Earnest, Serious, Genuine Questions for People Who Support Brendan Eich's Ouster from Mozilla
If Brendan Eich’s support for California’s Proposition 8 makes him unsuitable to be the CEO of Mozilla …
Would you allow him to hold a VP position there?
How about a managerial position?
Would you boycott a local coffee shop if he owned or managed it?
What about a bank?
In general, what positions should proponents of Proposition 8 be debarred from, and in what industries?
If you agree with the position taken by the leadership of OKCupid — who wrote on their website, in reference to Eich and to anyone else who opposes gay marriage, “Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure” — what degree of failure would be appropriate? Would unemployment be sufficient? Or does justice demand a more severe retribution?
What other widely held views — Proposition 8 passed, which means that by definition Eich’s stance is neither marginal nor extremist — disqualify a person from leading an organization? For example:
If it had become known that Brendan Eich believed that abortion should be illegal and had given money to pro-life organizations, would that have been grounds for dismissing him? If not, why not?
If Brendan Eich had said that he did not think insurance companies should have to cover sex reassignment surgery, would that have been grounds for dismissing him? If not, why not?
And finally, how far into a person’s past do you think it appropriate to look for evidence of heterodox opinions? Eich gave money to support Proposition 8 six years ago, but what if he had given money to a similar cause twelve years ago — would you still demand that he be fired or at least issue a formal apology for holding wrong views? In short, is there a statute of limitations on accountability for error?
It is the easiest thing in the world to work all the time, compared to the incredible difficulty of spending one hour or one day of rest in a proper way.
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Medieval John LennonThis familiar-looking face features in a Latin grammar book from the 15th century. The schoolbook includes entertaining scenes that encourage students in the challenging task of learning Latin. I like this image - and not just for its early depiction of a pair of glasses. It appeals to me because I imagine looking at a medieval portrait of John Lennon. It is not often that an image from a distant past connects so vividly to a modern - familiar - face. I wonder what the medieval student who used this book thought of this portrait. I fear that without the positive connection of Lennon this is merely a squinty-eyed, somewhat sour-looking person. Or worse: the student’s Latin teacher.
Pic: Uppsala, University Library, C 678. Image taken from this blog on the book, which provides additional images.
“Any reasonable ordering of the books must have The Last Battle as the final story, and must place Prince Caspian before The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader,’ since the latter is very straightforwardly a sequel to the former. Also, The Silver Chair cannot come before either of those books, since one of its main characters, Eustace, appears in Dawn Treader as a younger and very different sort of person from the one he is in The Silver Chair. Moreover, readers of the series will probably agree that The Horse and His Boy, being a largely self-contained story with minimal connections to the others - it is mentioned briefly in The Silver Chair, and the Pevensies appear in it briefly as rulers of Narnia - could be stuck into the sequence anywhere except the beginning and end. So the dispute really concerns only one question: should the sequence begin with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or The Magician’s Nephew?The argument for The Magician’s Nephew is simple: since it describes Aslan’s making of Narnia, placing it at the beginning yields a biblical, Creation-to-Apocalypse arc for the series. The case for The Lion is more complex and much stronger. First of all, though Lewis spoke of altering the order of the books, he also spoke of needing to revise the books in order to remove inconsistencies - and if Nephew is read first, there will be many such inconsistencies. For one thing, we are told quite explicitly at the end of The Lion that its narrative is ‘the beginning of the adventures of Narnia’. For another, Lewis tells his readers that the children in The Lion do not know who Aslan is ‘any more than you do’; but of course the readers would know Aslan if they had already read Nephew. Moreover, much of the suspense in the early chapters of The Lion derives from our inability to understand what is happening in the magical wardrobe - but if we have read Nephew we will know all about the wardrobe, and that part of the story will become, effectively, pointless. Similarly, one of the delights of The Lion is the inexplicable presence of a lamp-post in the midst of a forest - a very familiar object from our world standing curiously in the midst of an utterly different world - and one of the delights of Nephew is the unexpected discovery of how that lamp-post got there. Anyone who begins with Nephew will lose that small but intense pleasure, the frisson of one of Lewis’s richest images.
If Lewis really and truly thought that the series was best begun with The Magician’s Nephew, he was simply mistaken. The original order of publication is the best for any reader wishing to enter Narnia.”
[gallery] Another contest entry, an abandoned Presbyterian church in Detroit.
[gallery] houghtonlib:
Bodoni printing house. Designs for ornaments and non-roman type, ca. 1800.Houghton Library, Harvard University
[gallery] A lovely tribute to the Braun SK55
The distortion of words in secret to preserve hidden powers appears to be endemic to post–September 11 American governance…. In his essay, Orwell observed that “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” and he condemned the use of words “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It’s hard to escape the valence of that description to our contemporary politics.These policies—mass surveillance, torture, and targeted killing—have systematically violated civil liberty, but the Newspeak-inspired approach to language that has facilitated them is a frontal assault on (to borrow another Orwell phrase) “intellectual liberty” as well.
What good are words—and the laws with which we write them—when the government saps them of their ordinary meanings? One great power of language in a democracy lies in its ability to set the terms of the government’s compact with the governed—to grant the state power only upon popular consent. But a government threatens its own legitimacy by relying on its own dictionary. Policies erected on corrupted language are inherently corrupt.