Monthly archive March, 2012
Daily Links: Big Fat Tolerance Edition
Russian gay extremists; Patronizing employers; A Brownback woman; Jesus' juice; Milquetoast Patel; Other, the world's 12th religion; Liberty wolves; ideology-smashing samaritan; Damn anarchists; Government by any other name (like the presidency); Tolerance ponies.
Intense Friendliness: Kids, Cults and Criteria
by Ashley Baxstrom
NYU Local reported last week that city students have a lot more to worry about than midterms and the rising price of lattes: dangerous CULTS want to steal your soul, body and money!
According to the post--less an article than a humorous piece, the author admitted to...
NYU Local reported last week that city students have a lot more to worry about than midterms and the rising price of lattes: dangerous CULTS want to steal your soul, body and money!
According to the post--less an article than a humorous piece, the author admitted to...The Makings of Viral
James Curcio at Modern Mythology on Kony2012 and "virality":
You see, for something to become "viral" it has to be entirely ubiquitous, which essentially means that it must be stripped of all nuance and worthwhile content. This is an issue facing all propogandists who have any ethics at all. It must act on a common...
Daily Links
The Southern Party: I'm betting Santorum takes Alabama and Mississippi tonight. In the meanwhile, read Alec MacGillis at The New Republic:
If this year's GOP presidential candidates have all year been making such a conservative pitch in order to appeal to a party shaped by the South, why have they been having such a hard time connecting with voters...
Catholic Church Abuses Sex Abuse Victims
It's been more than a decade since the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal rocked Boston. In that time, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) has provided national support to victims of abuse. But recently SNAP is finding that the Church's new approach to managing national lawsuits is not apology and reparation but counter-attack....
Good Cop, Bad Cop
Mary Valle: Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, the priest who denied Barbara Johnson (also known as the "lesbian Barbara Johnson") communion at her mother's funeral, has been put on administrative leave for having "engaged in intimidating behavior toward parish staff and others that is incompatible with proper priestly ministry."
Jews and Black Baseball, March 21
Join us at the NYU Bookstore on Wednesday, March 21, for another event in our Revealer Reading Series:
March, 21 2012 | 5:00 - 6:30pm
726 Broadway, New York
THE REVEALER READING SERIES
Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (2011, Oxford)
REBECCA ALPERT (Temple University) will read from her new book which explores how Jewish sports entrepreneurs, political radicals, and...
Daily Links
My chum Kiera Feldman has a piece up at New York Magazine on Ken Starr's latest politically motivated sex scandal witch hunt, this time at Baylor University where he's president, "Ken Starr Redux: Lefty Icon Targeted Over Alleged Sexual Misconduct." Read it here.
What does informed consent mean to a "pro-life" governor?
“Could People Be Good Without Foundations?”
From Andrew Hartman's recent post at U.S. Intellectual History, "The Politics of Epistemology," in which he excerpts the following (and more) from his book Education and the Cold War:
By the beginning of the Cold War, this crisis was seemingly resolved in what Purcell terms the “relativist theory of democracy,” a stripped-down version of Dewey’s...
Free To Be You and Me
Ashley Baxstrom: The Swiss upper house on Monday buried a motion to ban the burqa, which had passed the lower house in September of 2011 by a margin of 101 to 77.
The proposal, dubbed “Down with masks,” could have eventually banned full-face veils including the Muslim burqa from public transportation or government buildings....
Doing the DOMA Dance
On February 22, 2011, Jeffrey White, a Federal judge in the U.S. District Court of Northern California, ruled the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to be unconstitutional when he found that Karen Golinski, an attorney and employee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, had her rights violated under the equal...
Identity, Crisis: Shari’a Law in Nigerian Politics
by Alex Thurston
In 1999, Nigeria made global headlines when Northern states began re-implementing “full shari’a,” i.e. Islamic law codes that included criminal penalties for acts like theft, adultery, and drinking alcohol. The shari’a project in Northern Nigeria caused further controversy when...
