Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

Andrew, have you tried to breastfeed lately? It ain’t easy. An indulgent former paramour of mine allowed me a few minutes of effort while her three-month-old was asleep. I gave it a good college try but got not a drop of milk for my troubles.

Oh, and the current girlfriend was none too thrilled either.

I’ll stick to skim, if that’s ok. Another reader reminisces:

I got married in Portland, Oregon. Portland is famous for its strip clubs (the best south of Vancouver, BC and north of Las Vegas) and also has a sizable Lesbian community. On the night of my rehearsal dinner, my friends took me out to visit some of the clubs (I was well behaved).  A lot of them were from the East Coast and they don’t have as good strip clubs back there. The women were gorgeous and there was one dancer who had the unique act of shooting streams of breast milk.  It might sound weird, but she was really pretty and had a body like Jessica Alba (she was smoking hot).  The place went wild when she did it.  Upon collecting her generous tips, she told us that she had a kid a few years ago and the milk has flowed every since.  A friend of mine commented he was in the land of milk and honey.

Some women were also in the club enjoying the show. Another friend of mine went over to chat them up asked why they were there and she pointed to the dancer and said – "same reason you are."

The NYRB pulls out an old review, with some real gems in it.

The dumber ones hit you; the smarter ones steal from you.

Grover Norquist explains their capacity to tolerate Rudy McRomney:

"What brings social conservatives to the Republican party is not some list of 20 things that James Dobson would like to see. It’s a much lower threshold. Social conservatives are best understood as a parents-rights movement. They don’t like guys throwing prophylactics at their kids in public schools. They don’t like their faith being made fun of, they want to be able to send their kids to private schools or home school. They are worried about raising their kids in their own faith and being left alone. On the abortion issue, pro-lifers need the same thing the chamber of commerce wants: serious judges. If you promise them that, credibly, you can have their support.

And each of the Republican candidates passes that threshold."

Shares prices index is reflected on a man’s eye glasses at a securities company in Chengdu, in southwest China’s Sichuan province, 30 May 2007. Chinese share prices slumped 6.5 percent 30 May after taxes on share transactions were raised in the government’s latest effort to curb the nation’s booming stock markets, dealers said. By  Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images.

One of the strongest of human impulses, even when presented with irrefutable empirical evidence. The scientists have proven it:

I’ve found over and over again that people who have been surreptitiously tape recorded in sting operations often refuse to admit that they said the inculpatory stuff on the tape in spite of what the recording clearly shows that they said. They usually claim that the government tampered with the tape. In rare occasions, the tape has been tampered with, but 99% of the time it hasn’t.

This looks like something a bit different from Dennis Preston’s observation, where people don’t seem to believe that they sound the way they were tape recorded (usually their phonetics, I assume, although perhaps grammar as well). In the sting tape cases, the person denies the CONTENT of the statements, claiming that they never could have said such things.

We. Do. Not. Torture.

Generations of straight men will love this fatwa:

Izzat Atiyaa had issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, offering his bold suggestion as a way around the prohibition in Islamic religious law against a woman working in private premises with a man who was not her close relative. Breastfeeding, he argued, would create a familial relationship under Islamic law.

Dr Atiyaa explained to the Egyptian newspaper al-Watani al-Yawm that:

"A man and a woman who are alone together are not (necessarily) having sex but this possibility exists and breastfeeding provides a solution to this problem (by) transforming the bestial relationship between two people into a religious relationship based on (religious) duties."

Chow down, guys. Allah commands it.

(Hat tip: Razib.)

The blogosphere has been hard at work. Dave Weigel surveys the assaults and counter-assaults on Al Gore’s "Assault On Reason". David Brooks’ anti-Gore column comes in for a shellacking as well. Minipundit piles on:

In response to Gore’s assertion that the Internet has the potential to improve discourse, Brooks asks, "Has Al Gore ever actually looked at the Internet? He spends much of this book praising cold, dispassionate logic, but is that really what he finds on most political blogs or in his e-mail folder?" Has David Brooks ever actually looked at the Internet? Because if he has, he’d have found, like Gore has, that there are far more bastions of tempered wonkery there than on television.

Indeed. For every Perez Hilton, there’s a swathe of wonky PDF files to consume. And an army of Ron Paul supporters.

A reader writes:

I think a few things are at work here. First is what you noticed yesterday, that people with openly gay friends and family members are probably more likely to support gay marriage than people who are not knowingly close to gays. That is how I ended up on this side of the issue.

10 years ago I would have been dead set against even informal domestic partnerships, much like what NYC had under Giuliani. Now, I support allowing gays to marry (not civil unions, marriage).  What changed?  My cousin not only came out, but she "married" and her partner had a child. And I saw that she had a family much like the one I wanted. And her "marriage" which is still refused state sanction, is stronger than the marriages of siblings.    

I think that as people see what happens in places like New Hampshire (where the state legalized it without the threat of lawsuit or a Court direction), they will realize that it is not so bad.

As for people viewing morality, I think that it comes down to this — there are lots of things I view as immoral but would otherwise not make illegal (and I admit I find certain things I do immoral).  I also think people have in mind the 1970s disco era homosexual "scene", with drag queens having sex on 5th Avenue.  As people see that most gays want the same things the rest of us want (a stable home, a family, a spouse happy to see you after work and kids shouting DADDY! when you walk through the door) much of the opposition will continue to disappear.

(Photo: Anne Latl and Rosa DeJesus get sworn in by town clerk, Donna Loglisci, before being granted a civil union at Stamford town hall October 1, 2005 in Stamford, Connecticut. By Stephen Chernin/Getty Images.)

Well worth a read. You can download a PDF file of the 9/11 Commission executive director‘s thoughts on interrogation here. Money quote:

The moral question is subjective, of course. It is closely related to another question: What standard of civilized behavior should the United States exemplify, in a fight to preserve civilization against barbarism?

My own view is that the cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral. I offer no opinion as to whether such conduct is a federal crime; merely that it is immoral. My moral standards are entitled to no special regard. My argument is not that others should adopt my morality.  It is that the responsible policy officials should explicitly, thoughtfully, employ moral reasoning of their own.  And, further, my argument is that the substitution of detailed legal formulations for detailed moral ones is a deflection of responsibility. Such deflections, often unconscious, are too common in our modern age.