Zephyr Dear

Ever since the 19th century, one of the points of convergence between the free-market right and the socialist left has been that the most important freedom under capitalism is the freedom of contract. Whatever its other problems, the market is the one sphere where the rights of man obtain. As Marx put it in Volume 1 of Capital:

This sphere [of the market] that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.

For the free-market right, that’s the end of the discussion: Workers are free. No one’s forcing them to work. If they don’t like a job, they can leave it.

For the socialist left, it’s more complicated. Workers are not in fact free, the left argues, but the source of their unfreedom is not to be found in the usual guise. The most important constraint upon the freedom of contract is not the discrete or formal acts of coercion by power-holders (what political scientists sometimes call the first face of power), which are embodied in law and enforced by the state. Rather, it is systemic inequality and disparities of power between labor and capital: people with few resources are not in much of a position to say no to a job that they don’t like. Formally, workers are free; in practice, they are not.

Now there was always a problem with this thesis: as Karen Orren has argued, up until the twentieth century, public and private power-holders (specifically, employers and judges) often imposed overt and formal constraints upon the worker’s exercise of her independent will. At-will employment was often a myth, not merely because workers were not the economic equals of their employers, but also because of legal liabilities imposed by these judges and employers. For example, when seeking a new job, workers were often required by law to present testimonial letters from their previous employers; without those letters, they were out of luck. That rule effectively kept them in the employ of their previous boss. Conversely, vagrancy laws could be used to force men and women into the workplace.

But now comes this latest report from the Los Angeles Times (h/t Frank Pasquale), suggesting we’re back in a version of the nineteenth century, in which this same nexus of employers and judges is being used to sharply abridge whatever modicum of freedom there is to be found in at-will employment.

Emboldened by a series of Supreme Court decisions and an employers’ job market, many companies are starting to require workers to sign away their rights in return for a job. It is a trend that experts worry could further wear away employees’ power in the workplace. The contracts make it harder for employees to join class-action lawsuits, take their employers to court, or leave to go work somewhere else.

…

Mazhar Saleem is bound to his employer by a number of contracts that made it hard to earn enough money to live, but also hard to go work anywhere else. He drives a town car for a company in New York as an independent contractor, rather than as a full-time employee. That means he doesn’t get benefits, never gets overtime, and isn’t guaranteed set hours.

But he also signed a non-compete contract when he started working, meaning he can’t drive a car for anyone else in New York. So even if his employer doesn’t give him any work, he’s not allowed to go find it elsewhere, says his attorney, Michael Scimone, with the law firm Outten and Golden.

“It ties into the larger theme of employers trying to use contracts to alter pieces of the employment relationship that are supposed to be governed by law,” Scimone said.

Non-compete clauses, once a staple of the high-tech world, are being extended to cover hairdressers, auto mechanics, exterminators and other professions that courts would traditionally not uphold them for, lawyers say. They essentially mean an employee can’t leave a job to take another one nearby, unless he or she wants to stop working for a year or so.

It’s a way to keep promising employees from leaving, said Matt Marx, an MIT professor who has studied these contracts.

“Given the increased job mobility of today’s world, companies are saying, ‘We can’t count on people to be here forever. We have to lock them up with contracts,” he said.

In a recent case in Worcester, Mass., three women working at a hair salon tried to leave after their conditions at work deteriorated. All three received cease and desist letters when they started working elsewhere, because they had signed non-compete clauses. They had to wait a year for the clauses to expire before they could work in the area again.

…

Many employment lawyers say they’re not surprised that courts have made life tougher for employees. Since the beginning of the Roberts court, experts say, the Supreme Court has issued decision after decision cutting back employees’ legal avenues to complain.

“Since the Warren court, employers have done well at the Supreme Court, but in the Roberts court, they have done exceptionally well,” said Cynthia Estlund, a professor at New York University’s School of Law. John G. Roberts Jr. became chief justice in 2005.

Law historians trace the court’s conservative leanings to the long stretches of Republicans in the White House in the 1980s and 2000s that allowed presidents to appoint more conservative judges to lower courts and to the Supreme Court. A study published earlier this year in the Minnesota Law Review found that two of the court’s current justices are the most conservative out of any of the justices who served between 1946 and 2011, and that court under Roberts is friendlier to business than it was during either of the two previous chief justices.

