incredulism

This isn’t just another shooting. 

During Tuesday’s marriage equality arguments in the Supreme Court, several of the Court’s conservative members suggested that same-sex couples should not be given equal marriage rights because these couples have not enjoyed those rights for most of the past. As Justice Antonin Scalia summed up this argument, “for millennia, not a single society” supported marriage equality, and that somehow exempted same-sex couples from the Constitution’s promise of equal protection of the law. Not long after her conservative colleagues raised this argument, however, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained exactly why marriage was long understood to be incompatible with homosexuality in just five sentences: [Same-sex couples] wouldn’t be asking for this relief if the law of marriage was what it was a millennium ago. I mean, it wasn’t possible. Same-sex unions would not have opted into the pattern of marriage, which was a relationship, a dominant and a subordinate relationship. Yes, it was marriage between a man and a woman, but the man decided where the couple would be domiciled; it was her obligation to follow him. There was a change in the institution of marriage to make it egalitarian when it wasn’t egalitarian. And same-sex unions wouldn’t — wouldn’t fit into what marriage was once.

when your friends actually let you talk for once but you forget what you were trying to say

This is not said as an endorsement of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed is utterly deserving of insanely paranoid criticism just like anything that makes money from your attention (this category includes me, Paul Ford). But it’s worth pointing out again that their recipe for traffic seems to be: Hire tons of people; let them experiment, figure out how social media works, and repeat endlessly; with lots of snacks. Robots didn’t make this happen. It was (1) a hint of magic, and (2) some science. So! If the conclusion that you draw, as a media professional, is “we should be getting in on things like that dress, we should be more like BuzzFeed,” you are probably going to damage your organization while not actually getting that sweet sweet traffic that you so desire. Because it’s not about traffic as much as culture. What should you actually do? I mean, you could hire or re-assign a mix of younger and older talented people from very diverse backgrounds, give them measurable goals and time to think, see what works, track progress, iterate, and then participate in the larger community of people who are trying to work out these problems of culture, technology, and prose. That would be expensive and would require not really having a plan but rather making it up as you go, which is the hardest thing for anyone to justify to their boss. Or you could wait and try to jam whatever is working elsewhere right now into your current creaking system. You can’t get the dress traffic from angry competition any more than you can get “Snow Fall” by pasting a bunch of stories and pictures together. You can’t buy software for it or squeeze it out of people. You have to build it over time with lots of nerds of all sort and make people not hate their lives along the way. Then you need to see which parts work, and do them over and over again. It takes years.

Let's not forget what they had to say about Amsterdam: