The weather doesn’t care how you feel about it. So the question of how you ought to feel about the weather—specifically, about the wave of warmth that covered the eastern United States this past weekend, and that promises to linger through Christmas—is a human question. What does a warm December signify?
Slate's Reihan Salam keeps imagineering a right wing worth defending: "If the Tea Party were to fight crony capitalism as hard as it fights wasteful spending, and if its members were to train their anger on the Wall Street-Washington axis...it would be the most constructive and powerful political force of our time."
Brandon Ambrosino is a young gay internet person who stirs up controversy everywhere he points his spoon. He tends to take a contrarian position on things that many LGBT individuals and their allies hold self-evident. You aren't a homophobe if you are against gay marriage (we need a new word, he says). People who called out Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson for saying the same vile things about gays that people have been saying since gay become a thing are the real bigots. Sit down, Ellen Page, you aren't so brave for coming out. Being gay is a choice. Jerry Falwell, founder of Ambrosino's Liberty U alma mater, was actually a good guy.
Congress has drafted and frozen the consensus agreement reached this morning on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. The House is set to vote tomorrow. Now would be the time for supporters to at least briefly indulge the naysayers, especially given the weak recent state of opposition politics in this country. Elven Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich has had his brief say on the House floor. And within the media? In 2006 it was a reporter for This American Life playing the contrarian, asking basic questions about then-popular subprime mortgages. "Sometimes, if you want the real answer, you have to ask a dumb question," Times columnist David Carr writes of the reporting in Monday's paper. Today , the person asking the "dumb" question is David Cay Johnston, until recently the Times' aggressive tax reporter. He's wondering whether we're in a crisis at all!
"Slavery was good for the black man." This real column comes not from a neo-nazi pamphlet or the editors of the National Review, but from The Jamaica Observer, which is apparently less like our own Observer and more like a really contrarian Jamaican Slate. You will not see a finer example of conventional wisdom-upending this year. Take it away "freelance writer" Michael Dingwall! "Those of us who continue to see the millions of blacks who died crossing the Atlantic and the displacement of what we had in Africa as proof that slavery was a bad institution don't understand the mechanics of human development and evolution." Wow. This is just like when Alumbrados Illustrated published that essay on how the Spanish Inquisition wasn't so bad. He goes on!
If you're going to be in the Hong Kong area next week, here's something for you to do: stop by the Fabrik Gallery and see the art exhibition from guerilla stencil artist Banksy. Why do I tell you this? Just to segue into this point: Banksy is good! So suck on that, all previously stated Gawker evaluations of the man and his work! Okay, we all have opinions. After the jump, a few examples of Banksy's art that you could buy at this show, if you were quite wealthy. Despite earlier protestations to the contrary, these do not suck.
Slate's pop-economist (every important media outlet is required to have a pop-economist who misuses the analytical tools of his inexact science to "prove" unlikely and surprising things each week) explains that housing foreclosures are good because after people are kicked out of their homes, other people get to move into those homes. Relevant excerpt: "I could use economics to explain why those readers are mistaken (a glut of homes on the market leads to falling prices, etc.), but that's unnecessarily complicated." [Slate]
