"A Daily Mail front page that declared 'Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!' next to a photograph of Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon and British prime minister Theresa May..."

"... has prompted widespread outrage," The Guardian informs us.

Inside the paper there was was more ogling at the female leaders, with a headline reading: “Finest weapons at their command? Those pins!” A column by Sarah Vine referred to Sturgeon’s legs as “altogether more flirty, tantalisingly crossed … a direct attempt at seduction”.

Ludicrous, of course, but The Daily Mail is very trashy, so who looks unless we're in the mood for utter garbage? DM seems to be at least 50% about how women look.

Here's the page:



I love this satirical response to DM:



It's not fair, since these politicos don't work for The Daily Mail, but it fits for my long-time "men in shorts" theme.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O said:

Are there any pictures of the Queen sitting like that? I doubt it. Though, Princess Dianna was well-known for her legs, with some claiming she singlehandedly took down the pantyhose industry. I suspect the DM is making a commentary of sorts. Kind of like Althouse's old "let's take a look at those breasts" post. Show leg, people notice leg. Front and center legs get a highlight. It's worth noting that the satirical response includes men doing leisure activities, whereas the women are in a business/political situation. Are there examples of men in shorts meeting together to discuss significant national transitions? That would seem to be the equivalent.

I said:

You know, this makes me think the photo op really was botched. They don't have to be on low, cushioned chairs. The photographers shouldn't be at such a low angle. It's distracting to have the legs occupying so much foreground, diminishing the significance of the heads.

The legs can be there, and I like seeing women in skirts, but whoever set up the photo op should have arranged things to make the women seem more dignified.

What if the men — properly clad in suits — were absurdly manspreading? We'd all laugh at that.

Here's how Margaret Thatcher looked, wearing a skirt and sitting next to Reagan.

Here she is sledding:



AND: Here's a New Yorker article by one of my favorite writers, Janet Malcolm, about photographing Queen Elizabeth in 2011:

My first impression was of a vaguely familiar elderly couple posing for a formal portrait in a corner of the palatial Minneapolis hotel ballroom where their fiftieth wedding anniversary is being celebrated. The pair were seated on an ornate settee, and my attention was drawn to the woman’s sturdy legs in beige stockings, the right knee uncovered where the skirt of her pale-blue silk dress had hitched up a bit as she settled her ample figure into the settee; and to her feet, in patent-leather pumps planted firmly on the fancy hotel carpet. Her white hair was carefully coiffed, in a sort of pompadour in front and fluffy curls on the sides, and her lipsticked mouth was set in an expression of quiet determination. The man—a retired airline pilot?—was smaller, thinner, recessive. They were sitting a little apart, not touching, looking straight ahead. Gradually, the royal couple came into focus as such, and the photograph assumed its own identity as a work by Struth, the plethora of its details somehow tamed to serve a composition of satisfying serenity and readability.

"I said I wanted to get some outside stuff, and I looked out the window and saw it was getting darker and darker... There wasn’t very much thought to it."

Said Don Hunstein, the man who took the photograph that's on the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" — quoted in his NYT obituary. He was 88.

That photograph has been stared at by a lot of people and inspired many, many fantasies — especially of what it should be like to have (or be) a girlfriend.



IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O said:

Reminds me of a dream I once had. Was it even my dream? It wasn't. It was a dream I once heard about. A dream Meade had one day many years ago, a dream of freewheelin' with a blog hostess.

Judge Posner "corrects" his statement that only Justices Ginsburg and Breyer are "qualified" to serve on the Supreme Court.

