Headline for another unread column.

"Donald Trump's war on DEI is not about 'merit.'"

That's a piece in Salon by Amanda Marcotte.

I didn't read the column. The headline made me feel as though I'd already read it 100 times. But I did prompt Grok:"Make the argument that the dismantling of DEI is racist" and "Make the argument that the real racists are those who make the argument that the dismantling of DEI is racist."

There's an authenticity to getting robotic things from a real robot. If it's going to be automatic, I'd like a crisp 7- or 8-point list.

Maybe it's not automatic. Maybe I'm being unfair to Amanda Marcotte. But how many chances to surprise do you get in this world?

"Friends enjoying music on speaker during rooftop party at terrace against sky."

Ludicrous caption for "The pleasure principle: How the left wins the abortion wars/The right wants to punish sex — so the only way to win the abortion wars is make sex fun again." 

That's a Salon article by Amanda Marcotte. It's a stock photograph, and they just used the stock photo description. I guess they needed a photo of people having fun sex. 

 How idiotic does this look?

 

I'm certain Salon is fine with offending those who morally oppose abortion. In fact, this article aims to insult them. It says so in text: They're not really about saving babies. They "want[] to punish sex." I'm saying the photo (and caption) are ludicrous because they represent Salon's idea of inviting its readers into the world of sex as fun.

Look at those models. They're so beautiful yet slightly drunk. They're sitting on the edge of the roof. They're ecstatic about a miniature speaker. They have a black friend, tucked away as far back as possible, with his head slightly bowed. The man in this foreground — Is he stretching in joy over whatever music emanated from the elongated rectangle wielded by the central figure? Is he the drunkest of the lot? Or is he lying there, arms outstretched, as our flight path into sex? Girl in Hat gazes back at us: Yes, we can join them. We can experience pleasure.

The puzzling intensity of bile.

It was a beautiful piece. Honest and non-judgmental toward any other choice. Why the intensity of this bile? https://t.co/mB22zDYLoH

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 9, 2021

Let's take a closer look at that bile. Is there bile at all?

I would like to thank this headline/byline combo for helping me set a record for the quickest "gross, pass" I've ever uttered in my life.

Bile is anger. "Gross, pass" is disgust.  One might perhaps base an entire career on examining the anger/disgust distinction, but I think the key distinction is the direction of the negative emotion. Anger urges you to take aggression at the source of your outrage. Disgust sends you away. You shun. It's the difference between wanting to attack what you hate and wanting to make sure you don't get any of that on you. Marcotte experiences disgust — "gross" — and immediately shuns — "pass." Her measure of the intensity of disgust is the shortness of the space between the emotion and the reaction. She's open and proud of the absence of rational thought. It's a feeling and a decision all at once — "gross, pass."

Having decided not to expose herself to the text of the article, Marcotte is free to enjoy herself: "The funniest part" — funniest part of the headline — "is framing 25 like it's some daringly young age. The average age of first childbirth is 26." Is that really funny? I haven't read the op-ed yet myself. I saw it, did a quick skim, and decided it wasn't bloggable, but I didn't think — like Marcotte — that my rejection of it was bloggable (i.e., tweetable). I'm going to read it in a minute, but I want to say that Marcotte comes off as privileged. I'm guessing that if the average age is 26, that includes a lot of very young women who are not spending their late teens and early 20s acquiring higher education and beginning career, that is, are not the sort of women who are reading NYT op-eds about timing their reproductive life. 

"Joseph Goebbels didn’t die. He just got a job at Hallmark."

Joseph Goebbels didn’t die. He just got a job at Hallmark. https://t.co/oKKOyYxXa6

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) December 26, 2019

ADDED: The linked article at Salon is "Hallmark movies are fascist propaganda/Forget 'Triumph of the Will' — the most insidious authoritarian propaganda comes in the form of schmaltz" by Amanda Marcotte. Isn't this like what Jonah Goldberg did — from the right — in his book "Liberal Fascism"? Goldberg wrote:

For generations our primary vision of a dystopian future has been that of Orwell’s 1984. This was a fundamentally “masculine” nightmare of fascist brutality. But with the demise of the Soviet Union and the vanishing memory of the great twentieth-century fascist and communist dictatorships, the nightmare vision of 1984 is slowly fading away. In its place, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is emerging as the more prophetic book. As we unravel the human genome and master the ability to make people happy with televised entertainment and psychoactive drugs, politics is increasingly a vehicle for delivering prepackaged joy. America’s political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now more and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered....

