to either search my inbox or google, I will try to recall from memory some of the many Obama administration “scandals” the Machine has recommended to my attention (readers can no doubt remember more):

The family without health insurance that had granite counter tops.

Solyandra (sp? Never found out what that one was about. Something lobbying favoritism boondoggle something).

The slut young lady who wanted the government to pay for her birth control.

The IRS persecuting people who file for 501(c)(3) status because they were conservatives.

Standing up for thugs in hoodies.

Bengahzi

The government web site that didn’t work.

Releasing Dangerous Terrorists just to get back a no-good deserter.

Like I said I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch, but anyway this play list is kind of lame. The problem here I suspect is that asking why the Machine is constantly revving up another fake scandal is like asking why a classic rock station keeps playing I Can’t Get Enough of Your Love. It’s just what they do.

And I bet the reason it “pays” to do it is roughly similar: because there’s a built-in audience for the nostalgia value. All these stories are attempts to re-live the magic of the Year of Lewinsky just one more time, in something of the same way that hearing something off Led Zeppelin IV for the 10,000th time is supposed to take the audience back to their own magic moments.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Yes, Tales From Topographic Oceans (1973)

We must stop being the stupid party. It’s time for a new Republican party that talks like adults. It’s time for us to articulate our plans and visions for America in real terms. We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. We’ve had enough of that. 

Those inspirational words were uttered by the Republican Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal in January, 2013.
 
Bobby Jindal, however, has shown very little inclination to take his own advice and, in fact, six months later suffered a bout of “stupid” himself in the form of a kamikaze Op-Ed in Politico:

Republican political correctness is all the rage, and it’s all roughly the same: we need to stop being conservative… we need to abandon our principles (at least the ones that don’t poll well)… we need to let the smart guys in Washington pick our candidates…we need big data and analytics so we can optimize… we need to be more libertarian…we need to endorse abortion…we need fewer debates…and the list goes on.

The overall level of panic and apology from the operative class in our party is absurd and unmerited. It’s time to stop the bedwetting.

And:

No more self-analysis; we’ve had our catharsis. The season for navel gazing has passed.

Let’s stop defeating ourselves, get on offense, and go kick the other guys around. If you’ve followed the news over the past month, they are certainly asking for it. We are the conservative party in America — deal with it. We have a lot of dissenting voices. So what? Deal with it. The American public waxes and wanes. Fine. It will wax again soon enough. Deal with it, and start fighting for our principles instead of against them, so we can be in position to create the next wave.

But, best-for-last:

At some point, the American public is going to revolt against the nanny state and the leftward march of this president. I don’t know when the tipping point will come, but I believe it will come soon.

Why?

Because the left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.

Their philosophy does not work and it got our nation into the mess it’s in.

Eventually Americans will rise up against this new era of big government and this new reign of politically correct terror. In the meantime Republicans — hold fast, get smarter, get disciplined, get on offense, and put on your big boy pants.

That terrible thud? That was Jindal tripping on the hems of his “big boy pants.”

But that’s just one guy.  Surely the GOP has vast reserves of sane, talented, principled people ready, willing and able to lead America to international primacy in the 21st century?

Anyone who doubts that might find their doubts confirmed by taking a look at last weekend’s Republican Leadership Conference, a conclave of party star power convened to firm up their winning strategies for 2014 and beyond. 

[BTW, the Republican Leadership Conference used to be called the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, but the GOP has decided that it has quite enough “southern” in the party already, thank you very much.]

Just look at the star-studded Speaker’s Lineup to get some idea of the political talent informing this event:

THURSDAY
Bobby Jindal
Reince Priebus

FRIDAY
Donald Trump
Phil Bryant
Mike Lee
Allen West
Haley Barbour
Newt Gingrich

SATURDAY
Ted Cruz
Michele Bachmann
Rick Santorum
Marsha Blackburn
Ron Johnson
Rick Perry

A few late adds, included convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza and homophobic Duck Whisperer Phil Robertson as well as perennial embarrassments, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX).

If you were looking for “leaders” or even serious candidates, here, you took a wrong turn somewhere.  But when a large percentage of your constituency is reactionary, ideologically rigid, or just plain bonkers, well . . . you do what you have to do to turn out the vote.

Usually, the formal statements of the Democratic National Committee are a little too tepid for my taste but, in this case, I think they nailed it:

. . . in the coming days, the conference is slated to hear from the likes of Donald Trump, Allen West, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Dinesh D’Souza and many more. This is a group of GOP leaders that are famous for things like shutting down the government, believing that employers should be able to limit health care options for women and question where the President was born.

In short - the RLC is a massive gathering of ‘the stupid party.’

But the problem with this gathering isn’t just the speakers, it’s the policies that they’re fighting for that are hurting the economic well-being of Americans.

Really.  I have nothing to add . . .

summer-of-supervillainy:

No idea why everything looks so red in this photo. The whites are white, and the rest of the colors are cool jewel tones. I’ll take photos in better lighting once I’m done quilting - the muddy-looking purple is actually spotted with blue and green, and the muddy-looking flowers have turquoise highlights in them.

Summer is very talented, and any babies in her sphere are very lucky because they get cool stuff like this. :)  Plus, I’m pleased because the friendship stars were influenced by me going “yes, make those, those are cool!” 

Also, I figure if Earth ever explodes and the parents of the child need to send the kid off world and they grow up to be a superhero, the friendship stars would be an excellent pattern for the adoptive parents to make a costume logo from. >_>

Apparently it is being translated!

I think this is a great thing for kids, just because it opens up that idea for girls that it’s okay to like girls, and when they get older and if they don’t find themselves attracted to guys and feel things for girls (or even if they are attracted to guys too), they have a framework for their feelings. 

anomenon:

When on artblock, possibly the best things you can do to yourself are:

Go out and watch a good movie or read a good book—get yourself hyped up.

