Or – much worse – Leslie or Marion. The good news:
“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”
A reader writes:
Why is astrology any less respectable than religious belief? Believers in both suspend reason to help explain the randomness of human existence. Saying you wouldn’t date someone who believes in astrology, while holding on to virgin births, heaven and hell, body and blood, omnipresent god and all the rest of it, is plainly hypocritical. I know you don’t want to have to face the inevitable here, but at some point someone of your critical faculties is going to have to deal with these internal inconsistencies and either accept that religion and ‘faith’ are meaningless, or stop criticizing others for the irrational things they believe. You just can’t have it both ways and expect to be taken seriously. You never seem willing to address this fundamental contradiction – any chance of a response now?
Louis Vitton imprints itself on nature. Ugh. More here.
Regarding this post, a reader writes:
A fundamental difference between the Ron Paul faction of the Republican party and the Dean faction of the Democratic party was Ralph Nader. There was a major wake up call amongst liberal activists that third party politics was going to do more harm than good in the long run. That, in the long run, it was better to channel their energies within the party and change the party rather than overthrow it wholesale. So when Dean came along, the energy that developed around him ended up getting transformed into a movement that was fixated on reforming the Democratic party. The Dean Democrats are liberal, but at their core, deeply pragmatic about how you really get things done in politics.
To see this in action, go look at what’s said on DailyKos on a daily basis, arguably one of the epicenters of Dean democrat politics. Yeah there’s a very strongly liberal bent, but at the end of the day it’s biggest emphasis is on practical electoral politics. It’s about getting Democrats elected, and in the process, improving on the quality of those that do get elected. While it’s liberal and progressive, there’s nothing very ideological about them. They happily backed relatively conservative Democrats knowing that more Democrats meant a greater chance that a progressive message would survive the Washington meat grinder.
My sense is that the Ron Paul supporters aren’t going to have that same drive to work within the party. That rather than being the Republican version of Howard Dean, Ron Paul’s movement is becoming the next generation of Larouchies. While some of his supporters are the more reasonable and libertarian wing of the party, there’s a strong thread of radicalism amongst a lot of them. Many of them drift past being libertarianism to almost being anarchists, believing, not in small government, but practically no government. They emphasize rather extreme steps like eliminating the federal reserve, going back to the gold standard, shutting down the IRS, etc.
Say what you will about the Dean democrats, they are hardly a radical lot. They were very enthusiastic, but deep down, Dean was not that radical except in how he was delivering his message. He wasn’t calling for some extreme change in government, mostly just getting out of Iraq and reforming a few things like the health care system. Because it was not an innately radical group, it could more readily merge into the larger party apparatus rather than become an active opposition to it. I just don’t see how the same thing could happen with the Paulites.
We can tolerate people who hold what we think are false beliefs. But can we respect them? Here’s an honest attempt to wrestle with the core issues of toleration by Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber. Money quote:
There is a gap between certainty of one’s own infallibility and very-close-to-certainty that one is right, and that gap is what makes respect possible.
Several readers have complained about Jeff Jacoby labeling both the sub-prime crisis and ethanol misadventures in big government. Clive makes this point about the mortgage crisis:
The US already has what must be the world’s most generous fiscal dispensation for mortgage borrowers – uncapped tax relief for owner-occupiers, plus colossal “government sponsored entities” to guarantee loans, implicitly subsidise mortgage rates and promote securitisation. This fiscal regime created an environment in which you felt a fool unless you borrowed to the hilt – not just to buy your house but to keep your equity in it to a minimum, so as to liberate cash for other purposes.
I know many environmentalists have criticized subsidies for corn ethanol and instead promoted cellulosic ethanol. But Tom Philpott argued just a few days ago that cellulosic ethanol isn’t likely to be viable. I’m not an expert in either of these fields, but Jeff Jacoby’s point about unintended consequences seems to me to hold water.
A poignant Spitzer ad from 2006.
Can’t you give us a way cooler version of the Kindle?
A reader has an interesting point:
1. Why is it illegal for me to pay a prostitute for sex, but it’s NOT illegal for a film director to pay two people to have sex in front of a camera and then make money for his product in the form of a DVD or an online download?
2. As a corollary: Why are a prostitute and her john held in such contempt by the media and the public, but Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy are treated as rock stars on both cable and network television? Are they not prostitutes? They were, in actuality, paid for sex. No?
A thought experiment: if you hired a couple to have sex in your bedroom while you watched, it would be prostitution. if someone else hired them, put it on video and you watched them in your bedroom, it would be porn. Why is one illegal and the other isn’t?
It’s his weak spot. Here’s what he may be trying to accomplish. And here’s why it’s an uphill struggle.
