Don't worry, it's just an ingredient forming less than 2% of the content of these link sausages.
- A NYT quasi-dialog asks "who owns fashion?" without ever coming to grips with the two essential predicate questions: "what is 'fashion,' as distinct from 'clothing'?" and "what does it mean to 'own' a fashion design/trend?" Of course, that's not surprising: None of the participants in the dialog live outside the echobox of the NYC-based garment industry (very much like proclamations concerning books from east of the Hudson), and none of the participants appear to value function as much as form. In short, this is a marketing exercise in which the value of that being debated is assumed without examination; it parallels whether Frank Lloyd Wright "owns" Falling Water (no — leaving aside that he's dead — he didn't/doesn't) and whether Bob Dylan "owns" the Jimi Hendrix rendition of "All Along the Watchtower," but without even the pathetically inadequate rigor applied to those questions.
The fashion industry (or at least some of its exponents) needs its jockstrap pulled up over its head anyway, for its rejection of function (e.g., the loss of the chest pocket on men's shirts, just when it has become increasingly necessary for reasonably-sized cell phones) and its celebration of crappy branding and logos on everything. Dammit, the only logos/branding I've ever voluntarily worn on my clothing — at least where visible to others — is a matching silver "U.S." on the lapels of my uniform. That was enough of being a billboard to last me a lifetime.
- Further proof that "conservative" does not mean "protective of and derived from the honorable elements of our past": conservatives are objecting to minor revisions to history curricula that don't meet their preconceived notions of truthiness. Excuse me, but when further research into documents of the time discloses that, say, the so-called "states' rights" movement of the late 18th century was founded on the presumed property rights in human beings, it makes sense to disclose that at least as much as it does to criticize the hypocrisy and excesses of Marx and Engels half a century later. And when the purported changes are criticised not concerning their factual basis, or even their discussion of contemporaneous doctrine, but how we look at both of them today through the eyes of our contemporaneous doctrine — that is, we look at basic-level historical analysis like we'd look at anything else — the "movement conservative" doctrine begins to look more than a little bit hypocritical and self-interested without the "enlightened" part that is an essential and critical part of both this nation's founding and any realistic chance at avoiding genocide. Although, to tell you the truth, I'm a lot more interested in the purported Howard Zinn "version," which is a rather unnuanced characterization of Zinn's own writings... and in a couple of hundred years, it'll be the same damned thing all over again.
- An Australian rants against a short-term-economics worldview and gets accused of being an "economist". Remember, enlightened self-interest...
- The IPKat mewses about "harmonisation" of moral rights. Which, of course, would require some kind of agreement on what moral rights are — across nations, across art forms, across cultures (I can already anticipate the hard-core Confucian response!).