Listen to some great music, neoclassical is always beneficial, though I personally recommend Lindsey Stirling x x x, Pentatonix x x x, and the Piano Guys.

OR, go to eschergirls and wail at how horrendous some of the stuff that is professionally published can be and get inspired to do better and one up them to ease the pain on your eyeballs and prefrontal cortex. It also makes you feel better about yourself :D

Escher Girls as entertainment AND motivation! :D

No, really, now the hawthorns are at their loveliest!  We have been troubled of late — well, ok, since 2003, with how or whether to celebrate Beltane.  This year?  We dawdled, I admit.  We “sacrificed” by giving money we needed to other causes, other people.  And finally?  We planted trees held far to long, waiting in their pots.  We gave up much of the vegetable garden, admitting we were not in the mood to recreate “Eden” in tomatoes and beans.  We have several raised boxes and a large strawberry bed still.

We planted a  Powder Blue Sequoia, a Spanish Fir, something beautiful and green and Japanese and a bristlecone pine.  All had sat waiting, waiting to be our personal forest in communion with firs that have grown at yard edges and a veritable grove beside the Labyrinth.  Finally, they are  in the soil.  The Sequoia has put out almost two inches of new growth!

Tagged: Beltane, gardening, trees

I am, of course, dying to see Angelina Jolie do “Maleficent” — but I am chicken about opening weekends.  So as I went through my weekend, with many thoughts jostling about my brain like a bunch of kittens in a sack, I was also recalling a comment on one of my PBP posts this past Friday.  The discussion of horned gods brought up the idea of horned female deities.

Or, well, think then of those medieval horns….and Maleficent took it a step further.  But since I WAS thinking of horned female figures, my eyes gravitated to my masks on the wall over my desk…particularly to this African mask of unknown name/lineage/origin:

I was suddenly somewhat amused and shocked at her RESEMBLANCE to Maleficent!

Tagged: movies, mythology, pagan blog project

Ten years ago today, the first post appeared at Lawyers, Guns and Money, then housed at lefarkins.blogspot.com.  The first post, by djw, was a classic “Test.”  We then managed a half dozen other posts in the first day, running a gamut of topics that, for the most part, we still write about now.

How did this come about? In early 2004, Scott, djw, and myself  (all graduate students in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington) started talking seriously about founding a blog.  Scott had already given the idea some consideration, and had even come up with a name: Lawyers, Guns and Money.  Both Scott and myself were in the midst of completing our dissertations, so while we didn’t have a wealth of time at the moment for other writing, we could foresee a future in which things would loosen up a bit.  A few months before I had met Matt Duss, who had already started his own blog and got me more interested in the project.

It seemed that everyone was starting a blog at that time, although in retrospect I think we may have been at the very end of the first adopter wave. We gained a small but loyal audience fairly quickly, largely drawn from our friends, colleagues, and students. The early development of this audience was critical, as the most demoralizing aspect of maintaining a blog is the feeling that no one out there is listening.

Since that first day, we’ve published upwards of 21000 posts, with almost 28 million visits and over 42 million page views.  It’s fair to say that both the longevity and the success of LGM have far exceeded anything that we reasonably could have expected when we began. Our audience has grown steadily, with only a couple of instances of sustained decline (these followed the 2004 and 2008 elections).

The Blogosphere

The blogosphere has, obviously, undergone a dramatic set of changes since we set up shop. The most notable difference is the decline in the independent blog; so many of our comrades from 2004 have joined larger media institutions, or become institutionalized (so to speak) on their own. Of course, we’ve hardly been immune to this process, as several of us have moonlighted for a variety of different outlets over the years.

The winds have also shifted against the multi-purpose blog, with authors writing on a variety of topics without pretense to specific expertise.  While each of us had specific areas of academic and policy expertise when we founded LGM, we never envisioned limiting our contributions to those areas.  Indeed, in the early years all of the front-page contributors ranged widely across topics, writing about foreign policy, legal affairs, politics, sports, and cultural topics as if we each had something interesting to say.

The willingness of the blogosphere to tolerate the generalist blogger has declined, and I think it’s fair to say that LGM has accommodated itself to this trend.  This is true both in how the original contributors now behave, and in how we’ve brought in new people.  My posts focus primarily on security and defense work, and while Scott’s posting strays a bit more from his academic interests, it certainly has narrowed around a consistent set of arguments about American politics.  The same could be said of Paul, SEK, and Erik; all write generalist posts, while also contributing heavily on their specialties.

Nevertheless, while the individual contributors tend to coalesce more around specific areas than they once did, the blog as a whole still touches on a wide array of topics. It’s a point of pride that we’ve managed to make this transition, and to maintain our independence for so long.  We’re also mindful of all the blogs from the “Golden Age” that haven’t made it as long as we have.  Most often, this has resulted from our own good luck (in terms of consistent outside employment, etc.) than from any degree of merit.

The Contributors

If this project goes as planned, everyone will have a say on what LGM has meant to them, but I wanted to give at least a few brief words on how all of these people have fit into LGM’s project (whatever that is).

Dave Noon was the first addition to the lineup. At the time he was producing brilliant work at Axis of Evel Knievel, work that we would often link to.  Productive conversations eventually ensued, and he came on board in plenty of time to chronicle the “rise” of Sarah Palin from an Alaskan perspective.

Defeated, Sarah retreated into the icy wastes from which she came. No one knows where Dave Noon is now, but some say (and I like to think that this is true), that he took an oath not unlike this one:

“Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.”

It’s comforting to me, the idea that Noon is standing upon that wall, watching against the return of the Darkness from the North.

Adding Erik had long been an idea; we very much enjoyed his work at Alterdestiny, but there was some uncertainty as to how he might fit in at LGM. As one commenter noted, there’s no question that Erik has changed the tone of the blog, but there’s little question in my mind that the change has been for the positive.  There’s no question whatsoever that Erik’s entry coincided with a significant bump in traffic.

