Boston-area nerds...

Anybody going to Arisia? I'm going to be there for a couple of days...

CC

*Headdesk*

I'm not the easiest girl to appall. But I'm appalled.

CC

Ps. I googled the lady who left that book review and discovered she is your basic troll who wanders around the internet posting nastiness wherever she can. For example, she really doesn't like Jews.

During our many discussions of the Arizona immigration law

I mentioned that I was concerned that damn near anything could look like "reasonable suspicion" to justify the sort of police stops allowed under the law. My example at the time was that if a woman were dressed up and headed to her favorite nightclub, there might be "reasonable suspicion" that a sexily-dressed woman walking down the street late at night was a hooker and that would be enough to stop her under the law*.

I was totally underestimating the creativity of our nation's law enforcement professionals. Police in Philly have twice arrested this poor bastard for loitering--at a bus stop.

So, yeah, my faith that the words "Reasonable suspicion" have any meaning at all in Arizona is pretty lacking.

CC



*Somehow I doubt there has been a spike in the deportation of sexy people since, but it seemed like a good example at the time.

CC embraces a culture of death, or at least critical thinking

Remember how I mocked Keith Olbermann mercilessly when he ranted that the fake twitter feed in his name was the tool of a Republican conspiracy, and it turned out that the twitter feed was being written by his own network's publicists?

Yeah, that was funny.

Anyway, it is Glenn Beck's turn. My husband reads lots of web-produced comics written by big nerds. (The best of which, as far as I'm concerned, is XKCD.) A bunch of webcomic artists got together and wrote a book called Machine of Death about the personal societal impacts of a machine that can predict the method of an individual's death. And they publicized it on their comics, asking people to buy a copy on October 26, the release date, to see if they could get it to #1 on Amazon.

LOTS of people did.

However, October 26 was the release date of Glenn Beck's new book, and he was not happy to have been beaten by both "Machine of Death" AND Keith Richards' auobiography. He has turned this into a new rant topic, hinting at both a huge conspiracy and/or a sick society for his loss. Being beat out by a rock star I suspect he could have dealt with, but being beaten out by a dozen sci-fi-short-story-writing weirdoes was just too much for Mr. Beck's ego to take.

Now, Micheal Moore did essentially the same thing when "Canadian Bacon" flopped, with an even heavier dose of implied conspiracy, so I'm left with the conclusion that pundits are nuts and people should read the news for themselves and make their own decisions.

Which is, admittedly, what I thought in the first place.

CC

This is my new favorite Cosmo quiz

though I'm kind of embarrassed at my own results.


CC

Juan Williams II: No, really, appearance of impartiality matters to your editor.

The upcoming "Rally to Restore Sanity" in DC this weekend is kind of a big deal to a lot of my Washingtonian friends. I don't fundamentally believe in political protests. It will be the first political march I've attended since college for a purpose other than keeping somebody else out of trouble. We've got a dude driving up from North Carolina just to attend.

Anyway, even reporters want to go. But when you're a reporter, that's just not that simple

NPR has asked its employees not to attend unless they are covering it.

The Washington Post says its staffers can attend, but not actively participate.

And yes, the local alternative paper has a policy mocking the bigger news outlets'policies, because that's how they roll.

But seriously, this "don't do overly political stuff that will cheese your sources off if you want to get good information out of them" is not a new thing just invented to persecute Juan Williams.

CC

The time CC pulled a Juan Williams

Lots of smart people I like having been writing about Juan Williams. If you don't know, he was an NPR reporter who was fired for admitting on national television that he is uncomfortable when he sees someone on an airplane in Muslim garb.*

Should he have been fired for expressing controversial views?

Personally, I'm asking the question this way: How are Williams' future interviews with Muslim sources likely to go? Even if they make nice with him and try to be understanding, hasn't Williams pretty much completely hosed his chances of having a Muslim source or someone else who thinks he's a racist trust him and open up to him in the future?

That is the crux of why reporters aren't supposed to do what Williams did.

Example from my own brief journalism career: One time, a county official was ranting (in a private conversation with me) about how the departing Clinton staffers had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars in White House property during the Clinton/Bush transition. I said simply that I'd read that the GAO did an investigation and concluded that the damage and missing items were minimal, costing less than the GAO investigation itself.

This guy didn't argue with me then, but never took another one of my calls or gave me any more information and it seriously screwed with my ability to write stories having anything to do with his area of authority in his part of the county. (In a small town, one guy can easily be the hub of information on a given subject.) Eventually, my editor took that beat away from me and gave it to the new reporter. He would talk to the new reporter.

