Althouse: "Maybe goddesses have some hypnotic effect on policy wonks...."

January 30, 2007

"Maybe goddesses have some hypnotic effect on policy wonks...."

Linda Hirshman responds to me and Mark Schmitt on Bloggingheads.

17 comments:

Ruth Anne Adams said...: I find the Pavolovian response to anything you say [by people of all political stripes] to be fascinating.

But, hey!, your blog-as-performance-art experiment seems to be going well.

Let the dust-up commence.; 1/30/07, 10:16 PM
Ruth Anne Adams said...: oops: "Pavlovian."; 1/30/07, 10:19 PM
Mortimer Brezny said...: She got a lot of mileage out of that quote on your banner. But her real problem is that you are not fooled by Hillary and hold her up to ridicule.

Linda Hirschman cheerleads any woman trying to obtain historically "male" power. Hillary could be Satan and Hirschman would support her.; 1/30/07, 11:16 PM
Maxine Weiss said...: Linda Hirshman needs to get herself a proper hairdo.

With such bad hair, nobody's gonna listen to her.

Peace, Maxine; 1/30/07, 11:40 PM
Mortimer Brezny said...: She gets her haircut at the men's barbershop. She's taking over.; 1/31/07, 12:12 AM
hdhouse said...: ortimer Brezny said...But her real problem is that you are not fooled by Hillary and hold her up to ridicule...Hillary could be Satan and Hirschman would support her."

Well the fact is Hillary ISN'T Satan and worthy of support or at least a good listen as is any candidate who might show up on your doorstep or the front steps of 1600 Penn Ave.

The problem with you Mortimer is you look at Hillary and your mind goes: 1. woman 2. democrat 3. liberal democrat 4. what she believes in. When you see some feckless flipflopper like McCain do you thing 1. man 2. McCain Doctrine 3. neo-con wannabe 4. I'll SAY ANYTHING?

When you get candidate "sex" off the plate, as Hirschman does by overreaching (i'll admit that much certainly) we will all be better off...you will most certainly.; 1/31/07, 12:55 AM
hdhouse said...: and Maxine, beating up on Hirschman's hair...hmmmm pot/kettle/black.

No offense.; 1/31/07, 12:56 AM
vbspurs said...: oops: "Pavlovian."

Ann(a) Pavlova?

Cheers,
Victoria; 1/31/07, 1:04 AM
Mortimer Brezny said...: Are you crazy, hdhouse? I was a Bill Bradley supporter in 2000 and a Howard Dean supporter in 2004. Was I not all over this blog denouncing Bob Corker in 2006? Get a clue! The comment was about Hirschman, not Hillary.

But since you brought it up, I don't like Machiavellian warmongerers. If Hillary wants me to listen to what she says, she could start saying something other than "Ignore that I voted to send American kids to their deaths just because I really, really want to be President".; 1/31/07, 2:36 AM
Mortimer Brezny said...: Well the fact is Hillary ISN'T Satan and worthy of support or at least a good listen as is any candidate who might show up on your doorstep

And if Hillary Clinton showed up at my doorstep, my wife would throw the cookies she baked in Hillary's face before my crippled Iraq War veteran son hurled his prosthetic arm at her to revenge the honor of Mahatma Gandhi, who, for the record, does not work at a gas station.

(Ok, none of that is true. But I think it's funny.); 1/31/07, 2:41 AM
Anonymous said...: Linda Hirshman takes Althouse to task for not having read the full text of her 2000-word article.

That may be understandable. While I was slightly afraid the Wigged-Out Bride might turn me to stone, there is no question Hirshman turns my eyes to glass. Talk about a hypnotic effect.

An old-fashioned newspaper editor would have scrawled "MEGO" across her copy and sent it back for rewrite before it ever got near a Linotype machine.

Whether or not Althouse suffered from the same glazed condition only she can say. But backed by wonderful research or not, Hirshman's is an example of prose that anyone can write and no one can read.

And I don't know about her doo. I've fallen asleep before I can raise my eyes to look at her picture.; 1/31/07, 7:15 AM
KCFleming said...: Linda Hirshman wrote: "ASU political scientist Carol Mueller had concluded years ago that this ignorance and lack of interest would lead to volatile, emotional and impulsive behavior in the polling booth."

Well then, there you go. Proof! Proven beyond all reasonable doubt that the Anti-Suffragists of 1906 were right all along:
"Women are creatures of impulse and emotion and did not decide questions on the ground of reason as men did.

What did one find when one got into the company of women and talked politics? They were soon asked to stop talking silly politics, and yet that was the type of people to whom we were invited to hand over the destinies of the country."

Hirshman the Foucauldian Feminist has twisted her dislike for women into believing that either women shouldn't have the right to vote or at a minimum one should take advantage of their irrationality.; 1/31/07, 7:27 AM
MadisonMan said...: If Ms. Hisrchmann is going to complain about my reading comprehension, can I complain as well? I wonder how hard she searched for women who disproved her thesis.

It's really quite easy to find a published hypothesis, find some support (say, in the form of 6 (SIX!) whole Mommies in Maryland), and then conclude you've proven something. All you really have is gammon.; 1/31/07, 7:47 AM
KCFleming said...: Perhaps all Hillary and Obama need do is hand out chocolates to the women, while debates will sway the menfolk.

Doesn't she get any sense for how demeaning she sounds?; 1/31/07, 7:54 AM
Ann Althouse said...: Madison Man: Well, her reading is obviously terrible. Look how she ends this post, saying that I believe that men and women are exactly alike. I never wrote that. She also asserts that I didn't read her whole op-ed. There's no basis for that.; 1/31/07, 8:37 AM
eelpout said...: So this is what passes for intelligent debate on women voting patterns? Poke the Perceived Liberal in the eye with a stick, scurry for cover and let your commentors duke it out for you? Then play the victim. Very Ann Coulter-esque.; 1/31/07, 12:45 PM
sean said...: I'm curious: do Prof. Althouse and madisonman dispute the fairly extensive research that suggests that women are, in general, significantly less informed about politics, both in the sense of performing worse on civics-type questions like "how does a bill become a law" and in the sense of knowing day-to-day such things as which party controls Congress? Can anyone cite a peer-reviewed social science article that reaches the opposite conclusion, even to the extent of not finding any significant difference between the sexes? Or are Prof. Althouse and madison man saying that there is some kind of political knowledge not measured by questions of either of those types?

I take it that no one is making the point that there are more important things than politics, like clothing fashions, although that is true.; 1/31/07, 9:09 PM