The history of totalitarianism is the history of the quest to transcend the human condition and create a society where our deepest meaning and destiny are realized simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it. It cannot be done, and even if, as often in the case of liberal fascism, the effort is very careful to be humane and decent, it will still result in a kind of benign tyranny where some people get to impose their ideas of goodness and happiness on those who may not share them...

Make people happy with televised entertainment... sounds like the Hallmark channel. So let's read the Amanda Marcotte thing, published jollily on Christmas at Salon:

When most of us think about fascistically propagandistic movies, we think of the grotesque grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl's films celebrating the Third Reich... even in Nazi Germany, the majority of movies approved by the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, were escapist and feather-light, with a Hallmark movie-style emphasis on the importance of "normality."

There's plenty of reason that empty-headed kitsch fits neatly in the authoritarian worldview. It's storytelling that imitates the gestures of emotion without actually engaging with real feeling... Hallmark movies, with their emphasis on returning home and the pleasures of the small, domestic life, also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world, which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive white nationalism that we see growing in strength in the Donald Trump era.

Both Marcotte and Goldberg are afraid of oppressive government and think cheap televised entertainment is softening the people up to accept it.

"watch whiteness work."

watch whiteness work. https://t.co/wjcVGm4Akq

— deray (@deray) January 21, 2019

(DeRay Mckesson is a Black Lives Matter activist — Wikipedia.)

ADDED: Another we're-not-sorry angle:

“Assertions to the contrary are simply false.”

We’re to believe a 16-year-old wrote this statement. Huh. https://t.co/rKPw0C38VZ

— John Aravosis 🇺🇸 (@aravosis) January 21, 2019

I certainly hope the kid is not all alone. He should have adult counseling! I thought the statement sounded genuine — like a teenager telling a straight story — but I assumed that meant he had a good lawyer. And he should have a good lawyer.

AND: Here's a third approach to digging in:

Cannot be stared enough: Racist boys were there for a rally calling for pregnancy to be used as a weapon to subjugate women. They were wearing hats celebrating a man who bragged about assaulting women.

Their claims not to be bigots are pre-emptively nonsense.

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) January 21, 2019

"Even talking about this… Men get so mad when they hear women talk about them this way. They get so defensive."

I watched that video a few days ago, and it's haunting me. Something about the demeanor of the 2 women — Amanda Marcotte and Fiona Helmsley — is just so weirdly enervated as they bemoan the deplorable energy ("fragility") of men.

More transcript here, at Salon:

I think the single greatest threat, and I’ll say to humanity, at the moment is male fragility, and men just not being able to process their feelings of insecurity, their feelings of anger....

What they were chanting in Charlottesville: ‘You will not replace us.’ Who is trying? Who is trying to replace you?...

I think it’s just the way that society raises them. Women are raised to have some concern about the way that they look, and they’re encouraged to be more sensitive. A lot of men aren’t....

So they're taking the nurture side of the old nature-or-nurture argument. And they're happier with women because they've been nurtured to care about how they look? Shouldn't a feminist oppose the nurturing of women to care about how they look and whether they're "more sensitive"? That sounds as though low-level vanity is meritorious.

And oddly enough those Charlottesville Alt-Right guys were concerned about how they look. There's this (in Vice):

... Andrew Anglin, who runs the popular hate site the Daily Stormer, published a truly astounding blog post... that explains how the movement he helped build should market itself [at the Charlottesville rally]....

"Bottom-feeder at Salon writes such a weak hit piece about me that I decided to tweet it."

Bottom-feeder at Salon writes such a weak hit piece about me that I decided to tweet it: https://t.co/0VaLErgTOl

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 8, 2016

"Why Can't All Ashley Madison Hacking Victims Be Josh Duggar?" is the wrong title for this piece by Amanda Marcotte.

Because this is the core of it:

But cheating is about violating a deeply personal agreement between two people. If the person you’re with doesn’t care if you sleep with other people, it’s not cheating. It’s all about an agreement that you decide between yourselves, and like all such agreements, the only people who should care what you do are people who your behavior directly affects. It’s not the business of the world at large.