Adding up seven years of decisions, the workplace is getting to be a tough place for many, said Cliff Palefsky, an employment lawyer at McGuinn, Hillsman & Palefsky in San Francisco. Employers already can ask employees to work harder for less because the job market is still so sluggish in many fields. But in some cases, employees who think they can find a better situation elsewhere are going to have trouble doing so.

“The law is being undermined and it’s putting some workers in a bind,” Palefsky said. In some situations, when non-compete clauses are mixed with arbitration agreements, he said, “We’re one step away from indentured servitude.”

Not to get all libertarian on you, but when I read these reports about the actual state of freedom of contract in contemporary America, I’m reminded of Gandhi’s alleged reply to a reporter asking him what he thought about Western civilization: sounds like a good idea.

ask-feather-dae:

billie-pipers-rotting-flesh:

bloggerserif:

Oh hey it’s back on my dash perfect!  I was just thinking of this the other day!

OHOHOHO wow the Korean alphabet is awesome. The people who designed it were geniuses and were obviously incredibly schooled in the morphology and phonology of their language. HNNGGG

wow

Centaursona. I took some liberties I guess; it’s not really me, or a horse, and kind of more like a goat and a reindeer had a baby. WHATEVER MAN I DO WHAT I WANT.

magrittee:

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Whatever America is doing, do the opposite.

Over at the The Atlantic, Derek Thompson delivers some bad news: Heavy drinking is costing the U.S. economy a whopping $220 billion per year, says the CDC. Hangovers alone are depriving employers of $160 billion in workplace productivity.

That's shocking. Especially when you combine it with all the other things out there that are supposedly draining billions of dollars from U.S. productivity. Like insomnia. Or smoking. Or checking out the Internet.

In fact, when you add up all the different studies on lost workplace productivity over the years, it starts to seem like a miracle the United States even has a functioning economy. Let's see:

-- Obesity and other chronic health conditions cost the United States an estimated $153 billion per year in lost workplace productivity.

-- The fact that so many employees aren't engaged with their jobs costs U.S. employers a staggering $550 billion per year.

-- Parents stressed out about child care cost $300 billion per year in lost productivity.

-- Cigarette smoking takes $92 billion per year out of the workplace.

-- Then throw in insomnia, which costs another $63 billion per year.

-- Let's not forget excessive commuting, which costs employers $90 billion per year.

-- Workers who have to balance their jobs with care-giving for older relatives sap another $33.6 billion per year out of workplace productivity.

-- The mere fact that we have to change computer passwords at work so frequently costs about $16 billion per year. And e-mail spam hits us for another $21 billion.

-- Facebook? That's $28 billion per year in valuable workplace productivity drained away.

-- Fantasy football? $18.7 billion in productivity, gone.

-- Angry Birds? $1.5 billion.

-- Actually, let's just combine the last three. One survey found that all of our futzing around on the Internet at work costs employers $134 billion per year.

-- Don't forget the Super Bowl, which costs employers about $1 billion per year (although this probably overlaps with the alcohol and fantasy football numbers).

-- The NCAA tournament costs $134 million.

-- One study in Australia found that coffee breaks were costing that nation's economy $11.4 billion per year in lost productivity. Since the United States has 14 times as many people, let's just multiply and assume that the coffee menace is costing America $161.7 billion in lost productivity.

Add it all up, and America's vices, distractions, and health problems are costing more than $1.8 trillion per year in lost workplace productivity. Clearly we're performing well below our potential!

----

or at least that's one explanation. Another possibility is that much of this research on "lost productivity" is overstated and we shouldn't put too much stock in it.

A few of the studies mentioned up above, like those looking at chronic health conditions or insomnia, do identify real health problems. But looking at lost productivity seems like an imprecise way to measure the toll.

And, of course, many of these estimates are outright silly. The idea that coffee breaks or or a little Internet browsing cost billions in lost productivity is highly questionable. As Jack Shafer pointed out back in 2010, many people are likely to waste time during the workday no matter what. The fact that they might do so by playing fantasy football rather than, say, taking a leisurely trip to the water cooler doesn't seem terribly important.

There's also the problem of overlap. Are "disengaged employees" more likely to browse Facebook endlessly? Should the cost of smoking be folded into the costs of chronic disease? Are long commutes contributing to the insomnia problem? It's impossible to tell.