We initially envisioned this site as a politics and culture blog.  Thus, there’s always been space for someone like SEK, although I don’t think that we ever quite grasped that “someone like SEK” would actually be “SEK.” I honestly don’t remember ever even inviting SEK to blog here; we just woke up one morning and he was posting, and that seemed as it should be.

It’s also under these terms that it’s easiest to understand bspencer’s role with the blog.  Over the past year, as I’ve noted on several occasions, I’ve been rebuilding the archives we lost during the transition from Blogger to WordPress.  Much has surely remained the same, but much has also changed, in both tone and content.  I daresay at this point that Beth’s blogging for LGM now is more reminiscent of the first year of LGM than any of the other regulars.

The three original members knew Dave Brockington from the University of Washington Department of Political Science, where he was two years ahead of Dave and myself and three years ahead of Scott. Brockington is our answer to Nate Silver, if Nate Silver lived in the United Kingdom and studied cricket.  I think it’s fair to say that we’ve nearly cornered the market on cricket blogging in the US political blogosphere.

Paul Campos has added a touch of seriousness and maturity to LGM, as well as deep subject matter knowledge in several areas that we consider critical.  We’re not just deeply honored to be part of Paul’s broader project on law school education; we’re also pleased at the attention the campaign has brought to LGM.

We also have a pair of “alumni” or “emerita,” depending on how you want to look at it.  Bean became a part of the crew in order to shore up our legal blogging side, as well as from general awesomeness. She joined us in October 2007, leaving for greener pastures in August 2008. We asked Charli Carpenter to join because of her interest in the intersection of international affairs and pop culture. Her most memorable post grafted a permanent “e” onto the name of a long-term “friend of the blog.” We dearly miss them both.

Finally, LGM has hosted quite a few guest bloggers over the years, including Steve Attewell, Colin Snider, Matt Duss, iocaste, Jonathan Powell, and many others.  At first, we invited guests in order to keep the site going when several of the front pagers went on vacation.  Now, we invite them primarily when we think that have something interesting and useful to say that goes beyond what our expertise can offer.

The Comments

There have surely been points at which I would agree with Freddie’s characterization of the LGM commentariat. The general attitudes of our commenters have changed a great deal over time, as has their relationship with the front-page authors.  There are some few that have been with us since very nearly the beginning.  The relationship has often been frustrating, but has almost always been productive, as some of the blog’s best posts have emerged from conversations that began in the comments.  It remains a tragedy that we lost the larger part of the comments from the first six years of the blog when we shifted to WordPress, but as far as I’ve been able to tell, there’s no way to get those back.

For my part, while I generally don’t wade in as much as I did in the early years of the blog, I still greatly value the comments as a form of peer review.  If I’m making a weak argument, or if I’ve left out some critical detail, or if I’ve explained myself insufficiently, I can count on commenters to point it out. Sadly, this contribution goes unpaid in anything other than our most heartfelt thanks.

Behind the Blogging

LGM has seen remarkably little internal drama over the past decade.  We don’t have a style guide, the money is too small to have a real fight about, and we don’t have an editorial “direction” in the sense that the term is normally used.  This doesn’t quite explain why there’s been so little fighting, as blogs fall apart all the time from big squabbles over small things.  I suppose that the closest we ever came to genuine problems came in mid-2010, when the transition from Blogger to WordPress was not going well and the site was hemorrhaging readers.  Even then, it was the situation that was stressful, not the relationships between contributors.

It’s worth adding that our readers have, over the years, been exceedingly generous. LGM “makes money” in the literal sense of the term, although the proceeds won’t soon allow any of us to quit our day jobs.  Beer money is nice, however, and the experience of owning and managing a small business has been eye-opening.

For my part, the LGM experience has opened up enormous personal and professional opportunities.  There have also been some costs, but those costs have, in my mind, been well worth bearing.  When I think about the contributions that I have made as an academic and “public intellectual,” LGM occupies the central position.

The Future

As for the future… who knows?  We’re all obviously in much different personal and professional  situations than when we founded LGM, but I nevertheless find it heartening that, between the nine of us, we still manage to find enough time in our days to keep the site running at near-peak volume.  We had more pageviews in April 2014 than in any previous month, so we seem to be doing fairly well.

We hope to restart regular podcasts (or at least podcasts that aren’t associated with Game of Thrones) at some point in the near future.  Podcasting demands a bit more organization and coordination that we’re used to, and also entails some upfront costs in terms of prep, learning, and software. A couple of us are also beginning to think about books that revolve around topics developed on the blog; I suspect that if anything comes of this, you will be repeatedly made aware of it in no uncertain terms.

As for the rest of the victory lap, over the next couple of days we will have posts from all the front pagers and former front pagers of LGM, as well as from a few “Friends of the Blog.”  If you like self-celebratory navel gazing, this is your thing.  If not, it’ll all be over in a day or two.

It’s amazing that it’s been ten years since Rob, Dave and I started this project. (I’m proud of it in part because it’s one of the few times I’ve ever come up with a good title.) As my quantity of posts makes clear, I still love it.

Rather than further navel-gazing, I wanted above all to thank the readers, who make this all worthwhile. I especially wanted to thanks our commenters. We have that increasingly rare thing, an actual community that’s big enough to generate good discussions while not so big as to be entirely dominated by trolls. It’s a delicate balance, as anyone who’s read blogs for a while is well aware, and we’ve been very lucky. I have to particularly single out Howard, who has done so much to build up my jazz collection although his anecdotes about music and baseball are more than enough of a gift. (I’m still working through the remarkable David Murray set he recently purchased me, and I can’t think him enough.)