That's the second-to-the-last paragraph, the serious point. The final paragraph serves up some cheap political amusement:

Unless you’re Josh Duggar, of course. Or anyone else who fights publicly to use government interference to mess with the private sexual choices of consenting adults. If you fight for the government to limit or ban gay people’s marriages or women’s reproductive choices, then your sex life is our business. If only there were a way to do a targeted search of Ashley Madison data for that, while leaving everyone else alone.

I sort of agree with that observation, even though I'm a big proponent of equal justice and think it's an important test of any rules we have that we want them to apply to people we like just as much as to those we despise. But the Ashley Madison data dump isn't a rule we've adopted as a group. It's something a small bunch of hackers inflicted on us, and, like a car accident or a falling meteoroid, we can, without hypocrisy, hope that it hits someone we didn't like anyway. And, speaking of hypocrisy, there is something special about exposing the hypocrites. Anyone who's made a public show of disparaging the sexual morality of others had better uphold high standards privately, because there will be little sympathy if we catch them sinning (which seems to happen so often that I always assume public perseveration about sexual morality is motivated by guilt about sexual sin).

I've almost talked myself out of my original premise that the second-to-the-last paragraph is more significant. It is what I started this post to talk about. I want to take issue with the idea that "cheating is about violating a deeply personal agreement between two people," that "It’s all about an agreement that you decide between yourselves," that "the only people who should care what you do are people who your behavior directly affects," and "It’s not the business of the world at large." Hello?! We're talking about marriage. Why was same-sex marriage recognized as a constitutional right? It wasn't — I've read the opinion — so that couples could get access to the economic benefits of marriage. It was because same-sex couples deserved equal respect from society as a group. If it were just a "deeply personal agreement between two people," then the legal status of marriage would not have mattered.

Obviously, married couples can and do work out their own relationship in private, and they may have understandings about sex with outsiders to the marriage. Sometimes it's because — in Marcotte's crude language — "the person you’re with doesn’t care if you sleep with other people," and sometimes it's because "the person you’re with" — that is, your husband or wife — has pressured or talked you into accepting nonexclusivity. Sometimes it's because you blind yourself to something that, confronted, would destroy what you want to keep.

But when you take on the legal status of marriage, you are including the rest of the world. You may have the idea — perhaps based on enlightened self-interest and choice — that marriage for you isn't exactly what marriage is for the general public. It may be a festival of polyamory for you and your spouse. But it is not a thoroughly private arrangement. You invited the world in. You interacted with the government and acquired a status of "recognition, stability, and predictability." And that made it the public's business. Flooding into your personal life came all these outsiders' ideas about what marriage means.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jane the Actuary said: "So Ann Althouse is publicly coming out as saying that marriage, by definition, requires sexual exclusivity? Good!" And I said:

How do you figure I said that?

I said that when you marry, you deliberately take on a status that is about public recognition of your relationship, and that closes off your argument that what you are doing is purely private. You've invited public judgment.

You could still say: 1. The public are jerks to express judgment especially where they don't know the details of our relationship. 2. I'll ignore what people say and do what I want and the govt still can't take away my marital status unless we seek divorce, and 3. Marriage ought to be understood to include the privately arrived at relationship between the spouses, including greater sexual freedom.

The Ashley Madison problem has to do with one's public reputation, which is based on the public's idea of what is good, and which tends to be that married couples should be sexually faithful. So, it's going to hurt your reputation to look like an adulterer. That doesn't say thing about what marriage is "by definition."

Analogy: It hurts your reputation (in present day America) to be known to be an atheist, but that doesn't establish that God exists. 

Should we — can we — ban selective abortion?

Over at Slate, Amanda Marcotte is writing about a bill in the Indiana legislature that would ban abortion motivated by the disability including "a mental disability or retardation; a physical disfigurement; Scoliosis; Dwarfism; Down syndrome; Albinism; Amelia; and physical or mental disease."

Bills banning sex-selective abortions are trendy among the anti-choice set because, while those abortions aren't actually common in real life, it's politically expedient to traffic in ugly stereotypes of daughter-hating Asian immigrants.... Banning the non-existent problem of sex-selective abortion is an easy way to grandstand and score "pro-life" points while preening about how pro-woman you are. But banning abortions for fetal abnormalities could negatively affect all sorts of women—and their husbands—including those that tend to vote Republican.

