Well, I guess I’m a playa now…the comment spammers have found my wee site and left their pellets all over. Cleanup underway, and the IP is naturally banned, but I have to wonder what, besides annoyance, this form of spam really accomplishes. I may be wrong, but I suspect that the three of you who still read this little weblog aren’t exactly online poker aficionados—I would expect in this age of branding and focus groups that even the spammers would do a little market research.
2004
This article captures so much of how I feel about religion in our country right now. I stopped being a practicing Christian a long time ago, although of course being raised in that faith has strongly informed the way I look at religion and the world, for better and worse. The fact that folks like the author, who have much more impeccable Christian credentials than I do (for those that it matters to), are beginning to feel their faith taken hostage by fundamentalists is cause for both hope and sadness.
I think the whole question of faith in politics and policy hinges on her question:
If someone—like me—who has worshiped as a Christian for more than 50 years suddenly feels afraid of the extremes of that religion—what must it be like for those of different beliefs, or of unbelief?
There is a reason that the architects of this country, Christians though they may have been, wrote the First Amendment into law. While speculation about exactly what they meant to accomplish with our various founding documents is exactly that, it seems clear that a common thread through all of them is a recognition that government is a human endeavor and therefore subject to error. So, we have various systems of checks and balances, we have the Bill of Rights and all of the court cases that have built upon it, and we have the power as citizens (at least nominally) to vote the ruling class out if we don’t like them. Theocracy, as government or national culture, leaves all of this aside for trust in the motives of self-declared godly people and their direct line to their god.
The line between the fundamentalists we fear and the ones we as a nation are becoming is getting thinner by the second.
Bopping around the net this afternoon, I found the site for PopTech, one of many conferences I’d love to attend if I had the time and money. I was looking for conference notes and registration info, and found both that, and this, a set of notes created in real-time by an artist as the speakers were doing their thing. Not having been there, I can’t say for sure, but it seemed a perfect summing up, both in content and approach, for a conference like this that explores the frontiers where culture and technology meet with each other and other disciplines. Very cool.
Interesting look at the changing face of New York City. It reminds me of an essay in one of V. Vale’s Zines books that chronicled the life and times of a movie theater on Market St. in San Francisco. Living in an area where it seems everything is being torn down and rebuilt, I always enjoy seeing continuity in places, and some of the photograph pairs here are stunning in showing how little some parts of NYC have changed in 60+ years. Not that I live somewhere where there are a lot of historic sites and buildings, but I can think of very few places in SJ that have stayed that identical, at least out here in the ‘burbs.
Although, now that I think about it, my house is close to a century old, and I suspect many of the others in the neighborhood are similarly aged. It makes me wonder what it all looked like before the freeway ran through and the orchards disappeared—there may have actually been a cul-de-sac at the end of Katherine Ct., rather than the very short open-ended street I live on now. Might be time for a visit to the local history museums…