I also wanted to thank the other bloggers who engaged with LGM when we were a guppy in the ecosystem of the blogosphere. In a non-exhaustive list, let me thank Duncan Black, Roy Edroso, Lindsay Beyerstein, Matt Yglesias, Brad DeLong, and Ezra Klein. I assume a fairly high percentage of readers have discovered the blog through one of these sources who found us early, and we’re grateful. And, of course, we’re grateful to those who have continued to engage with us over the years, which remarkably enough now includes at least two New York Times columnists.

There wouldn’t be much point in doing this without you. We immensely appreciate the support.

It feels strange to think that this is the tenth anniversary of this humble little blog, and stranger still when I realize that means I’ve been around for half of its life, as my first post was back in 2009.

Since then, I’ve written 821 posts — approximately 164 per year, if my math doesn’t fail me — which is a frighteningly absurd number to consider, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll note that most days I still feel like “the new guy,” so much so that when I don’t post for a week, I’m always reluctant to post again for fear I’ve been demoted during my absence. (Of course, that’s never been the case, and both the folks in the masthead and you lot in the comments have always welcomed me back.)

But Rob asked us to think about what the tenth anniversary means — at least, that’s how I understood his email — and for me, it’s likely a little different from everybody else, because right now what it means is that I have a career.

Most of you already know that my job at the AV Club was a direct result of this post, and my opportunity to write for RogerEbert.com came from this one and its laser beams.

But most of you probably don’t know that my main job, at Raw Story, can also be directly attributed to my time here.

When I decided to leave California last year — for a whole host of reasons, some related to my family, others stemming from my general hatred of the state — I had planned on continuing my academic career in the South. I had two jobs lined up, one of which could easily have turned into a tenure-track position, but I wouldn’t say I was looking forward to it.

I enjoyed teaching as much as I ever did, but I’d grown tired of the stuff that all academics grow tired of, and so I did what all academics do when they’re tired of such stuff — I bitched about it on Facebook. One of the people who read my bitching and knew my work from here encouraged me to apply for a job for which I wasn’t remotely qualified at Raw Story, so I did.

As I haven’t been fired yet, you can guess how that worked out.

My point is, I owe Other Scott, Rob, Dave, Other Dave, David, Erik, Paul, Beth, and Charli quite a bit. I’ve managed to turn my random life and failed academic career into a living, and I wouldn’t have been able to have pulled it off were it not for Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Eventually, I hope to get back into the swing of attacking conservatives for the conservative things they say, but it’s taken me a long time to learn how to write without an overtly editorial voice, so writing with one feels a little schizophrenic. I’m sure, in time, I’ll be able to deal, because it’s not like I don’t have opinions anymore.

Similarly, this summer I’m going to start doing visual rhetoric series, beginning with one on the first half of this season of Mad Men. Then it’s on to The Sopranos, which I’m now watching for the first time thanks to Amazon Prime. It’s all about developing a new, non-academic writing routine, which I haven’t been able to do yet because freelancing is much harder than it seems.

And, of course, I’ll keep on turning my life into one act plays, because that’s what I do. (Sad as it is to say, I owe these two jackasses more than I’d like to admit, since they’re the ones who put me on the radar in the first place.)

Honestly, the only thing I’d change about the place — and I’m sorry if this offends anyone on the masthead, but I’ve been meaning to say it for a long time now — but I really hate our logo. It’s missing that je ne sais quoi, but I mocked up a possible new one:

Isn’t that just much better?

SEK’S FAVORITE POSTS:

I’m really not the one who should be compiling this list, because I have the memory of an inattentive llama at this point, but if I had to choose, I’d say I thoroughly enjoyed creating a new internet tradition, teaching people what violent rhetoric is, wearing a hat, and being busted. As well as all those posts breaking down Mad Men, Doctor Who, The Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones. And the podcast with Steven Attewell, even if they throw my technological shortcomings into high relief.

Like I said, you’re probably better suited to telling me which of the 812 posts I’ve written are the best. I’m just glad I had the opportunity to write them here.

The last time I wrote for LGM was August 15, 2008 — my sign-off post. So it’s been nearly six years. It feels like a long time ago that I was part of the LGM family; that I could shed my law-student skin and become bean and be brassier and more vocal and less measured and more engaged than life in law school allowed. And it was a long time ago. But when I logged on to write this post in celebration of 10 years (!) of LGM, there all my old posts were. Just sitting there. In WordPress. As if I had never left.

But I did leave, to begin practicing civil rights law and pushing to effect some of the changes I called for (and so unstintingly) in my tenure at LGM.  And wow, what a difference it’s made. In August 2008, George W. Bush was the president; the U.S. was engaged in armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; the government was indefinitely detaining prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and fighting the detainees’ efforts to access Article III courts; and reproductive rights were under attack. Now, in May 2014, things have changed! For the better! Barack Obama is the president; the Iraq war has ended; we still have troops in Afghanistan; Guantanamo Bay remains open with no end in sight; and the rights to abortion and contraception are under fierce attack. Wait a minute….

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

While more change certainly would be better in some arenas — the cartoonish nature of our politics and the inefficacy of our federal government, by way of head-palm-obvious examples — there’s great comfort in the steadiness of LGM.  It remains today home to the same diverse and engaging posts as in 2008 (and more of them) by a too-heavily-male motley crew of very similar composition, with the same loyal, overeducated, engaged cast of commenters that I came to know as an LGM contributor and to rely upon to test my assumptions and assertions and call me out when I went too far or got something wrong. (Though of course there are amusing and legendary exceptions.  I’m looking at you, “I am aware of all Internet traditions,” known to some as the “greatest thread in the history of the Intertrons.”)

Recently, I’ve taken baby steps back into online conversations. I became an active Twitter user; I commented on blogs; I agitated for my current workplace to start its own blog. These tentative efforts at a (triumphant?) return to online life have given me renewed appreciation for the open, freewheeling, multidisciplinary, earnest-one-minute-and-satirizing-the-next online home I had at LGM, and made me grateful to the original LGM team for creating this place and keeping it going all this time.

