Keeping a racist on your masthead long after you know he’s a racist goes a long way toward undermining all that hypersensitivity about conservatives being called racist. I can’t really improve on Josh Barro’s line from last week: “Conservatives so often get unfairly pounded on race because, so often, conservatives get fairly pounded on race. And this is the Right’s own fault, because conservatives are not serious about draining the swamp.” NRO took this situation seriously, but only after years and years of not taking it seriously.
If a randy 80-something Don Draper were looking to get laid in the 21st century, he’d find himself moodily attracted to a raven-haired lady columnist who’d written an op-ed supporting allowing women members at Augusta. They’d meet at her place, order Indian food, and make slow, sad love to the gentle strains of Top Chef in the background. Don would lie beside her while she slept, watching the green light of her cable modem flickering off the fur of her labradoodle, and the next day, striding among the familiar sun-dappled lawn under the Big Oak Tree, the whole thing would seem like a gloomy, bewildering dream. The golf course, he’d think. The golf course made sense. The careful plan of the fairways, the pimento cheese sandwiches, the creek. This was order, civilization, tradition. A place where a man commanded respect. The kids would never understand this. They were in some other world, frightening but obscurely thrilling, where waiters went by their first names and you pressed elevator buttons yourself. You could visit that world; maybe you even had to. But you’d always come back to the golf course.
Madère, Eira do Cerrado, 1989
(Forecasting via Chris Blattman)
Lucas Cranach explains that it’s all about the Gesetz and the Gnade
"that ultimate subversion of all human power and authority"
[Peter’s horrified reaction at Jesus’ washing of his feet] is the reaction of normal human nature. That the disciple should wash his master’s feet is normal and proper. But if the master becomes a menial slave to the disciple, then all proper order is overturned…. All of us except those at the very bottom have a vested interest in keeping it so, for as long as we duly submit to those above us we are free to bear down on those below us. The action of Jesus subverts this order and threatens to destabilize all society. Peter’s protest is the protest of normal human nature.… This is not just an acted lesson in humility; Peter could have understood that…. The foot washing is a sign of that ultimate subversion of all human power and authority which took place when Jesus was crucified by the decision of the “powers” that rule this present age. In that act the wisdom of this world was shown to be folly, and the “powers” of this world were disarmed (Col 2:15). But “flesh and blood” — ordinary human nature — is in principle incapable of understanding this. It is “to the Jew a scandal, to the Greek folly.” Only those whom the risen Christ will call and to whom the Holy Spirit will be given will know that this folly is the wisdom of God, and this weakness is the power of God. At that moment, as the man he is, Peter cannot understand. The natural man makes gods in his own image…. How can the natural man recognize the supreme God in the stooping figure of a slave, clad only with a loincloth?
Through browser extensions, Privly allows you to post to social networks and send email without letting those services see “into” your text. Instead, your actual words get encrypted and then routed to Privlys servers (or an eventual peer-to-peer network). What the social media site “sees” is merely a link that Privly expands in your browser into the full content. Of course, this requires that people who want to see your content also need Privly installed on their machines… .What’s intriguing about all this is that it, as McGregor puts it, violates many assumptions we have about the way the web works. When we post to a site, we are used to that site controlling whatever it is that we’ve sent to them. That seemed like the tradeoff you had to make in exchange for a service like Facebook. But McGregor and his team argue that it’s simply not necessary to give away that level of control. And they are building the technology to prove it.
For too long, publishers have been worrying about the wrong thing, chasing pie-in-the-sky DRM that has never worked at stopping piracy, and will never work. In the process, they’ve fashioned a scourge for their own industry—a multimillion-dollar liability that their customers will have to absorb in order for publishers to get back any leverage at the bargaining table. And every book you allow a tech company to sell with DRM only increases that liability.
Nowadays, we love monsters; and Fantasy as a mode loves monsters to the exclusion of almost everything else. Writers have made whole careers finding ways of delivering weirder and gnarlier monsters to their readership; and producers evidently believe that the way to make Wrath of the Titans (in cinemas soon!) even better than its big-budget predecessor Clash of the Titans is to make the monsters bigger, toothier and more photo-realistic. The problem is: it’s not true. Our response to such SFX is one of disinterested curiosity, not primal terror. But the alternative aesthetic approach—that monsters are only scary if they are embedded in an eloquently realised society, culture and language, is anathema to a lot of fantasy, which prefers to sketch its world and populate it characters who are essentially modern folk in medieval fancy dress.