Such ugliness to that rhetoric! This is such a sad subject, from either side. Show some empathy! Show some soul! 

The conundrum of the monogamous bisexual.

Larry King is very old and he asks questions, often (and quite successfully) from the dumb guy perspective, but his simple, conversation-advancing "Are you a non-practicing bisexual?" and "But you were bisexual?" — asked of Anna Paquin — moved Amanda Marcotte to tongue lash the elderly interviewer.

Your sexuality may exist inside your head, but most people are going to judge your orientation by who you’re partnered with. And so monogamous married people tend to “read” as gay or straight, but some may actually be bisexual. “When you're bisexual or pansexual, but you're in a long-term relationship, your bi/pansexuality can become invisible,” Greta Christina, the author of Coming Out Atheist and expert on all things coming out sexuality-related or not, explained to me. “People often assume that you're gay or straight, based on who you're involved with now—and it kind of eradicates your history and your identity.”

This is a problem because, as the gay rights movement has shown, visibility helps—a lot. There are many myths that proliferate about bisexuals, including the myth that they are oversexed and can’t be monogamous, a myth that King was pushing with this line of questioning whether he intended to or not....

Inevitably when you start having discussions about this, someone feels the need to pop in and say, “Why do we need labels at all?” But the problem of bisexual invisibility shows exactly why we need labels and how much good they really can do. Naming a phenomenon makes it visible. Populating that name with examples that people can relate to makes it understandable. People who are putting their face out there and declaring their bisexuality are helping demystify it. Though it would be nice if they could do it without being peppered by a bunch of rude questions from Larry King.

I think it's rude to say that Larry was rude. Also to call him dumb. Though it's kind of complimentary to characterize his questions as a peppering. I'd thought he was considered maddeningly bland. But good for Larry that anybody still cares what he might be implying and for getting reasonably relevant pop culture characters to receive a peppering of his old-man questions.

As for bisexuals married to opposite-sex partners, do they have a special exception from the usual rule that a married person ought not to talk about his or her sexual attraction to persons who are not his or her spouse?  If they do, is it because we think they have a more persuasive argument that there's something they want that they're not getting from their spouse, or is it the seemingly loftier goal of increasing visibility for a group that monogamy would otherwise erase? 

And I suspect half my commenters are about to write something along the lines of: Why does anyone need to talk about the orientation of their sexuality? How about everybody shutting up about it?

"Look, you wait until they get to be 20-years-old, the only picking that’s going to take place is your pocket."

"You got to marry these girls when they are about 15 or 16, they’ll pick your ducks. You need to check with mom and dad about that of course."

So said Phil Robertson — back in the news, not because he said something edgy again, but because his antagonists dug up a 5-year old video. It took me a while to grasp that "pick your ducks" means pluck the ducks that you bring home (and not choosing which ducks to shoot). Robertson, we're told in the linked article, married his wife in 1966 when she was 16 (and he was 20). They'd been dating since she was 14 (and he was 18).

This material is right there in Phil Robertson's autobiography, "Happy, Happy, Happy," which has been out since last May. I have it in my Kindle. At page 52:

Miss Kay was the perfect woman for me. I was sixteen and she was fifteen when we were married. Nowadays some people might frown on people getting married that young, but I knew that if you married a woman when she was fifteen, she would pluck your ducks. If you waited until she was twenty, she would only pick your pockets. Now, that’s a joke, and a lot of people seem to laugh at it, but there is a certain amount of truth in it. If you can find a nice, pretty country girl who can cook and carries her Bible, now, there’s a woman. She might even be ugly, but if she cooks squirrels and dumplings, then that’s the woman you go after.

Seems like he's been telling that pluck-a-duck joke for a long time. Anyway, how old was Phil when he married Kay and how old was she? The stories in the news and in the autobiography don't match. And what was the law in Louisiana at the time? I think (looking casually on line at what the law is today) that if you're under 18, you need both parents' consent, and if you're under 16, you need a court order.

A page later in the autobiography, Robertson quotes the New Testament (1 Peter 3: 1–6): "Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands...."