I blogged the statement yesterday, here. Maybe Judge Posner read some of your scornful comments, because now there's this:

The second correction I’d like to see made has to do with my saying that none of the sitting Justices (plus Scalia) is “qualified” for the Supreme Court except Ginsburg and Breyer. This could be misunderstood to mean that I think the others lack the necessary paper credentials, of which the most important are graduating from a law school and passing the bar exam (though one of our greatest Justices, Robert Jackson, had just a year of law school, and did not graduate). That was not my intention in using the word “qualified” (if I did use it). I meant good enough to be a Supreme Court Justice. There are something like 1.2 million American lawyers, some of whom are extremely smart, fair minded, experienced, etc. I sometimes ask myself: whether the nine current Supreme Court Justices (I’m restoring Scalia to life for this purpose) are the nine best-qualified lawyers to be Justices. Obviously not. Are they nine of the best 100? Obviously not. Nine of the best 1,000? I don’t think so. Nine of the best 10,000? I’ll give them that.

I wouldn't call that a "correction." It's pretty much what I understood him to mean the first time around.

And as long as I'm going back to that, let me explain what I meant yesterday when I related that Posner post to the post quoting Howard Stern saying that Donald Trump was able to do a good Howard Stern Show interview because he got in "the spirit of the show" which is "to talk like real people." I said:

Talking like a real person... then running for office. That's dangerous... unless you're a saintly real person. Most politicians get on-task, self-censoring, and robotic. That's the normal way to stay out of this kind of trouble.  

To get appointed to the Supreme Court you have to control your speech and not give the President's antagonists material they can use against you. You cannot be Robert Bork. That is, you cannot be an outspoken, interesting person like Judge Posner. That's what disqualifies you politically. So there's reason to say that everyone who is really qualified is politically disqualified.

And I do regret using the word "saintly." I think more highly of saints than that, and I bow to Paddy O's comment:

A saint would have even less chance than Trump. A real saint offends all the powerful, so wouldn't even get a chance to stand on a primary stage.

Whither "the man in the street" and "John Q. Public"?

The other day, talking to Meade, I made the stray observation: "Nobody says 'the man in the street' anymore."

It was a common colloquialism in news reports years ago. It's hard to take note of when something stops getting said. Decades could pass before you notice that something has disappeared from the language. Maybe the death of "the man in the street" began in the 1970s, with the success of the women's movement, as it became less and less possible for mainstream folks to convince themselves that "man" includes woman. Perhaps there was a transitional period in which reporters — perhaps literally in the street with their microphones seeking random comments from passersby — said "the man — or woman — in the street," before that got old and sounded corny and then nobody ever said it again.

Yesterday, Meade and I were watching "Jeopardy!" It's "College Championship" time and all the players are college students. The board full of answers in need of questions is stocked with things that younger people know — pop singers, movie superheroes, school-level math, history, and science and so forth. The kids buzz in and get many questions right. But yesterday, they had an answer that drew absolutely vacant stares and even puzzlement when Alex Trebek revealed the question. The answer was: The middle initial of John Public. The question: What is Q? I laughed a lot, because I could see that from the kids' perspective, that was just some weird nonsense.

Nobody says "John Q. Public" anymore. Like "man in the street," the term embodies the general  public in a single person. This time, that person has a name, John Q. Public. I'm going to assume, it's gone away because we won't accept the idea that the public can be personified as a male, and that also means the whole idea of the general public as one person just doesn't work anymore. If there was ever a period when people adapted to changing times by saying, cutesily,  "John Q. — and Jane Q. — Public," I missed it.

Now, it just seems goofy, I suppose, to people who don't remember the common usage, to hear that John Public has a middle initial and it's Q. What's the Q for? From the OED:

1937   N. & Q. 6 Mar. 177/2   ‘John Citizen’..is not so frequent in American usage as ‘John Q. Public’... It is probably a play on the name of an early president, John Q(uincy) Adams.

I think it's more like Jesus H. Christ. An initial just seems funny. And if you want funny, there's no funnier letter than Q.

As for Jesus H. Christ, well, what's that about? Hilariously, there's a Wikipedia entry for Jesus H. Christ — which, you may realize, is "a vulgarism" that "is not used in the context of Christian worship." Mark Twain referred to it in his autobiography as typical of "the common swearers of the region," so the usage goes way back. Some people attribute it to "the first three letters of the Greek name of Jesus (Ἰησοῦς)... transliterated iota-eta-sigma, which can look like IHS." There's also an idea that the H is for Harold — from mishearing "hallowed be thy name" the Lord's Prayer as Harold be thy name.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O said "Monty Python had man in the street segments":

Henry Rollins on suicide, round 2: The Apology.

