I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

I usually avoid non-LJ comment sections, but this one from John Scalzi’s blog was too good, even if the commenter was using a Dilbert icon: “Trying to compromise with the current GOP is like trying to pick a restaurant when you would like Italian and the other person wants a ’53 Chevy up on blocks.”

I know some of you know more about fat acceptance: while the underlying study on bariatric surgery might have problems, it seems to me that this reviewer’s reasons for rejecting the study, described in this post (NB: not by the reviewer himself, but quoting him), are terrible; the reviewer doesn’t think that people considering bariatric surgery are capable of giving informed consent because of the climate of hostility to fat people. Now, that climate is poisonous to be sure, but should we therefore disbelieve someone who says “I consent to this experimental surgery”? That’s a pretty dangerous road, and while that rationale would make sense if this were a government-mandated program—there are definitely contexts where someone’s expressed consent isn’t really voluntary—I think we have to default more to autonomy than this, especially when a group already faces stereotypes invalidating their decisions.

Stuart Banner, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own: Overview of property in America from the colonial period to today (that is, property derived from English law; though Banner’s written on native issues in the past, his focus here is the settlers’ and then United States’ law). I learned the most from the early sections on property in political offices and various obligations to churches, a nice reminder that property disappears as well as being created. Banner’s treatment of slavery is far less extended, presumably because he thinks that everyone understands that some people were property and then weren’t. There’s a lot about intellectual property (right of publicity, copyright, etc.) and telecommunications-related property rights. The basic argument is that property is never just about economic value but also about social value: things become property when we see them as legitimate subjects of property, and become not-property when that legitimacy disappears. I’m not sure who the audience is, but it was a pleasant enough read.

Kevin Mitnick with William Simon, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker: Mitnick’s other book on social engineering (getting sensitive information out of people by making them think you’re entitled to it) is well worth reading, at least for any author with an interest in deception. This autobiography, though, is replete with self-justification and numbing detail in between descriptions of successful hacks and social engineering attacks. Mitnick may well have been abused when he was finally caught and denied bail and access to communication because prosecutors convinced judges that he could insert a virus into any computer and control any phone, but it’s kind of hard to listen to him complain about the false things that were said about him as he shows no remorse for the stuff he actually did, some of which was pretty creepy and much of which is illegal for good reason even if he only did it to prove that he could. Read The Art of Deception instead.

James T. Patterson, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America's Struggle over Black Family Life--from LBJ to Obama: Patterson argues that Moynihan’s controversial report was widely misread. A child raised in a poor single-family household, Moynihan was convinced that family structure had become an independent barrier to African-American success, and that the liberal policies he desired had to take that into account by promoting family formation. Patterson seems pretty kind to Moynihan’s report, given that it fit at least as neatly into conservative narratives about the uselessness of antipoverty programs as into liberal calls for improving economic conditions, but Moynihan himself insisted that he was trying to get the best results for an interventionist Great Society. Really a book for policy wonks.