Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Conor Friedersdorf

Via Will at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, a lesser known quote from Winston Churchill:

“The word ‘appeasement’ is not popular, but appeasement has its place in all policy,” he said in 1950. “Make sure you put it in the right place. Appease the weak, defy the strong.” He argued that “appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.” And he remarked on the painful irony: “When nations or individuals get strong they are often truculent and bullying, but when they are weak they become better-mannered. But this is the reverse of what is healthy and wise.”

Every time I hear that word, I think of this cable news exchange, one of my favorites in the history of broadcasting because it distills the intellectual dishonesty so prevalent in the medium. After watching it you'll always have a soft spot for Chris Matthews.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A male reader writes:

I am not a government employee – I might as well be, but not for the reasons they think. I work in the federal division of one of the many IT companies in northern Virginia, and people assume that I lead a quiet life because we’re just like the government. This is sort of true: I don’t work mad hours like our teams on commercial contracts. However, we are the focal point of all of our customer’s frustrations of the structural impediments (and peer impediments) of their job, and nothing we do is ever good enough, even if we throw in the occasional bit of scope creep for goodwill purposes. We get a lot accomplished and at, if I may say so, a pretty reasonable price.

However, that’s the rub: reasonable is relative to other contractors, not in-house work. I am part of the hidden civil service, the legions of contractors who bulk out the federal government without showing up in civil service headcount and without – to be perfectly frank – delivering the same work for less than government staff. We might be faster, or more efficient (sometimes, anyway), but we’re not cheaper. Such are the exigencies of national politics though, that it’s easier to have a shadow civil service for 120 – 130% of the cost of the actual civil service, in order to say that the government hasn’t grown.

by Patrick Appel

I missed the following reader e-mail until just now. A reader writes:

I'm not sure how this illuminates the discussion, but here goes.

I am female. My best friend in the whole world is male. We are housemates, and have been for many years. We are both straight, but not interested in each other, and our relationship is platonic but deep (think Will and Grace if Will were straight). When I became unexpectedly pregnant with a man I was seeing at the time, we gave the situation much thought, and opted to make a pact that we would "stay together" (platonically) and raise my son until he graduates from high school, at which point my friend will also be retiring, and we will have the freedom then to go our separate ways if we wish (while remaining a "family" in our hearts) or remain living together, as our circumstances find us. The father of my son is also our close friend, though our romantic relationship ended during the pregnancy.

Whew. OK. We are unconventional, but happy.

As marriage and all the rights and privileges of such have been talked about so much in the news, we started to think– maybe we should get married? What if one of us ended up in the hospital, etc., etc.? I can't get his pension if he dies (his father died young, so we think of these things), and all of the other aspects which have been so thoroughly discussed.

It saddens us to think that we could while a loving gay couple cannot. But it also made us wonder seriously if we should get married.

If there were civil unions, we would totally do that. But to get married? When we don't feel "that way" about each other? It's just… we take marriage too seriously for that. It's "MARRIAGE" and that means something very special. We have something very special, but marriage does not describe it (although in practice it is very similar domestically). We truly have a "domestic partnership". (That's what we tell people, "We have the only domestic partnership that isn't a euphemism.")

That should give you another glimpse into the weight of the word "marriage".

Oh, and it kinda makes us want domestic partnership laws anyway so we can have that, but we won't shortchange our gay friends by settling for any less than full marriage benefits for them. But still. It would be cool to have both. Not all of us fit into neat little boxes.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I returned to Indiana University in Bloomington to take an oral exam to fulfill my single remaining course, “Historical Interpretation of Baroque Music”. The exam went swimmingly, and I had a day to kill before driving back up to Indianapolis to catch my flight home. I’d already eaten at my favorite restaurants, visited my local friends, and decided to catch a strip show at a small club on the outskirts of town.

