links

• Proud to be gay: Wanda Sykes.
• Terrance on gay marriage and the black community after Prop 8.
• “President Obama isn’t going to take away your gun. Make sure that your gun doesn’t take away your life or the life of someone you love.” (Via Rachel Maddow.)
• Gregor Robertson is Vancouver’s new mayor, and the Non-Partisan Association has had its ass handed to it. A good day for the left in local politics.
• Some people on the Internet are atheists. Who knew?
• Master wordsmith Stephen Fry on his transformation from pedant to linguist.
• The Holocaust’s unholy hold over Israeli and Jewish politics.
• Finally, gematriya proves surprising things about American politics. (And some people take this kind of thing quite seriously indeed.)

This Sunday’s interesting links:

• The Southern California Board of Rabbis, an interdenominational Jewish organization, opposes the anti-gay marriage initiative to be voted on in California this election.
• John Judis of the New Republic has a terrific sum-up of everything wrong with John McCain’s stunt of singlehandedly fixing the world before last weekend.
• In a similar vein, the Washington Post’s analysis of how McCain screwed it all up in Washington before Friday night’s debate.
• One of the best analyses of the debate and the larger question of “strategy versus tactics”—and who really understood the best way to win this debate.
• A biologist reviews an Intelligent Design textbook. (He is not impressed.)
• Tina Fey returns as Sarah Palin on SNL in an absolutely deadly spot-on “interview” with Amy Poehler as Katie Couric.
• Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria is the latest journalist to express amazement at John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin in light of his assertion that he always puts country first.
• Crypto-Muslim (formerly Muslim Hedonist) on her experiences becoming white by removing the hijab. (This is mandatory reading.)
• Finally, will lolcats be able to keep making the moneys? Only time—and great lulz—will tell.

What’s eating up your laptop’s RAM today?

So I can quit Firefox, restart my computer, and make it go faster, I present these links that I’ve been sitting on for some time:

• The New York Times rightly supports laws that block enforcement of legal judgments relating to freedom of speech in countries where the freedom of speech is not as legally protected as it is in the United States.
• The LA Times’s Joel Stein on trying to convince your elderly Jewish relatives in Florida to vote for Obama.
• A Republican Party county chairman in New Mexico thinks some racist things about Hispanics, blacks, and Obama.
• Truthdig investigates who is behind the Obsession ‘radical Islam’ DVD.
• Margaret Cho says sexist things about Sarah Palin, gets called on it, posts one of the weirdest defences ever, and promptly gets called on it again.
• This year’s MacArthur Genius from the World of Contemporary Art™ is inexplicable as befits a member of that community.
• Campbell Brown, my new hero, tears the McCain camp a new one over their sexist treatment of Sarah Palin.
• Mike Huckabee thinks John McCain’s I-won’t-go-to-the-debate-because-they-need-me-in-Washington-even-more-oh-wait-no-they-really-didn’t gambit was an enormous error in judgment.
• Finally, Jewish settlers in the West Bank—remember them?—are committing terrorism against their fellow Israelis. Terrific.

What Firefox tabs are eating up your computer’s memory today?

Sorry it’s been a while, folks; classes have just started up again and I’m up to here with…you know, stuff. Such as usually happens round this time September. Let’s get right to some good reading, shall we?

• Cindy McCain’s Tuesday night RNC outfit cost about $300,000.
• Italy announces it will pay $5 billion to Libya as financial reparations for decades of colonialism. It will be interesting to see if other European countries decide this is something they want to follow up on. (Of course, given the size of Italy’s empire versus, say, France’s or Britain’s, I wonder what could be made to happen in anything resembling a feasible manner.)
• John McCain’s innermost hopes about Sarah Palin.
• Think eyeglasses cost too much? (I certainly do.) Next time you might think about ordering them online.
• Newly discovered and analyzed lexical item: adheed, as in NOLA Mayor Ray Nagin’s “I think most people will adheed to” a hurricane evacuation order, or 1937 Louisiana case law’s “the Court stated and now states that it will adhede to the request of counsel for the Plaintiff”. How long has this animal really been around, and where?
• There’s already plenty to object to about the so-called Daring Book for Girls, but Australian Aboriginal leaders are objecting to the book’s publication in that country because of a cultural taboo on women playing the digeridoo.
• Quiz time: can you pick which of these Extreme Religious Pronouncements were made by ultra-Orthodox rabbis and which were made by Muslim imams? Hint: it’s really hard to tell them apart.
• Peggy Noonan, Mike Murphy, and Chuck Todd discuss how f#@*!ed the McCain/Palin ticket is not realizing their mics are live.
• Yes, Virginia, there is a cisgender privilege—and most people who have it don’t even know it.
• Finally, the incomparable Little Light on the creepy religious-saviour undertones of Mike Huckabee’s speech to the RNC.

What interesting things did you write or find recently?