That's because no one's ever done a rigorous analysis of all these supposed productivity-killers. The findings are usually just large numbers tossed around to draw attention to pet issues. A new study finding that spam or yawning or picking your nose costs billions of dollars in lost productivity might make for good headlines. But it rarely tells us anything useful about the economy.

I’m back! I’m all moved in and have completed the majority of all the goodies for The Tomorrow Girl Kickstarter backers. It’s been a long summer, but we’re just getting started!

Namely, I’ll be at San Diego Comic Con on July 18th! You can find me at the Topatoco booth, #1229 & 1328!

In 2009, Barack Obama came to change Washington. Today's speech showed how much Washington has changed him.

Obama's first presidential campaign, and his first inaugural address, were about moving America past our old arguments. His second presidential campaign, and his second inaugural address, were about winning those arguments. It's in the space between those two projects that the triumphs, disappointments and lessons of the first term live, and where the project of Obama's second term reveals itself.

Perhaps the most quoted passage in "The Audacity of Hope," the 2006 book that served as the ur-text for Obama's unexpected presidential campaign, was a section in which Obama dismissed the arguments of the Clinton years as "the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage."

In "Goodbye to All That," his influential 2007 profile of Obama, Andrew Sullivan picked up on that theme. "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man," he wrote.

During his first inaugural address, delivered on a bitterly cold day in January 2009, Obama promised his presidency would make good on those hopes. "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics," he said. "We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things."

Obama's first term was, by any measure, incredibly productive. He passed health-care reform and the Dodd-Frank financial regulations. He ended the war in Iraq and gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden. He bailed out the banks and passed well over a trillion dollars in stimulus. But he did not end the petty grievances and worn-out dogmas that strangle our politics. These debates were not, as it turned out, childish things that would look small in light of our current problems. They were fault lines running beneath our politics, and they grew larger and more dangerous throughout Obama's first term.

Obama's reelection campaign, and his second inaugural address, was founded on a very different premise: The old arguments were indeed strangling our politics, and the only way to move past them is to win them, and the only way to win them is to fight over them.

His speech today fit firmly in that project. He retold the story of American history in a way that emphasized the project of collective action and liberal governance. "Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers," he said. "Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play. Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life's worst hazards and misfortune."

And he painted a picture of America that is again discovering that it has severe problems that it can only solve through government action. If there was a core to the speech, it was these two sentences: "The commitments we make to each other through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great."

Inaugural speeches are not typically the venue where presidents lay out detailed policy agendas. That comes a few weeks later, at the State of the Union. But Obama did offer hints today.

"We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. " he promised.

"We believe that America's prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class," he said, referencing his administration's ongoing belief that the government must do more to combat inequality.

"We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else," he said, in a line that added weight to rumors that the Obama administration is considering a push on early childhood education.

He agreed that "we must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit," but cautioned that, in doing so, his administration will "reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future."

He was explicit in his mentions of "our gay brothers and sisters" and emphatic that "our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts."

This was not a speech that assumed that the disagreements that split our politics are based on the psychodramas of the past nor that they will fall easily before the onslaught of the future. But it was a speech, more so than most Obama has offered, that signaled his intention to join the battle of ideas, to use his bully pulpit to make an aggressive and uncompromising case for why his side is right, and to not rest until the American people agree that the other side is wrong.

In his first term, Obama changed policy. In his second, he wants to change minds.

I've been reading and admiring Nathan Ballingrud's short fiction since 1992, when we were both students at the Clarion workshop. Now, some of his very best work has been collected in a moving, sorrowful volume called North American Lake Monsters, from the wonderful Small Beer Press.

Ballingrud's work isn't like any other. These stories are full of sadness and sorrow, but they're not merely sad. Like Tom Waits, Ballingrud is an expert at teasing out every delicious shade and nuance, every fine gradation of misery and pain. It's a heady and fantastic cocktail mixed from roughnecks and down-and-outers and flawed people who find in their ordinary and terrible world monsters, magic, and the strange. Ballingrud's fantastic elements are never seen full on, but always out of the corner of your eye, and it makes them all the more haunting.

This slim volume traces the fine veins of unhappiness in a way that no other writer of science fiction or fantasy I know of can match. If you've ever enjoyed a long cry, or come out of a deep funk to discover the joy of the contrast of the light and the sun, then you know why these stories are so powerful and moving.