So here’s to 10 years of LGM and to 10 more (at least). Maybe by the time LGM can drink legally, we’ll have seen some real political change. Hey, a bean can dream.

 

I started lurking here at LGM roughly two or three years ago. Lurking turned into commenting and commenting–happily– turned into a front page gig, for which I’m immensely grateful.

At first glance, I feel like I must seem like an odd fit for this place. I’m not not an academic; I never even graduated from college. But one of the reasons I began reading this blog is because it covers a weird and wonderful diversity of topics. And I’d like to think I round out that weirdness. Think of me as the author who plugs that hole that was left by a distinct lack of posts about horror movies, crockpot recipes and dinosaur erotica.

Anyway, posting here for the last year has been a genuine honor and privilege. Honestly, it’s mostly just a lot of fun. And then there’s the thing where I’ve become genuinely fond of my co-authors and the commentariat here. So, congratulations to Lawyers, Guns and Money on its first illustrious decade and here’s hoping I’ll be around for its scandalous next one. Because, as a caring person, I want to make sure you stay up-to-date on the latest innovations in dino porn. YOU’RE. WELCOME.

Wrote a post about LGM's 10th anniversary.Wanted to kept it short and classy so it's mostly about dinosaur erotica.CLASSY dinosaur erotica.

— bspencer (@vacuumslayer) May 30, 2014

So I am supposed to write something for this 10th anniversary deal. Not really sure what to say. It’s certainly nice to have an audience after blogging for eons in obscurity and I am very glad to help provide coverage of the labor movement and working class issues. When I started writing here in 2011, the blogosphere was pretty lacking in coverage of labor and poverty. Then Occupy happened and a lot more interest developed in these issues, which continues today. That’s great and I hope I am a useful part of that conversation. There are other issues too–climate change, historical films of cats boxing, chronicling the diabolical nature of the coal industry, Americans’ unfortunate tolerance of ketchup, dead horses in American history–that I like to think I add something to. But nothing as much as labor issues, both in the past and present, where I try to use this space not only to complain or think about how this will affect the next election cycle (although both of those things have value) but to begin to figure out ways out of the New Gilded Age. Not everyone thinks my ideas are good or practical (and in the short term, I’d agree on the latter), but you have to articulate this stuff to put together the intellectual and social movement framework that will eventually tame the capitalist beast.

Hopefully, my book does some of that work too, as I turn the completed manuscript draft in today (in about 1 hour actually–OMG!). It comes out of my work here so at least someone thinks this stuff is useful. Like SEK and others, writing here has directly advanced my career in amazing ways (even if it has threatened it at times as well) and I certainly never expected concrete gains to come out of my ranting and raving.

Now if there was just a way to clean up my Google search from the attacks from gun nuts and the Greenwald/DeBoer/various internet anarchists group over the 2012 election.

It’s also worth noting that on the 10th anniversary of LGM, we have again broken our monthly record for the most page views and with a good day could hit 1 million for May. In a period where liberal blogs have complained about declining readership numbers, I guess it means that we are doing something right around here. I’m glad you all like it enough to keep coming back.

So here’s to another 10 years of talking and working toward economic and social justice. And here’s something far more interesting than my navel-gazing. A man who, as I age, I model myself increasingly after: W.C. Fields.

Donations to this site will be used for me to get a prosthetic nose so I can look like W.C.

Since Lord Saletan, the most overplaced troll in all the internets, has linked my last post in his latest exercise in indignant outrage on behalf of the extremely powerful and privileged, I’ll clarify and expand on my original remarks.

The substance of Saletan’s post is that there appear to be grounds on which we might judge Sterling as a far worse, and more worthy, target of our ire than Eich. Some commenters on my previous post made a similar observation. I don’t contest this–based on what we know, the evidence available seems to suggest that Sterling may well be a far worse person than Eich. My original post, for what it’s worth, was not premised on moral and ethical equivalence broadly construed. Rather it was focused on a particular argument used on Eich’s behalf and how Sterling might fare under it. That there might not be other arguments, or other facts not assumed in that scenario that didn’t create some potential daylight between the two cases, was not something I intended or attempted to argue.

With that said, allow me to comment on the analytic poverty of Saletan’s approach to the question at hand. He poses the dilemma thusly:

If Sterling deserves to lose his team for being a racist—as the NBA has just affirmed—did Eich deserve to lose his job for opposing gay marriage?

Perhaps some people were committed to the proposition that Eich “deserved” to be forced out of his position at Mozilla (assuming he was). Many other people, including myself, dissented from Saletan’s histrionics on other grounds. My position was that Eich’s resignation was (merely) a non-injustice. I take no particular position on the question of what he deserves. That’s a far more difficult question; a great deal of the good and bad things that happen to us have little to do with what any of us deserve. A friend of mine was recently dumped by his girlfriend: he was a good guy who treated her well, but she didn’t want to be with him. Did he “deserve” that? No. Was it an injustice? Of course not. In our associational lives, including careers and relationships, the stuff that happens to us often has a great deal more to do with luck and chance than desert. In some ways, it’s almost certain that someone who’s had as much right-time right-place luck as Eich has had more success than he deserves, strictly speaking, if we were to try to construct a theory in which career success and desert are tightly linked.

Is this just nomenclature? John Rawls, a more thorough-going desert/justice relationship skeptic than I, replaces what many of us would would call desert with ‘legitimate expectations.’ If I win the lottery, for example, it’s silly to say I ‘deserve’ a million dollars. But I now have a legitimate expectation to get paid.

