The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

The Violent Gang Member in This Picture Is Easily Identifiable By His Tell-Tale Outerwear

by Tod Kelly March 23, 2012

Being a white male of means, I’m never entirely comfortable getting on a soapbox and talking about racism. You never know what is really in another person’s heart, and it’s difficult to unpack what you yourself are bringing to the party from your own head. Plus, most talks of racism neatly divide everyone into the two groups of Us (Never, Ever, Racists!) and Them (Racists, Each and Every One!) that I find both untrue and unhelpful. But I have no ...

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Log in, glaze over, tune out

by Rose Woodhouse March 23, 2012

One of the several bees who are long term residents in David Brooks’s bonnet is that a certain kind of love between teacher and student is what really spurs learning. Today’s iteration of the theme occurs when describing an experimental school called the New American Academy:

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Our Civilization’s Essence

by Christopher Carr March 23, 2012

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A New Ending Couldn’t Destroy Mass Effect’s Artistic Integrity

by Ethan Gach March 22, 2012

[Note: This is a companion piece to something I wrote earlier this week on the same subject but from a different point of view. In addition, while there are no spoilers per say, the way I talk about and characterize Mass Effect 3's ending in the abstract might make it better for people who want to approach the end of the game with no preconceptions to pass for now. For anyone who wants background on the game, or the controversy over the ...

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In Which I Posit the Theory that Fiscal Conservatives Should Vote for a Democrat POTUS – (and government spending advocates should vote GOP)

by Tod Kelly March 22, 2012

One of the inevitable election-year pundit cliches that always makes me cringe is this response to any accurate criticism of either party’s lack of promised execution: “Yeah, but it would be so much worse if the other guys had won.” You know what I mean – in fact, I’m sure you can sing along: Hey, the last time the GOP was in power they went from a surplus to a huge deficit. Yeah, but it would be so much worse ...

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Plain Dumb Luck

by Jason Kuznicki March 22, 2012

In my perfect world, I’d have Michel Foucault’s old job: Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. Here’s a bit of what I might want to teach.

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Economic Benefits of Marriage

by Mike Dwyer March 22, 2012

In 2011 Pew Charitable Trusts published an interesting study showing just who is falling out of the middle class. – Compared with married women, women who are divorced, widowed or separated are between 31 and 36 percentage points more likely to fall down the economic ladder. In turn, never-married women are 16 to 19 percentage points more likely to be downwardly mobile than married women. – Men who are divorced, widowed or separated are 13 percentage points more likely to drop ...

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Stray Thoughts on This Week’s Peter Beinart To-Do

by J.L. Wall March 21, 2012

1) I don’t know why I’m writing about this tonight and not Dr. McCoy’s technophobia. Probably because I’m a masochist at heart. 2) I haven’t read The Crisis of Zionism. Neither the university nor the local public library have it, and the League doesn’t yet cover book review expenses. So I’m not pretending to comment on the contents of the book per se. Perhaps, once one of these libraries does acquire a copy, I will read it, if I have ...

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Like any truly great politician, the real Mitt Romney doesn’t exist

by Erik Kain March 21, 2012

“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.” ~ Romney Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom on whether his boss’s hard-right turn will alienate general election voters. That’s a lovely image: an Etch-a-Sketch of ideas, positions, beliefs, all so transient and loosely held that, when it comes time to run a general election campaign, you can shake ...

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Skimming for the Dirty Parts – Book Censorship In Public Schools, The Enders Game Controversy, and The False Allure of Public Decency

by Tod Kelly March 21, 2012

While it is true that I stole both Brave New World and Flowers for Algernon from the public library, it should be noted for the record that I did eventually return them. Plus, it was all Newsweek’s fault anyway. I was thirteen, and my parents had only just started subscribing to Newsweek. The magazine itself was a curiosity, if only because my parents weren’t “subscribe to magazines” kind of people. Our bathrooms all had several very old copies of Readers ...

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Confirmation Bias, Video Games, Art, and Interactivity

by Jaybird March 21, 2012

Mass Effect 3 was released two weeks ago today (Tuesday) and there have been a lot of little swirling dynamics when it comes to the game, consumer response, corporate response to the consumer response, and so on. (Now, I can’t talk about the game and some of the problems that folks have with it without touching on spoilers. I will try to make these spoilers be as broad and non-specific as possible but if you want to enter the game completely spoiler-free, you ...