You have to go to the Bible yourself if you want to get the significance of "in the same way." The antecedent is not about husbands submitting to their wives but servants submitting to their masters ("not only to the kind and gentle but also to the overbearing"). But the text goes on to tell husbands what to do: "live considerately with your wives, bestowing honor on the woman as the weaker sex." But that's not quoted in Robertson's book. His Biblical snippet goes on to counsel against "outward adornment" and in favor of the beauty of a woman's "inner self," manifested as "a gentle and quiet spirit." And Robertson tells us that's exactly what Miss Kay is. She doesn't wear much makeup, and she's beautiful "on the inside and the outside."

Kay and I always were the perfect match. I was our high school quarterback, and she was a cheerleader. 

Speaking of gentle, quiet beauty on the inside, the quarterback goes for the cheerleader. We're told that she sought him out, and they dated until duck season, when he decided that he was going to spend all his free time hunting and that Kay couldn't go along, because "Women are a lot like ducks— they don’t like mud on their butts. I figured she would just get in the way." But then Kay's father died suddenly, when she was only 14, so he "went to her daddy’s funeral, and we made eye contact," and he "asked her out a few weeks later, and we’ve been together ever since." And:

My qualms about taking Kay into the woods were quickly relieved. And Kay wasn’t only a spectator. She helped catch baitfish, gather worms, hook them onto trotlines, and of course, pick ducks by plucking their feathers to prepare them for cooking. You know you have a good woman when you return home from a hunt and she’s standing on the front porch, yelling, “Did y’all get anything?” Before I repented, Kay also drove my getaway car when I was hunting out of season. I always knew my woman was waiting for me on the other side of the woods if I got into trouble.

The last page of the book is "A Note From Kay," in which she describes her childhood dreams of the  man she would marry.

What I didn’t know when I found the man who filled my dreams was that I had found a diamond in the rough.

Which is a way to say, he did not fit those dreams, not for a long time.

One of the great tragedies I see is people not putting every effort into the foundation of their marriage. My grandmother told me that it’s one man and one woman for life and that your marriage is worth fighting for. We had a few hard and bumpy years, but prayer, patience, and some suffering and hope — plus remembering an old lady’s words — were what got me through the difficult times. We have given it our all for our marriage and family, and my dreams did come true.

What do we want to say about high school sweethearts marrying (in a world where most of us seem to accept them having sexual intercourse)? She loses her father and her boyfriend closes in on her, limiting her life choices and not really ready to be a man and treat her right. But she sticks to the path she chose, and she makes good, the way wives have traditionally done, and few young women are inclined to do these days.

Here's how Slate's Amanda Marcotte presents the story: "Phil Robertson Says Girls Should Be Married Off at '15 or 16.'" The headline is bad, because "married off" expresses the point of view of the parents of a young woman. Robertson spoke from the perspective of a man looking for a wife who will treat him well. Marcotte goes on to speak from this perspective, but she gets that wrong by assuming he was addressing older men: "His advice for a happy marriage is to make like R. Kelly and hang out in high-school parking lots."

Should 2 teenagers — close in age — marry? We've drifted toward no, I think, mostly because we accept sex outside of marriage, which we do in large part because of birth control (and abortion) and the various sexual practices that don't lead to pregnancy, including the anal sex that we know Phil Robertson can't get his mind around. Before we sneer at the idea that teenagers should marry, we need to be honest about what we are accepting.

What Rush Limbaugh is almost surely planning to say to those who are outraged at his rape analogy.

Rush Limbaugh likes to throw out things that he knows liberal media types will propagate. He knows what gets them, and he's using them to go viral. It doesn't always work out right for him, and the Sandra Fluke incident ended up hurting him, but often it creates excitement around his show and keeps his reputation relatively fresh. People love him and hate him, and that's keeps the old radio show going.

This weekend lots of the sort of people who love to hate him are raging about the analogy he used in talking about the ending of the Senate filibuster:

Let’s say, let’s take 10 people, in a room in a group. And the room is made up of six men and four women, okay? The group has a rule, that the men cannot rape the women. The group also has a rule that says any rule that will be changed must require six votes of the ten to change the rule.

Every now and then some lunatic in the group proposes to change the rule to allow women to be raped. But they never were able to get six votes for it. There were always the four women voting against it, they always found two guys, well the guy that kept proposing that women be raped kinda got tired of it. He was in the majority and he said, you know what, we’re going to change the rule. Now all we need is five."

And the women said, "You can't do that."