Here's our discussion of Rollins's first piece, which was called "Fuck Suicide." My focus was on the effect of an artist's suicide on our perception of the work he has left behind, but there was also material taking the position that it is morally wrong for anyone with children to commit suicide. ("[I]t should be your utmost goal not to traumatize your kids.")

The new piece is headed "An Apology." First, let me reveal that when I wrote the previous paragraph, on proofreading, I was surprised to see that instead of "Fuck Suicide," I had written "Fuck Apology." Is Rollins really sorry and, more importantly, what is he sorry for?

For the last 9+ hours, I have been answering letters from people from all over the world. The anger is off the scale and in my opinion, well placed.

The article I wrote in the LA Weekly about suicide caused a lot of hurt. This is perhaps one of the bigger understatements of all time. I read all the letters. Some of them were very long and the disappointment, resentment and ringing clarity was jarring.

He acknowledges the "anger" and the "hurt" he caused, and he wants those who are enraged to see that he's taken quite a bit of time to read everything and to undertake to write back to everyone.  Acknowledging that your words have hurt doesn't concede that you now see that what you've expressed is wrong.

That I hurt anyone by what I said, and I did hurt many, disgusts me. It was not at all my intent but it most certainly was the result.

Even this does not take the words back or express regret. He could be invoking the principle of double effect, which explains why it is ethical to do something that has a harmful effect when your intent was to do good, to produce a good effect, even when you know the bad effect will also follow. You don't like that bad effect, but you did go ahead and do what caused it.

Next, Rollins — puts himself within the circle of victims of depression:

I have had a life of depression. Some days are excruciating. 

I'm sure many of the letter-writers accused him of not understanding what it is like to be depressed. If you only knew how it feels, you would not say such ignorant things. Those letter-writers are so very wrong.

Knowing what I know and having been through what I have, I should have known better but I obviously did not. 

Known better than... what? To predict how very angry people would get? Is he feeling sorry for himself for attracting all that hate mail?

I get so mad when I hear that someone has died this way. Not mad at them, mad at whatever got them there and that no one magically appeared to somehow save them.

Here he's backing away from a demand for personal responsibility and adopting the belief that the motivation toward suicide is a separate entity beyond the mind of the person: the "whatever," the absence of magical saviors.

I am not asking for a break from the caning, take me to the woodshed as much as you see fit. If what I said has caused you to be done with me, I get it.

This sounds as though he feels sorry for himself, because so many people got mad at him. He's presenting himself as the victim, visualizing the criticism as physical violence, a caning. And, as noted above, he himself suffers from depression, so he's doubly the victim. The "whatever" torments him and the people who hated his "Fuck Suicide" are beating him up.

We finally reach the apology:

I am deeply sorry. Down to my marrow. 

For what? Is this a nonapology?

I can’t think that means anything to you, but I am. Completely sorry. It is not of my interest to hurt anyone but I know I did. 

I say nonapology. He's sorry that what he said hurt, and he knows that being perceived as hurting others is against his interests. He's sorry for himself! And he's determined to flip the narrative: If we're supposed to empathize with the depressed and not criticize, we need to empathize with him, one of the legions of the depressed.

IN THE COMMENTS: betamax3000 said:

Rollins prides himself on being the angry Truth-teller. This works when you are telling the kids what they want to hear. In this instance he misjudged the expected reaction of agreement to his Truth, which calls attention to the importance of his audience in such events. He probably needs to go back to talking tough against Straw Men.

Paddy O said:

His previous article is out of my analog world. I know it existed, yet it has nullified its existence 

"His 'Bone-Dry' Martini features a tincture made from chicken bones that are roasted and dissolved in phosphoric acid..."

"... his Sazerac contains a touch of ambergris, the whale secretion used in perfume production..."

There's some weirdness going on these days in the segment of commerce that goes under the rubric "cocktails."