If you'd like to get a taste of what I'm talking about, Tor.com has a excerpt from the collection, a story called "The Monsters of Heaven," about a missing child, broken angels, and a marriage in great ruin.

North American Lake Monsters: Stories

The Stasi versus the NSA: "How much space would the filing cabinets of the Stasi and the NSA consume if the NSA would print their 5 zettabytes?" [in German, via @ioerror]

collective-truth:

Soviet anti-American posters. Equality, American - style. PROPAGANDA collectible 1969s by rarely
communist, ussr, collectible, poster, propaganda, soviet, soviet poster, space, communism, posters, gagarin, stalin, constructivist

Vietnam War veteran and photographer James Speed Hensinger has shared a never-before-published collection of night photographs he shot in Vietnam in 1970.

They show US troops opening fire on a Viet Cong sniper who was firing on the US soldiers with an AK47 automatic rifle. Hensinger kept these photographs private for four decades; he chose to publish them online to commemorate Memorial Day in the US.

The images appeared on PetaPixel in late May:

In April of 1970 I was near Phu Tai, Vietnam in the 173rd Airborne Brigade Admin Compound. We were pissed off at taking Viet Cong sniper fire from the mountain above us several nights in a row. The guy would stand up from behind a rock and blow off a clip from his AK47 on full-auto. The sniper was shooting at such a high angle that most of his rounds came through the sheet metal roofs of our hooches. We decided to use a “heavy” response the next time(s) the sniper hit us.

Over the course of a week, I shot two rolls of Kodachrome II (ASA 25) time exposures using a cable release and resting the camera on sand bags in a perimeter guard tower. I used a 35mm Nikon FTN with a 50 mm f/1.4 lens. Most of the exposures were from 15 seconds to one minute in duration. I mailed the unprocessed film home, and didn’t know what I had until I was released from active duty in June. Only recently have I decided to share them.

You can view the entire set here, on his Google+ page: Vietnam Night Gunfire.

The photos have gone viral; Daily Mail, Digg, Amusing Planet, the Independent, Visual News, on and on. Some of what was published in those accounts was (shocker!) inaccurate. Hensinger writes:

I resurrected some photos I took in Vietnam and submitted one to Quora.com. An editor for PetaPixel saw it and contacted me. He asked me to submit more to his photography magazine. Then a feature editor at RexFeatures (similar to our Getty Archives or UPI or AP) saw it and asked for more. He re-wrote my submission and syndicated it in Europe about 24 hours ago. Now it is appearing everywhere, but the Daily Mail (London) got it out first, and published it as their lead story.

There are several factual errors between what I wrote and what ended up getting published. (Phu Tai is near Qui Nohn not Da Nang) And I certainly did not use the phrase, "hot lead". I am very pleased that the photos are finally being appreciated.

A search on Google for "Hensinger Vietnam" amazed me.

When the jobs numbers came out for metropolitan areas last week, the unemployment ranking had a surprising winner: The decidedly middle-American Minneapolis-St. Paul, clocking in at 4.7 percent. What's going on in the Midwest these days? Is it something in the water? Should we all move to Minnesota?

It wouldn't be a terrible idea. Minnesota unemployment usually tracks below the national average, and the Twin Cities even below that. The region is blessed with 19 Fortune 500 companies, like Cargill, United Health Group, 3M, Target, Best Buy, Medtronic, and General Mills. It's also a national center for the fast-growing medical device industry, giving it a pretty healthy base of careers in science and technology fields, with the revenue-generating patents and high incomes that come with them.

There are a couple of other less apparent factors behind Minneapolis' success. Three decades ago, the regional governing body set up the Fiscal Disparities Act, which created a tax revenue-sharing agreement for a seven-county area. That facilitates regional cooperation in attracting companies--something that the tri-state Washington D.C. area struggles with, as each jurisdiction tries to steal companies from its neighbor. Also, the area has been a target for the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which has helped establish Somali, Hmong, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, and Liberian communities in the area. Immigrants start businesses at twice the rate of native-born U.S. citizens, so that's a leg up too.

But what of this miraculous May unemployment number? It might be a little bit of a fluke, says state economist Laura Kalambokidis. The region had a nasty spring, weather-wise, which delayed hiring for construction and tourism jobs. When things got nice again, both those sectors saw big jumps. So the Twin Cities are still as good a place as any to go looking for work--but there's nothing magic in May's numbers.

