You are my brother’s keeper. And I’ll force you to keep him at the point of a gun, if necessary.
Gmail tackles the scourge of drunk emailing.
This is the kind of thing I find absolutely deplorable about party politics. And it’s worse living in D.C. When your ideological loyalty boils down to a damned color, or a capital letter, or a cartoon animal, you might as well be rooting for a sports team. I do like Conor Friedersdorf’s response, though. And not just because he quotes me.
McCain leaves Obama hangin’.
Dubai planning another behemoth, world’s-tallest skyscraper.
Sebasian Mallaby and Warren Buffet on regulation and the financial meltdown.
Polyamory hits the NY Times. Stanley Kurtz’s head a’splodes.
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TheAgitator.com
It’s not just politics that is tribal – all aspects of life for the average person are tribal. It’s part of human life – a part of human life that may have been necessary when survival of the tribe meant survival of you and your progeny. However, in the civilized world tribalism is just a way for the average person to feel important and it’s sickening.
I started bitching about tribal politics during the Bore/Douche elections and the more I looked around, the more I realized that the average dolt has nothing else but feeling that his team or his town or his party or his whatever is better.
Mail Goggles is fucking brilliant. I could have used that a few times.
I need “Forums Goggles.”
[...] Thru Radley Balko. [...]
But what if you drink heavily during the day like Honeyko?
I keed, I keed.
:D
Coincidentally, they are already building (and have almost finished) the world’s-tallest skyscraper.
I present the Burj Dubai:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Dubai
Since this sort of bad “logic” annoys me, a quick comment on the piece on tribal politics:
That is just nonsense. He is claiming to consider the difference between loyalty to a person and loyalty to an ideal, but then evaluates the loyalty to the ideal as if it were loyalty to the person associated with the ideal and concludes it’s no good. That sort of fallacious logic makes me want to send the author a book.
There is really too much other questionable reasoning in that article to step through, but I want to touch on one other point it mentions. The author agrees with a quote from his friend that “To me, the movement matters. Are you in or are you out?” I won’t pretend that the statement is 100% clear to me, but we often hear complaints whose underlying sentiment is that people aren’t going far enough in sacrificing themselves or their ideals to advance this or that movement. I just want to say that movements exist to help people, not the other way around. If a given “movement” isn’t advancing the ideal you support, then to hell with that movement. And (with reference to political tribal loyalty), by “movement” I mean “party”.