"Yes, we are. We're the majority, we're changing the rule." Then they vote. Can the women be raped? Well, all it would take then is half the room. You could change the rule to say three. You could change the rule say three people want it, it's gonna happen. There's no rule.

We've got Carolyn Bankoff in New York Magazine ("a vile, profoundly inappropriate rape analogy"), Amanda Marcotte ("The rape comparison is distasteful and casually misogynist"), and Politico collects the tweets:

Ana Marie Cox, a political columnist for the Guardian US, wrote that “Limbaugh using a rape analogy to explain the filibuster really takes mansplaining to a level I never imagined” — or as ChartGirl.com founder Hilary Sargent dubbed it, “rape-splaining.” Media Matters research fellow Oliver Willis tweeted that “rush limbaugh really games out how you could theoretically vote to rape women. hes just throwing it out there folks,” while fellow Media Matters colleague Todd Gregory called it “dumb, glib bullshit” that “is such a perfect encapsulation of rape culture, it should be put in a museum.” And The Huffington Post’s Elise Foley and Sabrina Siddiqui also weighed in, with Foley tweeting “Class act, that guy” in response to Siddiqui’s comment, “In today’s edition of offensive rape analogy.”

Come on. It's a trap. Don't you know your most basic famous aphorisms about democracy? "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." Usually attributed, probably incorrectly, to Benjamin Franklin, it vividly drives home the problem with simple majority rule.

I'm virtually 100% certain that on his Monday show, Rush Limbaugh will laugh at his critics for their ignorance of the famous aphorism. He can easily point out that he did not minimize the seriousness of rape. In the aphorism, the lamb is killed by the wolves. His analogy substitutes rape for killing, men for wolves, and women for the lamb. Really, it's men who are getting the negative stereotype, so misogyny is exactly the wrong word. A lamb is the very symbol of innocence. And it is killed by those terrible, selfish wolves. Knowing Rush, I predict he'll pivot to a discussion of abortion: Maybe women don't realize that killing an innocent is terrible. Maybe that's why they didn't understand the workings of his analogy.

"Even though the feminist project has been underway for decades now, plenty of people still view women doing work..."

"... especially nonservice work, in the same boggled way that you look at a dog walking on its hind legs. Is it still a dog? How can this be?"

Writes Amanda Marcotte, mangling or accidentally getting close to the famous Samuel Johnson quote:

I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

It's not that anyone thinks the woman preaching ceases to be a woman or the dog walking on its hind legs ceases to be a dog. It's that people act impressed simply because it happened and fail to hold the creature to the normal standard that would apply to men. I think Johnson's quote is regarded as quite sexist, but — looking only at this quote and not the whole body of Johnson's sayings and writings — it can almost be defended. It's patronizing to mention that a woman did something as if that's remarkable. Did she do it well? If you think women are as capable as men, that should be the question. But Johnson speaks in an aphoristic form that implies that women will never be able to preach well. He did not say — or Boswell did not transcribe his saying —You say a woman preached as you might say a dog walked on his hind legs; let me know when a woman preaches well.

"If he's good enough to marry, he'll still be around when you're ready to make that leap."

Amanda Marcotte, quoted by James Taranto, who says:

Let's translate that from feminist-speak to English: If the romance fails, his inadequacy as a man is entirely to blame; you have no responsibility for making it work.

If you follow that advice, you're likely to end up alone. Marcotte seems to imagine it will be a consolation that you'll be resentful too.

Let me translate that back into feminism (this will be like "recursive translation"): You're free to absorb the risk that the right man at the wrong time will be in the wrong place when it's the right time.

ADDED: My translation reminds me of the analog of pregnancy and abortion as seen by feminism: You're free to end a healthy pregnancy that comes at the wrong time, but you take the risk that there will be no healthy pregnancy when it's the right time.

You're entitled to your freedom, but freedom can only be exercised in the real world with all its limitations — including nature and, in a free society, the freedom of other people.

"Mother of Two Princeton Men Scolds College Women For Showing Insufficient Enthusiasm for Marrying Princeton Men."

Scoffing at what might be good advice

The advice: "Find a husband on campus before you graduate.... you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you."

The scoff — by the oft-off Amanda Marcotte — is that the woman is really only concerned about her sons and she's embarrassing them badly.

Your thong?!

Why assume a thong?!!!

"Should you get divorced in order to make your children better people?"