A reader quotes me:

Does this mean gay male couples should publicly challenge the social norm of monogamy? I don’t believe so. What we can do – and what some straight couples do – is contain the details of our relationships to one another. It’s called discretion.

I know you’re a conservative, and you’re framing this as a conservative stance. But as a woman in an open marriage, I think you’d really be doing us girls a solid by going ahead and challenging the social norm of monogamy. Monogamy is part of a larger set of stories that we tell women about how their desire works that are not particularly true because we want to control them.

My experience closely follows the experiences and ideas laid out in some newer books that take on female desire, including What Women Want and Sex at Dawn. My actual desire has an almost inverse relationship to the stereotypes and norms and expectations that surround me. I am visually stimulated. I get attracted to lots of different kinds of things. I walk around feeling kind of sexy all day long on most days. I crave casual sex. And most importantly, I need novelty, or my libido tanks.

Like a number of the women profiled in What Women Want, I did not have a very honest relationship to my sexuality for a long time. I assumed that I need romance and companionship in order to want sex, that I should therefore want my husband – and that if I don’t, I must not like sex. I’ve figured out how to listen to what I actually want, rather than what society tells me I want. And my conservative counterargument is that my marriage is stronger and more meaningful because I cat around.

My real issue, though, is with discretion.

If this were just about me and my pleasure, then discretion would be appropriate. But we control women by diminishing their sexuality, and this hurts! It is actively disempowering to feel as separated from your own desire as most women in our culture feel. It is terribly diminishing to assume that you’re messed up/frigid/broken because you don’t want to have sex with someone you love anymore.

Sex is social – this is why you talk about it so much on your blog! As a gay man, you live in a world where everybody gets the privilege of being straightforward about desire. Women, on the other hand, are charged with this impossible task of simultaneously inhabiting two social sexual spheres: the one that affirms your desire, in which short skirts or red lipstick are expected and rewarded because they signify sex, and the one that denies your desire, in which you are inexplicably expected to be wearing that lipstick for the same person that you regularly fart in front of.

Challenging monogamy challenges this double standard. Women deserve this!

What follows is an exchange from the commentary section after I wrote last year that the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office unwillingness to pursue all but the most winnable murder cases — and a corresponding decline in the number of charged defendants by anywhere from 33 to 45 percent, depending on the time frame — would [...]

Egypt, Brazil, Turkey: without politics, protest is at the mercy of the elites:

Sad but true.

"Despite their differences, all three movements [Brazil, Egypt, Turkey] have striking common features. They combine widely divergent political groups and contradictory demands, along with the depoliticised, and lack a coherent organisational base. That can be an advantage for single-issue campaigns, but can lead to short-lived shallowness if the aims are more ambitious – which has arguably been the fate of the Occupy movement."

Scott Smith's presentation "Beware of Flat-Pack Futures" is a stinging critique of thoughtless corporate futurism, that he delivered at Media Future Week in Almere, Netherlands. His "flat-pack futures" are the insufficiently weird, bland, like-today-only-moreso futures we see depicted all around us. He proposes a weirder, more textured, more contradictory future and a toolkit for thinking about it. It's a whole hour, but it's an hour very, very well spent.

Scott Smith (Changeist) @ MFW13 (via Beyond the Beyond)

William Lindsey points us to Neil Steinberg’s recent column, which I’m tempted to quote here in full. It’s titled “Anti-gay bias loses its legal whip,” but really Steinberg’s topic is sectarian coercion — the ability to require others, by law, to follow the particular dictates of your own sect. That’s a bad idea, Steinberg suggests, and an unjust and unfair thing to do. Your religion will be better off not trying to coerce everyone else to obey your religious law, he says:

The question remains: How can McDonald’s sell cheeseburgers, violating Jewish law? Not a toughie. Answer: Because the laws of kosher don’t matter to anyone but observant Jews. … Jewish dietary law has no bearing on secular law. Jews, a scant minority, are uninterested in trying to force their arcane practices upon non-believers. …

Anti-gay Christians are now approaching their cheeseburger moment — welcome, welcome — after the Supreme Court has tossed out much of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8. The legal whip drops from the fundamentalist hand, which strikes them as oppression, forgetting they can still practice whatever private dogma they like regarding gays — never marry their own gender, disown their own gay children — but gay marriage is going up on the menu in more and more states. Society is marching — running, really — off without them, into a future of gay folk living openly without fear.