"Mitt Romney’s son rescued four people from a car crash—then tweeted a photo of himself grinning next to the wreck."

"Bad move if you’re an aspiring politician from a family with a reputation for being out of touch."

“Was first on scene to big accident, see pic of car in the house,” Josh tweeted. “I lifted 4 people out to safety. All ok. Thankful.” Accompanying the tweet was a the moral equivalent of a selfie of Josh standing proudly in front of the wrecked SUV that had just destroyed some homeowner’s kitchen.

Weirdly, he is grinning—the symptom of either a relentlessly sunny personality or else an alarming incapacity to empathize with another person’s horrible luck.

Poor Josh Romney. Even when he's out there saving lives, he must be ever on guard lest he create evidence that can be used to say, one more time, Romney is out of touch.

By the way, Barack Obama is always smiling — including while standing in front of wrecks worse than a car that crashed into a kitchen but didn't injure anyone. Somehow his smile always fits the preferred media framing: Whatever happens, we still love him as a person.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said:

How is that a selfie? Is his right arm 25 feet long with multiple joints?

CWJ said:

[M]y take was that either Josh reflexively smiled when the camera was pointed at him, or that the amateur photographer might actually have said "cheese" or its equivalent.

I said:

Yeah... I can imagine a lot of jokes that could be made, like "Hey, where's Seamus?!!!"

The Althouse Amazon portal: dedicated to the principle of live and let live.

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if you come right out and tell us will we know it's you.

"How Long?" by Patrick Oden (Author)

"A lone rooster sees a lot of all the hens in the flock, but the hen with the largest comb gets a bigger dose of sperm."

A discovery about chickens.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O gets it:

There should be a Bulwer-Lytton type contest for the world's worst written aphorisms.

"Maria would please me muchly by denying herself the Christmas frolic because it’s a fool’s day."

So wrote Jonathan Blanchard, president of Knox College, in 1858, in a letter to his wife Mary, as noted by Paddy O in the comments. Paddy O also says:

Back in the 1800s... very conservative Christians assumed that Christmas was in fact a pagan holiday and would not celebrate it.

The founder and first president of my very Evangelical college, Jonathan Blanchard, did not even want to cancel classes on that day....

Yet, Christian ritual is by its very nature adaptive. Unlike in the Torah, there's no liturgical prescriptions, so Christians are able to adapt within a culture, honoring their savior in culturally imbued ways. For our culture, a day of birth is the day we honor especially those we value. So, to honor the day of Christ's birth is to honor this man, to honor indeed the incarnation itself, making it a theological statement.

Following this analysis, we should approve of the early Christians who fell into the celebration of the Feast of the Sol Invictus. Right?

There's also an issue of theology and culture involved. Do Christians hide from the culture or do they interact with it? How do they interact with it? I very much like the transformative approach, shining light on a culture through culturally understood celebrations. 

I think your answer to my question needs to be yes. It's the old question of whether religions need to be kept pure and, if so, what counts as pure. Paddy goes on to stress "goodness, love, community, giving, peace, joy," so perhaps he would lean toward purity but define what is within that circle of purity to include a set of virtues that are not limited to Christianity or even to religion.

We celebrate that we are to be good, to live at peace, to sing and laugh and hope together. Christmas, much more than Valentine's Day, is really a celebration of the deepest reality of love. We wish each other love on this day, not sentimentality or cheap romance or egotistical lust, but actual deep, fulfilling, holistic love.

May your day be merry and full of life, full of love. On this day may we taste that fullness of love that is at the heart of God's work in this world, sending his son, to us, for us, with us, among us, seeking us out, because God first loved us.

The end of the Post Office?

Is it unthinkable?

The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances.

Why not close it down? Isn't it strange that it's on the brink — or really over the brink... in that Wile E. Coyote way...



... of collapsing entirely... and yet they still haven't eliminated Saturday delivery?