(Note–I wrote this a while ago but never finished it and didn’t intend to publish it–it may have been inadvertantly published in the 10th anniversary flurry of posts. In fact, my failure to finish and post it in real time is a good example of the anxieties I discuss in my anniversary post. Since it’s been up for a bit, I’ll leave it up, with a brief conclusion here:)

I’ve long felt that desert is overdone. It moralizes issues that shouldn’t necessarily be moralized, and suggest a greater precision than we can reasonably expect. Justice tolerates multiple possible outcomes for someone like Eich, where as desert implies getting the precisely correct one. Whatever contribution desert makes to a theory of justice it is sorely misapplied in this situation. Shifting to legitimate expectations, Eich losing his job over a political controversy seems well within the range of outcomes anyone taking a CEO job should reasonably expect.

I’ve known Scott (scooter), Rob (full beard Rob, sadly we’re missing his sidekick Bo, about whom last I heard is tenured in one of the Dakotas), and Dave (sideshow) since they foolishly signed on to get a Ph.D. at the University of Washington.  This was long before Paul schooled the world on the economic futility of such endeavours.  They followed me in the rough and tumble environment that was UW poll sci, but I took to them quickly.  Alcohol helped in that quest.  And my one best approbation was affording Watkins the nickname “sideshow”, as it stuck for a while.

When they started the blog, I received an email, so I followed it.  I wasn’t new to this internet thing, having written beer reviews for rec. food.drink.beer, and having them on the ‘web’ as early as 1994, as I chatted about this past autumn. Rob and Scott tried to get me on board prior to the 2008 election, but I was either busy, drinking, watching my daughter, or in some ER.  Let’s focus on the busy bit as I was chairing my department after all (which probably explains the nascent drinking problem).  When I did sign on, it was to be a guest blogger for Rob who was off on some ill advised mission to destroy the air force (I honestly don’t recall what he was up to those two weeks, but that sounds like a high probability endeavour of his).  I wrote a handful of posts over those two weeks, and they decided to approach me to be a masthead author here.  I had to say yes, as my credit cards were all maxed out and the vast sums of money suddenly flowing my way were appreciated.  I do remember telling the guys that I felt like the fan of the band who suddenly got to play bass for them.

I’m still a fan of LGM, and as we’ve added authors since (Charli, SEK, Erik, and Bethany, in particular) I’ve been exposed to different ideas, styles of writing, and people. As our readers know, I’m not part of the blogosphere per se. Yeah, I’ve interacted with Nate Silver when he was pre-NYT and especially when he wrote something boilerplate about the 2010 British elections, about which I took him to task here, and he graciously replied in the NYT. But, I am not part of the entire inside baseball thing that crops up from time to time. I’m a dad first, academic second, and latterly, the data guy for my local party third. But based on my Usenet days, I’d fit right in.

Since, I’ve made an effort to meet our authors during my many travels back to the US (my wife lives in Oregon and I don’t, and I like her a hell of a lot, so I’m there whenever I can be).  I have succeeded in meeting both Erik (in Eugene) and Kaufman (in New Orleans, following an epic visit to the LSU ER), and both meets involved not a tame amount of liquor. Both brilliant people FTF. One of my life goals, along with converting one of our Ph.D. students from Tory to Labour, is to find Dave Noon and make sure he’s still alive, and give him brewing tips. I’m thinking both have the same probability of success. I don’t have many regrets in life nor do I really do regret (I should and I guess I do as I’ve been married thrice, and one of my best friends is my first and I’ve got a good relationship with the mother of my daughter), but I do regret not being an omnipresence here. As I said a couple days ago, when things get busy in my life, LGM is one of the first commitments to go. I’m surprised that they still keep me around, to be honest.

I’ve also encountered many people back in the States, in bars, who read LGM (that might be a trend). Writing and blogging comes up, and I humbly point out that I, on occasion, write for some blog. For whom is asked, and I spill it, and with surprising frequency, this one is known.  This happened once in Chicago and twice in New York in April.  It still astonishes me. Indeed, several of my colleagues in my department read the damn thing to the point where they made me the blog guy. We have one now, but the release of that album won’t happen for a few more weeks.

So as for our commentariat, got to love them. I’m constantly fascinated at the time and effort that our readers expend on dissecting and peer reviewing our contributions (and each others’ comments). I barely have enough time in my life to write for LGM, yet anything I do write, I know if there’s anything I got wrong, it will come out.  That’s perhaps the most brilliant part of being part of the LGM team, exposing our sloppy musings to our readers.  You guys really make us better.

Here’s to the next ten years.

I want to begin by thanking Rob and Scott for the idea here, and for including me. It’s nice to not only have a ‘home’ on the internet, but to have one populated by the many  thoughtful and challenging people who live here. That we’re still going after 10 years is remarkable, especially given the typical lifespan of a blog.

The truly long time readers of LGM may remember that in the early days–the first couple of years, roughly, if memory serves me correctly–Rob, Scott and I posted roughly similar quantities of material. For a couple of years, I was a daily (or, at least, several substantive posts weekly) blogger. It didn’t seem hard to do. Then, one day, it did seem hard. I didn’t really understand why–I didn’t feel ‘burnt out’ particularly, or bored with or tired of blogging or the blog, or anything like that. While perhaps part of the story is that I was getting busier elsewhere in my life (I was just entering my “full time adjunct” stage while also trying to get more serious about writing the damn dissertation), I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think, although I didn’t recognize it at the time, that I found my greater awareness of a ‘real’ audience intimidating, if not paralyzing. Prior to this blog I’d never really attempted to write for any sort of public, beyond the narrow academic community I was hoped my scholarly work would eventually be read by. When I started blogging, I didn’t really write for a public either, at least not self-consciously. I didn’t really internalize the possibility that other people–beyond my co-bloggers and a handful of friends from graduate school who I knew read the blog–were really there. I gave little thought to audience, and wrote about whatever I liked, in whatever way struck me at the moment.