It hurts, bubbie, I know. Here’s a Kleenex.

You’ll get used to it. Take it from a Jew. You get used to the world not singing along with your religious peccadilloes. (Not that keeping kosher and discriminating against gays are comparable, except as religiously inspired irrational acts). No harm in cleaving to your faith in the midst of a carnival of all you don’t believe. At Christmas, it isn’t like I suffer through all these foreign practices — caroling, wassailing, midnight massing. I accept them with humility — it’s not my party, but it’s someone’s party. It isn’t all about me.

That’s an astute point, but it’s likely to fall on deaf ears among the sort of Christians who have half-convinced themselves that being wished “Happy Holidays” at the mall constitutes a form of religious persecution. “It isn’t all about me” isn’t likely to get through to the foot soldiers of the “War on Christmas.”

Steinberg contends with a typically mendacious statement from the Liar Tony Perkins, then wraps up with this:

There is a bedrock truth below all this, one that would have been unchanged no matter what the court ruled: Gay people don’t make worse spouses, or parents, or friends. If they did, chuckleheads like Perkins would wave any scrap of evidence like a flag. But there is none, so bigots have to try to twist these advances into some kind of religious oppression — that hating gays is a bedrock of Christian faith and to try to change that is persecution.

Good luck with that one. Ask the next rabbi you see if he feels oppressed because the United States government doesn’t enforce Jewish dietary laws. He’ll take a step back — distancing himself from the crazy person — and say, “No, and believe me, we know what real oppression is.” That’s where Perkins et al. will be in 50 years, only their privately held torch will not be a harmless dietary quirk, but a shameful, refuted hatred gilded with a thin, worn and crumbling veneer of faith.

That same twisted claim — “that hating gays is a bedrock of Christian faith and to try to change that is persecution” — also concerns Dave Gushee in his recent Religion Dispatches essay, “Christians v. Gays: The Damage Done.”

Gushee acknowledges the primary damage — that being done to others by Christians, but his focus here is on the secondary damage. He’s talking about the damage done to the church as a consequence of its choosing to be a source of damage for others. He’s talking about the damage of allowing our faith to be reduced to a “thin, worn and crumbling veneer” laid atop a “shameful, refuted hatred.”

Gushee summarizes that damage in five bullet points:

• Christians (understood to mean here heterosexual activist traditionalists) have become identified with actively pursuing the denial of rights and benefits to others that they themselves enjoy. In other words, the “Gospel” has been identified with the cause of self-benefiting social discrimination against a minority group, a losing hand if ever there was one.

• Christians, claiming to follow Jesus, have become identified as the chief enemies of gay and lesbian human beings (some of whom are also Christians), and of the moral and legal rights of lesbians and gays, whereas Jesus’ enemies tended to be people who performed exactly this kind of marginalization on the despised ones of their era.

• Christians have become known for a deeply distorted moral agenda by elevating the anti-gay cause to the top of their public ethics, and this in a world afflicted by war, hunger, ecological disaster and all manner of social injustice.

• Christians have alienated gays and lesbians and their families, friends, and sympathetic allies, driving many away from the love of Jesus Christ and contributing to the secularization of American culture. They have done a great deal to create hostility to the church and closed ears to the Gospel. The saddest cases are the church’s own rejected gay and lesbian adolescents and twentysomethings. They are legion.

• Christians have contributed to the fear in society that millions of Americans are unable to tell the difference between the church and the state, or between the demands of their faith on themselves vs. the demands of their faith on those who do not share it.

I wish I shared Dave’s confidence that “self-benefiting discrimination against a minority group” is always a losing hand. In the long run, yes, the arc bends toward justice, but in the shorter run of a generation’s life-span, privilege using power to defend itself often succeeds. I’m not saying it’s not evil, mind you — “self-benefiting discrimination” against the powerless is pretty much the definition of evil — but in a fallen world, selfish evil isn’t always a losing hand.

But Gushee’s point there — that equating the Gospel of Jesus Christ with such “self-benefiting discrimination” is obscene — is dead on.

