cognitive dissident

Andrew Sullivan fisks David Brooks’ new column in a most delightful way. (I feel some trepidation at not having read the entire Brooks piece, but it’s behind the TimesSelect wall.)

Nice work, Sullivan.

update (4/2 @ 3:47pm):
Brooks’ statement that “Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders, but they're not models for the future” stuck in Glenn Greenwald’s craw as well, as the conclusion to his rebuttal illustrates:

On every front, the Bush administration has ushered in vast expansions of federal power -- often in the form of radical and new executive powers, unprecedented surveillance of American citizens, and increased intervention in every aspect of Americans' private lives. To say that the Bush movement is hostile to the limited-government ends traditionally associated (accurately or not) with the storied Goldwater/Reagan ideology is a gross understatement.

[…]

The terms "left" and "right" do not mean what they meant even ten years ago, though they still have meaning. At least for now, until this movement is banished to the dustbin, those terms have come to designate whether one is loyal to, or whether one opposes, this government-power-worshipping, profoundly un-American right-wing cultism that has been the dominant political faction in America for many years.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My seeming hiatus from blogging has not been time spent AFK. I have lost several weeks of posts due to a hardware failure, during a time when I was not making regular backups. I plan to be back at the keyboard in a few days, after reconstructing my bookmarks, RSS feeds, and perhaps some of the lost posts.

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the lost data, but my backup scheme is now much more robust.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers upbraids another for supporting the odious don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy of excluding out-of-the-closet LGBTs:

Look what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. The biggest strength any army has is its spirit. A joyous, unified, spirit to win, knowing they're doing the right, just and moral thing.

You're right, actually. The best asset of the army is its spirit - of comradeship, brotherhood, and unity. It is a spirit which overrules, or at least ought to overrule, all the taxonomies of civilian life: race, politics, class, region, and even, one might hope, sexuality. But if you actually believe our men and women in uniform can stand up to the most maniacal, barbaric, ruthless, and vile killers in the world, and still be flustered by - gasp - a gay person, then you have officially exiled yourself from the frontier of reason. [emphasis added]

The coming-out of Eric Alva (see HRC and SLDN for details) and countless others in the military explodes the wingnut fears about “unit cohesion” into a million pieces of bigoted bullshit. Has no one on the Right had ever heard of Leonidas, or Alexander the Great, or the Sacred Band of Thebes?

Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cameron Scott has an excellent piece at AlterNet, “Queer 101: A Guide for Heteros,” where he dissects the “San Francisco values” slur, nothing that:

Blindness to difference has allowed the right wing to invent a sinister stereotype of "homosexuals" that has only tenuous links to reality. […] The right gets away with their smears because they have persuaded Americans that sex and desire have no role in polite society.

Scott’s “primer to help understand the people behind the values and what they stand for” deals with some of the gender issues, while Violet Blue’s piece on “San Francisco Values” observes that “When someone says, ‘San Francisco values,’ they mean sex.” She lists some of the sex-positive aspects of San Francisco, and concludes:

So that's fine by me if Bill O'Reilly and Gingrich (and all the rest) want to wallow in their homophobic male fantasy of San Francisco values. Sex between two men is normal. Sex is normal. Pundits and politicians want to scare people with San Francisco values because they don't fundamentally believe sex is healthy. They're the dinosaurs, and we're the meteor.

The fact that most straight people are completely ignorant of queer culture is a shame (and no, a passing familiarity with Queer Eye and Brokeback Mountain is insufficient!). Reflecting my bibliomania, I would suggest that curious straights begin by reading Martin Duberman, Randy Shilts, and Lilian Faderman for history; Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, Paul Monette, Camile Paglia and Michelangelo Signorile for commentary; Larry Kramer for anger; and Dan Savage for humor. (For those into comics, you can’t go wrong with Howard Cruse, Roberta Gregory, and—especially!—Alison Bechdel.)

Posted by cognitivedissident at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)