Awareness of audience was great in one way–my posts could become not just a record of whatever was on my mind at the moment, but the start of a conversation. But as our readership grew from double to triple to (unfathomably) quadruple digits and beyond, I became a much more self-conscious writer. Am I sure I’m right about this? Do I actually know enough about this to hit publish? Is this actually an interesting insight or repackaged banality? Is the idea I think I’m expressing too half-baked for public consumption? Does anyone reading this actually care about this topic? As Rob has pointed out to me on multiple occasions, these are strange questions to obsess over in light of the fact that we built this blog and its audience by writing about whatever the hell we felt like writing about. But these questions are hard to shake; and many an idea for a blog post has been scuttled because of them. It’s led me to conclude that part of being a writer–a real and successful one, who writes significant for large audiences regularly–must surely be an ability to manage one’s awareness of audience. To be able to turn it on and off as necessary to guide one’s writing without impeding it is a skill I wish I had. I think I’ve made a some progress in that area, but I still find it a real challenge. At any rate, it’s a small price to pay for having an not just any audience but a responsive and impressive one we’ve got.

I started blogging on a lark back in March 2005, mostly out of an interest in doing some non-professional (or unprofessional, if you prefer) writing; within a few weeks, more people—and by that I mean “a few dozen”—had read my blog than had, or ever would, likely read all of my academic publications combined. Everything was horrible and stupid in the spring of 2005. The war in Iraq was a gruesome stew of death and fuckery, Pope John Paul II was weeks away from realizing that God does not in fact exist, and wingnuts aplenty were camped behind the Kum & Go, huffing sacks of glue over Terri Schiavo’s dissolving brain. At some point that month, James Wolcott offered some approving words for a blog called “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” and—lacking all three—I decided to drop by and see what the big deal was.

Within a few weeks, this blog was probably at the top of my daily reading list; the authors and readers were meditating on important questions, including “who is America’s Worst Blogger?” and when would the Mariners call up Felix Hernandez? (Note: Rob was off by three weeks, but accurately predicted four wins. Though I have no data to back this up, I’m reasonably sure that no one at LGM has ever since predicted anything quite so accurately.) Over the next year, I commented regularly and unctuously linked to LGM at my own blog, doing so at a pace that ought to have raised stalker warnings. Charitably, Rob, Scott and DJW would from time to time link to something I’d written; most touchingly, Rob linked to a series of rather gloomy “This Day in History” posts I wrote in anticipation of my first child. In part because of those posts (and some later, related writing I did at my own place), the OG asked me to join this blog later that summer. I was beyond honored. I have always admired the quality of the writing here by everyone who’s ever participated, and though I don’t quite know what the straight line is that connects me to the vastly superior brains who keep this operation afloat, I don’t exaggerate when I sad that the existence of this blog has been an important part of my intellectual life for the past decade.

Since 9 October 2006, I’ve made some rather eccentric contributions to LGM. I provided us with arguably our most important feline mascot; I wrote a shitload of happy birthday posts to horrible people (especially this monster); there was the Althouse tiny prick fiasco; and of course the internet traditions, about all of which you are doubtlessly aware. Over the years, my writing here has conspicuously tailed off. The challenges of parenthood, combined with a series of unforced personal and professional errors, combined with the fact that I am an agonizingly slow writer prone to fits of undermedicated and over-whiskeyed self-loathing, have from time to time conspired to fuck my life up flatter than hammered shit. I remain grateful, however, to everyone here—co-bloggers and especially commenters with long memories—for indulging my long absences and to return from time to time like a plague of locusts to pester and annoy.

At some point, I will (I hope) return to a more regular schedule of contributions. One idea I’m toying with is a series called “The 25 Percent True Erotic History of the American Presidency,” which would detail the assorted preferences and perversions of the nation’s chief executives. If you’re curious about the famous necrophiliac Millard Fillmore, who hauled his dead wife around in a wheelbarrow for six months after pneumonia took her life in 1853, this series will not disappoint.

Also: There were many reasons George Washington hated wearing dentures. What you learn will shock you!

Also: Though Woodrow Wilson tried to remain neutral on the issue of war in Europe, he was never in doubt about butt plugs.

But, like, don’t hold your breath or anything.

On LGM’s 10th anniversary, I’d like to thank the Founders for inviting me to join the gang all the way back in 2008. For me it was a timely invitation, as a decade-long stint as a weekly columnist for the Rocky Mountain News was about to end, due to the paper’s demise.

I’m also grateful to the management of our anarcho-syndicalist commune for allowing me to integrate the 19 months I spent producing Inside the Law School Scam into LGM’s capacious platform.

For me, this blog’s greatest strength is its eclecticism, both in regard to the perspectives of its front pagers, who have supported positions as varied as “Derek Jeter is annoyingly overrated” to “Derek Jeter is overrated, but dreamily handsome,” to “who exactly is Derek Jeter again?”

This seems like a good time to share my Derek Jeter story: A friend of mine was the star of the Kalamazoo Central High School baseball team, and was named captain going into his senior year. He was at that time certain he was going to be a professional baseball player. On the first day of practice, a ninth grade kid showed up to try out for the varsity. By the end of the day, one dream of professional baseball greatness was defunct.

Some wise person said recently that we live in an age in which “everyone has a platform but nobody has a career.” Writing for LGM isn’t yet a career (I’m still waiting for George Soros’ checks to clear), but it remains a great platform, not least because of our erudite if occasionally batter-soaked commentariat. You’ve brought us fame and fortune and everything that goes with it — I thank you all.

This is a guest post by Lance Mannion.

Over the last ten years I’ve read many great blogs that have been informative, many that have been entertaining, many that have riled me up and set me to work. There have been blogs that have made me think, blogs that challenged my thinking, some that have regularly changed my mind. There have been blogs that have made me feel smart for reading them.