He predicts three likely ways Christians will respond to the recent Supreme Court decisions and to future victories for LGBT equality:

One is to dig in their heels and resist every step of the way, with continuing damages along the lines just indicated, and all this in an increasingly hopeless cause.

He doesn’t seem to be recommending that one. Because, again — evil.

Another is to draw a clearer distinction between church and state, and between moral and legal norms, deciding that the place to defend and practice traditional Christian beliefs about marriage is in the church, not the state.

Did I mention that Dave Gushee is a Baptist? You might have guessed that already based on that earlier bit chiding Christians who are “unable to tell the difference between the church and the state, or between the demands of their faith on themselves vs. the demands of their faith on those who do not share it.” This second, eminently Baptist, response seems to be part of Gushee’s prescription, but not the whole of it.

The third is to be open to rethinking the possibility that the core Christian norms of love, justice, and hospitality must be integrated with moral norms related specifically to sexual ethics.

Yes, please, a bit of that too, thank you.

I’m not entirely sure what moral norms could exist or survive dis-integrated from love, justice and hospitality, but that is the weird situation now facing much of the church. We’ve got some vague notion of “specifically” sexual ethics that somehow exists wholly apart from love, justice, hospitality and their corollaries and kin, such as consent, trust, fidelity, mutuality, magnanimity, honesty, kindness, joy, etc.

Those, somehow, are not regarded as integral to “sexual morality” or to Christian sexual ethics, which is what makes our idea of sexual ethics so confused and confusing — an arbitrary set of lines and laws and Rules for Other People. Clanging brass and tinkling cymbals.

The folks Gushee is desperately trying to reach here will likely view this third option as a call to something radically new, but really his call for “rethinking the possibility” here is an attempt to get them to remember something old — something that they seem to have forgotten.

ryan-andrews-comics:

It’s been a long time since I’ve made any pixel art. I may have spent far too much time on this.

Brian Anderson explores the potential of “micro-dosing” LSD, which would allow you to possibly “reap some of the reported benefits of a semisynthetic psychedelic like LSD without going all heavyminded”:

That’s the allure of what’s known as the sub-perceptual dose. It’s an idea that has been gaining traction in certain pockets of the medical community, though it’s neither new nor validated by any formal research. As James Fadiman notes in The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide (2011), sub-perceptual psychedelic dosings have for centuries been known about and utilized by indigenous cultures the world over. Fadiman would know. He’s been in the trenches of legitimate mind-altering research for over four decades, and with time has become a sort of champion of the micro dose.

The problem – as usual – is prohibition’s effect on research:

[Fadiman] can’t establish proper lab conditions without facing criminal charges. The workaround? His volunteers must access the Schedule 1 drug on their own, and then parse the stuff into micro-hits of either 50 or 100 micrograms. Then they self adminster, and finally self-report. And then they repeat.

More Dish on drug research and micro-hits here, here, and here.

The next time you're patted down and pornoscanned, remember that there was a time in American history that skyjacking was so common it was almost comical. Between 1968 and 1973, there was a hijacking per week. Teenagers hopped on board with fake dynamite and asked to go to Canada. Disillusioned working stiffs jumped out of airplanes at altitude after gathering thousands in ransom money. Hijacking insurance could be had for $75 and ensured that fliers could sit back, drink free booze, and enjoy the windfall of having a wild-eyed miscreant yell “Take this plane to Havana.”

After all, the insured got $500 per day of captivity – enough for a nice vacation.

To be clear, this was mostly the airlines' fault. They didn't want to reduce the efficiency of their operations. In that era there was no airport security and you could, without issue, alight from your Ford Fairlane and waltz right to the gate in any airport around the world. You could rush onto a flight an buy a ticket from the attendants on board, all the while fiddling with your revolver, baseball bat, or bottle of Jack Daniels. You could even traipse around the baggage handling area with little interference. In short, flying used to be crazytown.

Brendan I. Koerner's new book The Skies Belong To Us, details this wild “golden age” of air piracy and protest. The primary story in the book features a couple of kids from California named Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow. Roger was a disgraced military man who went AWOL from Vietnam. Cathy was a sometime drug dealer and party girl. The two met, fell into something like love, and hatched a plan: they'd escape their dire straits by hijacking a plane to Australia after picking up Professor Angela Davis and taking her to Hanoi.