"What a good parent you are for asking, but, no, of course not: There are easier ways to get the benefits of being non-religious to your children than going through a divorce."

France provides free birth control to girls aged 15 to 18 — and bars doctors from notifying parents.

Amanda Marcotte approves:

Straightforward, almost boring health care policy story about a government taking sensible, cost-effective measures to curb a public health problem. But the story isn't really about health care policy — the underlying narrative here is that the French are yet again making American politicians look like a bunch of out of touch prudes....

Needless to say, the measure sailed through the French legislature without any kind of political battle...

"I suppose it could be a coincidence that lengthy breast-feeding and attachment parenting..."

"... that interferes heavily with maintaining a career came into style right as it became passé to pressure women to downplay their ambitions for the sake of men, but it just seems highly unlikely."

A sentence, among the many sentences I read today, that I thought you might want to digest... maybe diagram.

From a short blog post made up of sentences like that, which one of those readability calculator devices puts at the 16.26 grade level. In other words: suspect obfuscation, AKA bullshit.

"Obama Punks the GOP on Contraception."

That's the spin from Slate's Amanda Marcotte (and I think she may have it right!):

After two solid weeks of Republicans rapidly escalating attacks on contraception access under the banner of "religous [sic] freedom," Obama finally announced what the White House is proposing an accomodation [sic] of religiously affiliated employers who don't want to offer birth control coverage as part of their insurance plans. 

Yeah, rotten spelling/proofreading, but give her a chance. Normally, I can't stand Marcotte, but I think she's homing in on the truth:

In those situations, the insurance companies will have to reach out directly to employees and offer contraception coverage for free, without going through the employer. Insurance companies are down with the plan... contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it's cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. 

Remember the economies of the "blue pill" and the don't-call-them-death-panels for end-of-life human beings? There's lots of money to be saved at life's onset. Insurance companies (and the safety-net-providing government) stand to save lots of money through pregnancy — and child! — prevention. It makes economic sense to incentivize the use of birth control. A woman has a right to choose whether to have children or not, but the government may nudge the woman toward its preferred choice. It is good economic policy to push women to avoid having babies until they've got a stable relationship and a solid economic foundation, so clear the path to the relatively inexpensive pills and poisons and devices that keep the sperm and the egg from acquiring a will of their own.

Another point, which Marcotte doesn't make, is that many, many healthy individuals are about to be forced to spend thousands of dollars a year on health insurance, and there needs to be a decent flow of seemingly "free" things so that they don't get too upset about it. Birth control is perfect for this. It's something women use — continually — when they are perfectly healthy. Face it: Birth control is about preventing an important bodily function from working. Now, the birth control won't be free, because everyone paying into the insurance pool will be covering the cost, but the women who use the birth control will have the feeling that they're getting something. That's a special kind of palliative care that the designers of Obamacare are going to want to cover.

So did Obama "pull a fast one" on conservatives, as Marcotte surmises?

He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women's access to contraception, which is what this has always been about....

Now, those who complained about the old rule have a choice whether to move on to some other traditional-values issue or to find a way to say that the problem is still there. If they do the latter — as Rush Limbaugh did a series of semi-coherent rants on his show yesterday — they're going to annoy/scare the millions of women who use contraception and the millions and millions of women and men who want other people to use contraception. (Don't forget the "Freakonomics" theory connecting the avoidance of unwanted pregnancy to a reduction in crime.)

Marcotte thinks the conservatives will give up on this issue and exults that "the damage has already been done."

[W]hat most people will remember is that Republicans picked a fight with Obama over contraception coverage and lost. This also gave Obama a chance to highlight this benefit and take full credit for it. Obama needs young female voters to turn out at the polls in November, and hijacking two weeks of the news cycle to send the message that he's going to get you your birth control for free is a big win for him in that department.

And let's not forget — Marcotte doesn't mention this — that the birth control fracas peaked precisely when a story was breaking that should have made the administration look weak on a women's rights issues: the decision limiting women in the military. As I noted yesterday, Michelle Obama was deployed on a nutrition-in-the-military mission on the very day that decision was announced. So there is good reason to think the Obama campaign is sharply focused on manipulating the minds of constituents who care about women's issues.

As Marcotte said: "It's all so perfect that I'm inclined to think this was Obama's plan all along."