There have been few that have made me smarter, very few that have done it while doing all the above. One of those very few, maybe chief among those, has been Lawyers, Guns & Money.

A decade ago today, when LG&M started, the liberal side of the bandwidth was crowding itself with blogs dedicated to proving that the legacy media was wrong about Iraq and George W. Bush, a worthy and necessary endeavor. Passionate and creative opinionizing and invective spewing ruled the day. But Rob, Scott, and Dave gave themselves the additional job of being right…about whatever subject they posted on, and their subjects were from the beginning, varied and wide-ranging. They made sure they knew what they were talking about before they started talking and they showed their readers where and how they’d got to know what they knew.

When they didn’t know, they were careful not to let opinions and speculations pass as knowledge. They made it clear they were still working things out, and they made that work interesting, fun, and enlightening. They were thinking out loud and made that both an entertainment and a lesson in how it should be done.

They were practicing the almost lost of art of being public intellectuals.

In the years since, the team has expanded, contracted, and expanded again, but each new member has blogged by that standard. Whatever their individual area of expertise, whatever their personal style and approach, they have all been careful to know what they’re talking about and to separate what they know from what they are working towards knowing. They know their stuff and they know lots of stuff about lots of other stuff, and the result has been that their thinking out loud has been an ongoing lesson in how to think about, well, everything really, politics, history, baseball, hockey, movies, teaching, art, dinosaurs, and, of course, law, military and foreign policy, and economics.

And they have one of the rare comment sections that are not just worth reading and contain real discussions but that actually enhance and expand the posts being commented on. So congratulations to Rob and Scott and the gang for putting that community together and congratulations to that community for all they do for LG&M.

Oh, one more great thing, at least in my opinion.

No cats.

Thanks for that, gang, and thanks for ten great years.

apothecary-initiate:

summer-of-supervillainy:

Dear white people,

I don’t think you’re getting the joke. The joke is that white people don’t, in fact, get described like that. White skin gets described with terms like “tanned” and “pale,” terms that in this context are understood to just refer to the range of skin colors of white people. These descriptors are self-referential and rely on people understanding what white skin looks like, instead of scrabbling for comparisons to objects the readers are familiar with. All terms for describing white skin boil down to “it’s this specific subtype of white person skin color”. As I showed in my last post, none of the actual objects that light skin is compared to are literal matches for skin color, and nobody seems very interested in hunting down exact matches for white people’s skin color. And that’s if authors even bother to describe white people’s skin in the first place. White skin is often assumed to be the default, and race or skin color is only noted when it deviates from the “default”.

The skin of people of color is often described in excruciating detail, and as N.K. Jemisin points out, is often "described in terms of the goods that drove, and still drive, the slave trade - coffee, chocolate, brown sugar". I’ve seen books where the authors barely mention that most of their characters are white, let alone describe their specific skin tones, but lavishly describe skin of their characters of color, making sure to specify the exact shade of brown by comparing them to inanimate objects. Wood. Earth. Spices. Chocolate. Coffee.

There are no words to describe dark skin as skin itself, just as there are no words to describe light skin as objects. The skin of characters of color can be described with elaborate coffee order descriptions specifying the amount of milk, the flavor of coffee, the exact spices sprinkled on top, detailing their skin color so thoroughly you can practically go out and buy a bucket of paint in that exact shade, and readers don’t even blink. People read a description of a white person’s skin as “tanned” and consider that accurate enough. People read my description of eggshell-colored white skin and giggle.

Sure, it’s a funny post, but there’s a reason it’s funny. It’s not an earnest list of writing recommendations, nor is it racism against white people. It’s mocking a widespread inequality in the descriptions of white people and people of color. Part of the point of my post was providing a vocabulary for describing white skin, so everyone can indulge in silly descriptions as a form of revenge against the ubiquitous invisibility of whiteness in writing. And part of my point was that there isn’t a vocabulary for describing white skin, and that it isn’t described. And let’s think about why it isn’t described. White skin is unmarked. White skin is default. White skin is invisible.

White people, I think you’re missing the point of the exercise here. The point isn’t to give you cute, special new names to describe your skin color. The point is to show you that your skin doesn’t even have a vocabulary to describe its color because it is considered the standard color for skin. It’s an exercise in white privilege to read that post and go “wow, I’m glad we have this vocabulary too!” instead of “shit, we get described very differently from brown people, don’t we?” Sure, it’s a funny post. But it has a point.

And now, for a random example off my bookshelf, to drive the point home: Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine. Not that it’s particularly egregious or a bad book, but it’s a pretty good example of how this shit works.

Descriptions of white people’s skin:

"You looked like a china doll, with a white ribbon in your black hair, and your cheeks red from excitement."

"They each had tawny curls and swarthy skin."

"Her face was a pasty white with twin spots of rouge on the cheeks."

Descriptions of the skin of people of color:

"Her skin was the color of cinnamon with a tint of raspberry in her cheeks."

P.S. You should probably read the rest of the posts on describing characters of color in N.K. Jemisin’s sidebar. They’re really good, and struck a chord with a lot of people.

Ella Enchanted also tried to couch that “color of cinnamon” description in the main character immediately following it with the character whining about how hungry she was, which forced her to compare Areida to food. Really now? Is that like saying blackface is okay if it’s done satirically? Oy.

Funny, the descriptions of King Jerrod’s “swarthy” skin and “dark face” (I remember Ella being surprised the freckles showed up on skin so dark) made me picture both him and Char as PoC. But I haven’t read it in a long time…maybe it was wishful thinking :/

Anyway, I’d insert a “THIS” gif if my gifs weren’t failing to work. As a writer, the links are really helpful!

Now I want to write something where the protagonist is describing a white character as having a face the color of snow, and thinking about playing hockey on their face.  But see, it’s okay because she’s a Leafs fan and they don’t play again until October, so she’s starved for hockey. >___>

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1661/