It's hard not to like the tale. The pair are at once charming and dangerous. Holder is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and has let his demons take him. He knows enough of the world, in his early 20s, to know that it doesn't want him in it. Kerkow is mostly there for the kicks although she also loves the freedom of being Bonnie to Holder's Clyde. To pull of their caper they board a flight and Holder pretends to have a bomb on board while his girlfriend waits patiently in the back for the fireworks to start. After frenzied plane swaps and bumbling by the FBI, the plane takes to the air and lands in Algiers – where Holder and Kerkow's troubles really begin.

Koerner also describes the other airjackings of the era, from the comical to the tragic. Wild-eyed hippies and pensioners alike see air superiority as an opportunity for power. As the world spreads out before the seemingly successful hijacker, problems seem smaller and prayers are easily answered. In those halcyon days, airplanes were weapons of mass persuasion, not mass destruction.

The action rarely drags – you might get bogged down by the countless hijacking anecdotes that sprinkle the story like so many airline peanuts, but that's it – and Koerner captures the kinetic energy of the criminals on the lam and the syrup-slow lifestyles they lead after the engines are shut off and everyone is led off the plane. The Skies Belong To Us is a paean and a warning and a true-life tale of two kids who knew better but didn't care. And it puts into perspective just how bad things got before airlines were forced, finally, to take away our water bottles.

The Skies Belong To Us: Love And Terror In The Golden Age Of Hijacking [Amazon]

Twitter announced today that it will now allow advertisers to tailor ads for you based on your activities off of Twitter (for instance, browsing third-party websites), and will also use personal information like email addresses to target the ads you see.

"Users won’t see more ads on Twitter, but they may see better ones," wrote Twitter's Senior Director of Product and Revenue, Kevin Weil, touting the change as a way to make the service "more useful" to users.

Privacy-minded folks won't be too happy.

Advertising Age has more. A positive note for privacy advocates: Twitter offers you opt-out with this stuff; Facebook doesn't.

As Twitter's official announcement explains, you can avoid the increased tracking/targeting by simply checking off a couple of boxes in your Account Settings, and by enabling Do Not Track (DNT, not DMT) in compatible browsers.

Here's how to opt out, if you are so inclined:

1) Log in to your Twitter account.
2) Under "Settings," uncheck the boxes shown above.
3) Enable "Do Not Track" in your browser (FF, Chrome, IE are all compatible).
4) Follow @boingboing. Hah, I made that part up! But please do.

Charlie sez, "Ed Sullivan didn't want Buddy Holly to perform Oh Boy! on his show. He wanted a ballad. Holly refused to obey. This performance is poetic justice in regards to how awesome Buddy Holly was. Buddy was one of the few defiant rock acts at the time to get into an artistic scuffle with Ed. Sullivan mispronounces a rock legend's name, cuts his guitar line by 50% and Buddy begins screaming his lyrics, checking volume and goes into a 50's speed metal chorus while banging his head in energetic defiance with the hard drum beat. His show was so electric that Sullivan was forced to invite Buddy back. Buddy declined."

Buddy Holly Oh, Boy! Ed Sullivan Show1 25 58

Marco Arment:

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

Well, fuck them, and fuck that.

Lockdown [marco.org]

New Rasmussen 'poll' finds that black people are the real racists.

Brandon Keim has an amazing feature up at Aeon Magazine, about the idea of animal consciousness — i.e., how animals think and feel and experience their own lives. After delving into the chimpanzee experience of death for a couple weeks, this story really grabbed my attention. Increasingly, it's an idea that scientists are paying more attention to, as well.

When the NSA came recruiting at a University of Wisconsin language program, the students and teachers pushed back, hard. The transcribed recording of their discussion is a model for the dialog that we should be having with our spooks everywhere we encounter them: "So, 'adversary' is basically what any of your so-called 'customers' as you call them -- which is also a strange term to use for a government agency -- decide if anybody wants, any part of the government wants something about some country, suddenly they are now internally considered or termed an 'adversary.' That’s what you seem to be saying."

besturlonhere:

i need small gov’t because i truly deeply think that the country with the largest economy and military forces in the world that maintains a worldwide network of hegemonic military bases used for buzzword atrocities like “power projection" “targeted killings" “prompt global strike" should follow to a T a document written ~200 years ago designed by white aristocratic slaveholders to govern an agrarian society why are you laughing at me please take me seriously or i’ll vote republican