Month: June 2011

Contra my objections, McArdle says society has reason to report on Weiner's digital infidelities:

Society takes a greater interest in marriages than in other relationships because society, as well as the individual, has an interest in strong marriages.  Strong marriages support a strong society.  And society supports the marriage by encouraging people to do the very hard work of keeping their promises.  One of the ways in which society ensures strong marriages is by tut-tutting (or worse) at people who don't keep to their vows: who abandon spouses, treat them badly, or yes, violate their trust by engaging in covert sexual activity.  I'm a big fan of sexual privacy.  But you cannot have a public institution that rests in part on fidelity, and also complete privacy on those matters.

Well: that depends on what the vows are. And most of us do understand that how marriages work should be left to the couple involved. We don't really know what Weiner's wife thinks of all this, and how seriously she believes virtual sex means fully-fledged adultery. Megan admits that its "a bit trickier in an era when people like me and Andrew accept that there can be healthy non-monagamous marriages":

Maybe, folks have suggested, she was totally okay with this!   This seems possible, but not really very likely.  I know a decent number of people in open marriages, but they are very far from the majority of the people I know.  Looking at what polls and research we have on this sort of thing, plus an unscientific survey of my friends and the women who have written me, I'm going to go out on a limb here and speak for heterosexual married women as a class: I'm pretty sure that most of us are not okay with our husbands sending racy photos to strangers, or engaging in phone sex with same within weeks of our wedding day.  And if she's totally okay with this, how come she hasn't said so?

Most definitely fake – and genius:

A reader writes:

Yes, one remains disease-free as a sexual avatar in the virtual world, and even though one is “not, in this interaction, a real or rounded person,” the avatar is still driven by a real and rounded person. The recipient of the photos of pecs or legs – or faces! – does not get a full view of the person who sent them, but the sender is still irrevocably human.

Time spent in the virtual world is time spent. Attention given in the virtual world is attention given. That time and attention are splintered into digital pieces rather than given in a manner in which they may be received fully and appreciated appropriately. What is invested virtually cannot simultaneously be invested elsewhere, so for me (and many other wives, girlfriends, or significant others) the argument of the virtual/real distinction does not hold water. It is less about physical contact than what else is shared: time, attention, energy, flirtation, and the like that precedes and accompanies the love.

“This is not real life,” you say. Yes, I agree. But it is real in its consequences.

Another writes:

You wrote,

"For gay men, it's win-win – a harmless online playground where you flirt the hours away and never really get your feelings hurt and remain, as they say in the brutal jungle of online sex, "disease-free". For straight men, it's tougher to find willing partners who don't think you're creepy (most men and women are just wired differently in sexual matters), but still win-win until wives or girlfriends find out, and they do not see the virtual/real distinction."

I take issue with that last little bit. My fiance and I met in a trashy Yahoo! chatroom flirting the hours away, not getting our feelings hurt. We moved from the chat room to private messaging and he became my best friend. And then we started talking on the phone and two and a half years after the first chat room encounter he flew from Portland to Alabama to meet me, and we started dating immediately. Three years since then we're engaged and will be married after I'm ordained priest (next May or December).

During the time between our meeting in the Yahoo! chatroom and meeting in person, we took different paths:

I moved from Yahoo! to Manhunt and slept around, telling my (deeply repressed self) that it didn't count because I was saving myself for a girl. He was waiting for the person with whom he planned to spend the rest of his life, regardless of their sex. Part that means that there is nothing resembling an open relationship for him.

And that's something we've had to negotiate over the three years we've been together. It's been very clear from the beginning that my hooking up with someone has been out of the question, but we struggled for two to define what was and was not appropriate online behavior and what "committed" means in that realm. And it took crossing lines to figure out where they were…and finding the line often meant that I got caught doing something that made him uncomfortable.

He doesn't see the real/virtual distinction. And I mostly agree with him (no matter how annoying it might be given that he lives a thousand miles away doing his residency).

Morrisville, North Carolina, 5 pm

As usual, the tired old bigoted comedian Rush Limbaugh took offense that anyone could call Sarah Palin "nuts," even though she is quite obviously a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and her grip on reality is, shall we say, tenuous. And as usual, Limbaugh blamed it on the left, i.e. the Guardian's Wintour/Watt blog. What he doesn't understand is that Palin's nutsiness is not a partisan matter in Britain, or anywhere else in the world. It is an obvious truth marveled at by all. Palin's emergence as a serious figure in American politics has made the country a laughing stock across the world. The idea that a stateswoman like Thatcher, in advanced dementia, would be used by such a crackpot is simply unseemly.

Will Wilkinson defends the relevance of the Weiner scandal:

I'd rather voters evaluate candidate representatives on the basis of their policy opinions and legislative competence, and I think the desire to minimise the more numinous symbolic aspects of political representation can be a noble one. But we mustn't kid ourselves. I was relieved when George W. Bush left office because he made me feel a bit ashamed of my country. There were a number of reasons for this, but one of them was that I thought he sounded a bit dumb. Despite my deracinated cosmopolitan ideals, despite the fact I never voted for him, I nevertheless felt he represented me when he spoke, and I didn't like it. He made us all look a bit dumb. Representative Weiner represents a bunch of New Yorkers in a more direct way than George W. Bush ever represented me, and I imagine most of them now like that fact less than they used to. I'm not going to tell them it doesn't matter.

Adventures in niche cooking. Priceless Youtube comment:

for some reason he is more angry on this vid than the past one… he keeps cursing and trash talking and he just drops ingredients on the table and chops them like crazy lol… and screams at his food??

I'm all for it in almost every area. But it does seem to me that, in healthcare, it may generate amazing new drugs and treatments, but it sure doesn't add up to what we normally think of as market efficiency:

Maybe this is just a cultural function of Americans' preference for costly and inefficient medicine over cheaper, more efficient models. But American consumers are usually pretty good at keeping prices in line. In healthcare? For various reasons, it doesn't seem to work. More on that theme at the Economist.

On the holiness of an object … wait for it:

“Bye-bye, nomination. Another one down. We’re in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of man-made global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates that want to buy into it,” – Rush Limbaugh on Mitt Romney's view on man-made climate change.