There must have been a school break, because I was the only customer in the place. The strippers fawned over me, trying to coax a night’s worth of dollars out of a single fellow in the room. It was enjoyable, and expensive. The second gal that decided to keep me company asked what I was doing in town. I said I’d just made up the last credits to get my degree. “In what?” “Voice performance”. Well, she had taken some classes at the Early Music Institute, and thought about switching from violin to baroque violin, but couldn’t afford it. Did I know such-n-such professor? Yup, I did.

I went out for a cigarette and talked to the bouncer. He was completing a Phd in classical philosophy. I asked if his job gave him any insights, and he told me that it was a job, and didn’t really influence his feelings about Aristotle. I met an MBA candidate, a dentist-in-training, and many other very attractive young ladies that night. No funny business — just a very surreal, David Lynchian life experience.

by Chris Bodenner

From the horse's mouth:

Meanwhile, Beck and his followers go to war over crowd estimates, claiming the number was six times the independent figure of 87,000.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Apropos recent posts on the subject, here's a 2009 account of the Supreme Court Justice explaining why he isn't going to hire any clerks from second tier law schools:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was his usual blunt self last month when he responded to a law student’s question on how to become “outrageously successful” despite a lack of connections and elite degrees. At first, Scalia gave the American University law student some general advice, the New York Times reports. “Just work hard and be very good,” Scalia said.

Then he went on to talk about the student’s chances of obtaining a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice, the story recounts. Her school is ranked 45th in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. “By and large,” Scalia said during the April 24 law school appearance, “I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, OK?”

The story says the data support Scalia’s comment. In the last six years, about half of the Supreme Court’s 220 law clerks attended Yale or Harvard law schools, respectively ranked first and second by U.S. News. About 50 others came from Chicago, Stanford, Virginia and Columbia. None hailed from American University’s Washington College of Law. Scalia acknowledged there are some exceptions, citing the case of Jeffrey Sutton, now a federal appeals judge on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in Cincinnati, according to the Times account. Sutton was first hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., and then worked for Scalia.

“I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton,” Scalia said. “For God’s sake, he went Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best law clerks I ever had.”

Justice Scalia attended Georgetown University and Harvard Law School.

by Conor Friedersdorf

In a review of a new book about preppies, Mark Oppenheimer says the subculture will only survive if embraced by outsiders:

Perhaps young black and Jewish academics will take cues from their unrepentantly preppy elders, like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Willard Spiegelman. Surely gay men will continue to do the tradition proud, and I suspect they are responsible for the current vogue for "heritage" clothing, which leads prep away from Anglophilia and into a rugged American past. As will conservative journalists: George F. Will, Tucker Carlson, Seth Lipsky. (Although female prepdom is beyond the scope of my expertise, I have noticed that hard-core preppiness among women has become hard to find, in part because preppiness is about what is old, and women do not wish to be identified with traditions that recall a more sexist era.)Perhaps there is a renaissance around the corner. After all, as one Harvard alumnus recently wrote, "I'm not sure that anyone in Regency England would have seen the Victorian era coming." But for prep to live on, it must mean something. True Prep is an enjoyable but maddening wake-up call that we are watching a culture unravel, one lambswool thread at a time. If we don't snap to attention, throw on our duckboots, thread the duck's-head insignia belt, leash up the English setter, have a Pimm's Cup, and figure out what this culture is, it will be gone.

My favorite preppies of all time: Alex P. Keaton and Brother Mouzone.

by Patrick Appel

McArdle agrees with Bering:

If we're evolved to be polyamorous, why do we also seem to be evolved to be extraordinarily possessive?  This seems like an evolutionary maladaptation.  And I find it hard to believe that this is just a cultural quirk, given that it does appear to be cross cultural, and it doesn't fade much over history the way that, say, attitudes about female dress have.

Lifetime monogamy may not be the evolved human template.  But I'm pretty sure that carefree polyamory isn't either.  And at some level, who cares?  Rape seems to be pretty "natural", but I'd still like to build social institutions that fight this "natural instinct".

Dan Savage doesn't like Megan's dichotomy.