I still think what that guy did was completely insane. I was very young then and remain fairly blunt now, but I don't think I was in any way rude about what I'd said. I really don't think I even gave my own opinion, I simply pointed out in a private conversation that the GAO report disagreed with his assertions. And it cost me my beat and made me look very bad in front of my editor.

So yeah, that kinda stuff happens to reporters, and I can certainly see how what Juan Williams did would seriously hamper his ability to do his job. His comments on national TV hampered also showed that he is a dude with seriously poor judgment willing to do things that hamper his ability to do his job. Y'all know what the state of journalism is these days. Is it really so surprising that his actions go him canned?

Of course, now he works for Fox, where getting the other side of the story from a Muslim source likely won't be that big a part of his job.

CC

*Of course, the 9-11 hijackers didn't wear Muslim garb, they dressed to fit in with other people on the plane. This was the first thing that made me wonder about Williams as a reporter.

Odd conversations

Co-worker: What's a word that means you can only deal with one thing at a time?

Me: Monomaniacal?

Co-worker: No, like, a normal person word.

Me: Focused?

Co-worker: Yeah, that's good.

Random housekeeping post

I've been decluttering the house recently and having trouble with the whole "defining clutter" aspect.

This blog post was helpful with that.

CC

Links I liked

Desmond Ravenstone has about the most useful post I've seen on the It Gets Better line of thinking. I've had complicated feelings about that campaign in that I certainly agree that things get better. If life after high school doesn't get better for any given person something's very wrong. But it does seems like a pretty passive strategy, and Ravenstone encourages all of us to seek out some more active participation.

A young adult rights about the experience of being one of the few young adults in a church. I don't agree with everything he says. But I think he makes a lot of valid points.

CC
who as a very young twentysomething in grad school, liked the "a few hundred aunts and uncles" feel of an older congregation, but this dynamic is surely not for everybody and it got, well, old.

Nora Ephron to head HuffPo's new divorce section

Read all about it.

I don't know if I'm more annoyed that someone who made her money raising unrealistic expectations about romance is now profiting off the inevitable result of unrealistic romantics getting married or that divorce is STILL this woman's schtick.

Either way, Nora Ephron sucks.

CC

If you've ever thought that life isn't as good as it used to be

Click here.


CC
who had never heard of these laws until tonight.

The best sign at my law school

Wonkette echoes CC's feelings on protests

"You know what’s not fun, ever? PROTESTS. There’s a reason people used to laugh at liberals, in the 1980s and 1990s: Because liberals did the protests, and protests are Earnest & Boring, unless they are Dramatic & Violent, or happened back when Protest People had dignity & self respect (Civil Rights & MLK Jr., Velvet Revolution, etc.) or at least had lots of super-fine hippie chicks and Black Panthers with enormous super-cool ‘fros. Now everybody’s ugly and dull. Sure, the Teabagger folks are also obese, racist and terribly old, so they have funnier protests. But when you go somewhere with a slogan on a sign, nobody wins." Source.

CC

One more on O'Keefe

I've been thinking about James O'Keefe and why it is that everybody looks so incriminating on his videos, yet nobody gets prosecuted when the situation is investigated.

It's because they go along.

We all do it. In the part of DC where my law school is, people coming up to you and yelling at you about their issue of choice is pretty much chronic. And do you argue? Of course not.

When a guy comes up to you and tells you how, say, the Army implanted a signaling device in his leg in Vietnam in 1978 and has been controlling his actions ever since,* you don't say "What motivation would the government have to do that?" You don't even say "We pulled out of Vietnam in 1975."

You just smile and nod, or furrow your eyebrows and nod in that specific case, act like you are interested in this person's drama and would help if you could because that's the quickest way to get someone like that to leave you alone.

Similarly, when I was a political fundraiser, I heard "I'm giving this to your candidate because his opponent wants to..." followed by some crazy rumor all the time. At that point, my job was not to evaluate the person's reasons for giving my candidate money, it was to take the money and smile and nod and validate their reasons for giving it.

So when James O'Keefe shows up dressed like a fratboy pimp wannabee says he wants advice on opening a prostitution ring that he has no apparent resources to open or well thought out plan for opening**, people (except for that one guy) don't think "oh, my gosh, this man is a threat to society" they think "how to I get this whackjob out of my office?" No ACORN staffer ever actually helped them at all. Some staffers actually gave them bad tax advice that would attract IRS attention. One staffer screwed around with them and claimed to have killed people herself.

Mostly, they smiled and nodded and went along.

