the best part of linking up...
Mood: cheerful
Posted on 2011-08-12 11:32:00
Tags: gay politics links
Words: 167

Warning: I've been saving these up so there are a ton of them. Enter at your own risk!

- The Teleporter Library: A Copyright Thought Experiment - interesting take on file-sharing. But I'm not sure how to solve the "too few people need to pay for a thing" problem. (thanks David!)

- What Happened to Obama? - pretty damning article about Obama's lack of passion.

- Study: Strong Catholic support for gay rights - a majority of Catholics support same-sex marriage? If those results are correct...wow!

- How Plan B found the Droid I was looking for - exciting story of tracking down a lost phone.

- A big story broke accusing the Toronto Blue Jays of stealing signs. Grantland is a bit more skeptical, but also links to this account of the Dave Bresnahan Potato Incident, which is awesome.

- The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter - interesting story about getting a project on Kickstarter.

- An oldie but goodie: And that’s why you should learn to pick your battles.

- Ah, okra

- If Mario Was Designed in 2010

6 comments

Comment from destroyerj:
2011-08-12T13:00:26+00:00
Re: catholics, I'm curious how the questions were phrased about marriage. Do the respondents support gay marriage as a governmental institution, or do they want it to be available within the church? It wouldn't surprise me if people support the former while not supporting the latter. The catholic church is much less evangelical than the average protestant church, which I think yields more of a live and let live attitude among a greater subset of its population (as opposed to official messaging). This same difference in culture probably makes catholics less afraid than evangelicals that the existence of gay people and gay marriage will somehow infect them and their children. Combined with probably some latent pressure from JFK's presidency to separate the church's views from government views, it makes sense to me that average joe catholic would view it as a humanitarian issue that is unfair to people.

Comment from gregstoll:
2011-08-12T13:11:48+00:00
It looks like the question specifically referred to it being "legal", so I'm guessing your interpretation is correct.

Yeah, I knew that "official messaging" of the Catholic church is definitely out of step with the population on some issues (birth control, anyone?), but I didn't realize it was this dramatic about gay marriage. And it makes me a bit more optimistic about people in general!

To be clear, who religions allow to marry in their church is totally up to them, and while I do think it would be nice (eventually) to see it spread to more religions, I'm way way waaaay less concerned about that than legal recognition.

(also, shouldn't you be on a plane or something?)

Comment from destroyerj:
2011-08-12T13:17:01+00:00
Had a slightly longer than expected layover so I'm catching up on the world, though I'm on my phone, so I forgot to also say, "yay!". About to board for Austin now!

Comment from flamingophoenix:
2011-08-12T20:50:44+00:00
This!

Comment from gerdemb:
2011-08-13T04:04:25+00:00
The "Teleporter Library" is an interesting though experiment, but I'm not sure I agree with the statment, "Here is a solution no sane person would propose to this problem, if it were a real problem: Prohibit people from using the teleportation network to loan books and movies to their friends, and monitor it to ensure they did not do so." That sounds exactly like what media companies would do...

Comment from gregstoll:
2011-08-13T12:23:11+00:00
Well, he did say "no sane person"... :-)

I think the point is that it would be almost impossible to do, and society would need to find another way to ensure that people still had incentives to write books and movies.

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