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Book notes: Sex at Dawn

by Rufus F. March 20, 2012

I suppose I’m the most likely culprit here to read and comment on the recent book Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, but I feel a bit awkward doing so because I’m also probably the target audience for the book. Being in a marriage that’s a respectable 90% monogamous (depending on the season. I think the PC term is a “slutty marriage”) many of ...

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A Quick “OMG! Update” on Enders Game & South Carolina

by Tod Kelly March 20, 2012

Big, big, big hat tip to Erik who sent me an email today about the continuing breaking news surrounding the South Carolina teacher suspension for reading Scott Orson Card’s Enders Game that I discussed yesterday. You know how some stories seem too weird to believe when you first hear about them, and then the facts come out and it turns out that in reality it wasn’t so weird after all? Well, in this case it might be the case of ...

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Five Leadership Lessons of James T. Kirk: The Movie (Or, How Alex Knapp Plans To Conquer The Universe)

by Erik Kain March 20, 2012

If you missed Alex Knapp’s article on the five leadership lessons of James T. Kirk you really should read it. Or, if you prefer, you can watch Alex’s video version which he recorded at Forbes headquarters in New York. Video after the leap…

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Scenes from an Arizona snowfall

by Erik Kain March 20, 2012

One reason I really do love this town: we just had thirty inches of snow dumped on us, and today it’s sunny and bright and the snow is melting. You can go outside in a t-shirt (though it’s not exactly t-shirt weather.) The sun is warm even if the day is brisk.

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Death + Taxes + … + n

by Christopher Carr March 20, 2012

The quote, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, from a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, is: “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” This is wrong. Other things are certain too. Take, for instance, the Borg-like capacity of the Culture War to take over and assimilate everything. The optimists among us may say it’s all because there’s an election coming, but there’s always ...

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Don’t Fear Me

by Ethan Gach March 20, 2012

I won’t go into any of the details surrounding the shooting of Trayvon Martin. First of all because many of them are in dispute, but more importantly because none of them really matter, or at least shouldn’t. The reality of the matter is that in Florida the law will protect you if you gun someone down because you felt “reasonably” afraid for your life.

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Everyone in Afghanistan suffers PTSD

by Erik Kain March 20, 2012

I’m pretty sure that long before American troops set foot in the mountains of Afghanistan, that the people of that country already suffered from post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Another ten years of war stacked on top of the decades of war and theocratic tyranny there has only made matters worse. When we talk about the failure of the American military to do things like improve maternal mortality rates, or build schools, or significantly improve the lives of Afghanistan’s population, we miss a larger ...

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Peyton Manning is coming to Denver Open Open Thread

by Jaybird March 19, 2012

Peyton Manning is coming to Denver. The story says that this means that Denver is going to trade Tim Tebow. This has “short-term solution” written all over it. Now, if they benched Tebow (and I believe that Tebow would, in fact, take one for the team and go back to secondary) then this might have “long-term solution” written all over it… give Tebow the 2011 MVP as a mentor and that raw talent could easily become… erm… processed talent. If Tebow is traded? The upside (on the ...

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Portlandia in Portland, The Enders Game in South Carolina, and Why I Prefer Living In A Nation Over a Confederacy

by Tod Kelly March 19, 2012

There are few things on television today that are as beloved by we denizens of the Rose City as IFC’s Portlandia. While I believe that quite a few people in other parts of the country find it amusing, I’m not entirely sure that it can truly be appreciated by those that have never lived in the Pacific Northwest. It’s very premise is the bizarre creative offspring of Fred Armesin (who comes from the mainstream mainstay SNL) and Carrie Brownstein (who ...

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Arizona buried, again, beneath a tide of snow

by Erik Kain March 19, 2012

I’m tired of snow. I know this is true because it’s hardly snowed this winter at all until now. I took the above picture about half-way through our current storm. It was about the second time I’d gone out to shovel that I thought to myself, “I really need to live somewhere without snow. Somewhere warm.” Typically this thought only comes to me after the fact, but this time the shoveling has me irritated and sore.

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