And when O'Keefe called up Planned Parenthood and offered them a donation to be expressly used on aborting minority babies, the fundraising person thought "A donation's a donation" and took the money.

Nobody actually did anything wrong, but because smiling and nodding looks like agreement, they looked terrible on video and they all got fired.

I think one reason why this story bothered me, and keeps bothering me, as that I've dealt with this situation both as a fundraiser and as someone who is supposed to help the general public. I worked for a government agency at one point and I got all those calls all the time. I would patiently explain that if the Post Office was discriminating against them because they were Italian*** that they should call 888-EEO-USPS and speak with the Post Office's EEO officers, who were specifically tasked with dealing with that sort of complaint and could talk them through the process of filing a formal complaint that would get the Post Office's attention. I would say there was nothing anyone in my office could directly do to help them because USPS cases weren't in our jurisdiction. When they said, no, no, I had to help them because calling the EEO office never worked, I would ask if they had tried the Post Office's EEO office.

They would then ask to speak to my boss, who would listen to their complaints about how I was incompetent. He often then gave the call to the most shameless person in our office, the guy who liked to tell people they were describing the worst human rights violation he'd every heard and give them the number to the United Nations.

They loved that guy. My boss was, all things considered, very understanding about the fact that I kept trying to give them information that actually helped them, rather than being the sort of encouraging-but-unhelpful that they wanted to hear and that made them happy.

My weasel co-worker spent a lot less time on the phone. But if O'Keefe had ever called, he's the one who would have ended up on the video. Of course, I'm the one would would have taken the check from the crazy person as a fundraiser.

These days we really have to consider the O'Keefe factor, even in our churches. If a pregnant teenage girl comes to a UU minister and asks for help because her older boyfriend got her pregnant and she wants an abortion but feels like she can't tell her parents, we could be the next ones on the news accused of promoting child rape if we give her the help she's asking for. I honestly don't know if at this point I would advise people to smile and nod or to actually be helpful or what to do. In some jobs, just telling people what they want to hear is by far the best way to get through the day, but the person on the other end of the line could always be James O'Keefe.


CC

* Actual claim made by guy on street to CC at one point.

** Oh, and most of the time he didn't even say that. In the transcript at the link, he is asking ACORN about the best way for his prostitute girlfriend to pay taxes. That's all, no prostitution ring even came up.

*** Not an exact claim I ever heard, but representative.

It's fun watching James O'Keefe fail

He should know by now that he's known for lying with video and on video. I'd like to think his shenanigans wouldn't have worked, but maybe a few of the people who believed the ACORN videos might have bought it.

CC

Like the Chaliceblog? Have an extra $149,999

Awesome.

CC

And CC rejoiced...

Recording the cops during a traffic stop is obviously legal but it is nice that a judge agree.

Woot!

CC

Annnoying conversation I had recently.

"I hear you're having a sign-making party for John Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity," the lady at church whom I'd seen around but never met said.

"I'm thinking about it, but I'm trying to talk someone who lives closer in to having it." I said.

"Wouldn't it be wonderful if the church could sponsor a sign-making party or let people from out of town stay here for it?"

"Actually, I don't really think it would. I don't see this rally as problematic, but I'm worried that sign-making parties and lending the church to protesters would become a regular thing for liberal political rallies and I think that would be a bad trend for our church. I think we should leave the sign-making and such to individuals. But feel free to ask the minister about it. She might not agree with me." I said.

The woman hadn't been expecting to be disagreed with. It really took her aback.

"Oh, I'm sure people would understand that this is a different sort of rally."

"I perceive that this is a different sort of rally, but someone who is passionate about immigration who wants to hold an event for an immigration rally or some such would likely feel differently. It just seems like a bad precedent to set, but again, the minister might disagree. You should ask."

"But..."

And it went on like that for while.

CC

Arizona UUs and water

A few weeks ago, Chalicesseur TK wrote me a note suggesting that I write about these UUs who leave water in the desert for humanitarian reasons. They were recently tried for littering. As far as I can tell, they were guilty under the law as the law doesn't provide an exception for "humanitarian littering."

They got off on a technicality. I'm not going to cry about that.

While I'm sure that a legislator who is smarter than I am could craft an exception that lets one throw water bottle out one's window for humanitarian reasons, but would still cover littering, I don't see Arizona voters/legislators letting it become law.

I agree with the article that this is a bittersweet ending, at best.

One time, my brother got out of jail and Epilonious left a comment on this blog reading "Congratusorry."

That's about where I am. Congratusorry, Tuson UUs.

CC

Who doesn't see this as the church involving itself in politics unreasonably, FWIW.