[D]ecades of contractual promises made to unionized workers, including no-layoff clauses, are increasing the post office’s costs. Labor represents 80 percent of the agency’s expenses, compared with 53 percent at United Parcel Service and 32 percent at FedEx, its two biggest private competitors. Postal workers also receive more generous health benefits than most other federal employees....

“The situation is dire,” said Thomas R. Carper, the Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversees the postal service. “If we do nothing, if we don’t react in a smart, appropriate way, the postal service could literally close later this year. That’s not the kind of development we need to inject into a weak, uneven economic recovery.”

My preference is always: do nothing. That's the presumption you need to overcome. It's good for government and it's good for your individual life too. (For decades, my personal motto has been: Better than nothing is a high standard.)

Why not let this propped-up competitor to FedEx and UPS (and the internet) fall? There would be losers but there would also be winners.



Why are we so afraid to find out? Remember what Rahm says:



"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

ADDED: My postman just delivered a 615-page catalog from Restoration Hardware. Why was that a feasible business move for Restoration Hardware? I've never mail-ordered anything from them. Why is the government subsidizing this inefficiency? If I were interested in buying something from RH, I would go to their website. Instead, I have to lug this heavy object to the garbage can/recycle bin? Think of the carbon footprint. I do! But I don't believe the government believes the climate change hype. Because they never act like they do.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O said:

Ann, watch out. Don't mess with the mail. I shouldn't even be talking to you, but I'm telling you as a friend. Here's how it's going to happen: you may be walking. Maybe on a crisp, autumn day just like today. When a mail truck will slow beside you, and a door will open, and a mailman you know, maybe even trust, will offer to give you a lift. And no one will ever see you again!

Qaddafidils.

As in: Pushing up Qaddafidils. Could someone illustrate my coinage by photoshopping (or drawing) a daffodil combined with Qaddafi?

Or Gaddafi/Qaddhafi/Qaddafi/Gaddafi/Kaddafi/Khadafy/Qadhafi/Qadaffi or however the hell you spell that in Latin letters.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O makes this:



Chip Ahoy makes this:

Voir Google.

Voir dire — the juror selection process — is transformed by Google.

While interviews suggest that Internet vetting of jurors is catching on in courtrooms across the nation, lawyers are skittish about discussing the practice, in part because court rules on the subject are murky or nonexistent in most jurisdictions. Ten law firms and five jury consultants declined requests from Reuters Legal to observe them building juror profiles, many saying they weren't sure judges would approve. "Lawyers don't know the rules yet," said John Nadolenco, a partner at Mayer Brown in Los Angeles. "It's like the Wild West."

Is this wrong? An invasion of the juror's privacy? It's so easy to do that it seems to me that making a rule against it is unfair to honest lawyers. (Cue the typical jokes.) I'd say get used to it. This is the world we live in. The information that's out there is out there. Deal with it.

IN THE COMMENTS: bagoh20 says:

I hope it catches on. I'll never have to sit on a jury again. 

Pogo says:

Fake posts implicating jurors and cops and witnesses will escalate.

Paddy O says:

I used do tweet to amuse me, now I'm hoping it'll excuse me.

If twits do tweet, then raps aren't beat.

"Honestly Monica, the web is considered 'public domain'..."

"... and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it!"

Via Instapundit.

The stolen article begins with the line: "'As American as apple pie' isn’t." Ah, funny! Just yesterday, I was saying: "Americans say: as American as apple pie."

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O says:

The Cooks Source Facebook page is hilarious now.

Ha! Poetic justice.

"[M]ore arousing than anything I’d glimpsed in furtive schoolboy copies of Playboy."

That would be the cover photo of "The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan," to the young Sean Wilentz, who has grown up to be a Princeton history prof and author of a book that fawns over Bob Dylan.

Sometimes you walk into a room and know that something is going on even though you don’t know what it is. But that’s no excuse for paraphrasing well-known song lyrics, and Mr. Wilentz sometimes paraphrases excruciatingly. “He was weary, unable to keep a grip, but also unsleepy, and with no particular place to go, he would follow the musical figure to his ‘magic swirling ship,’ out to the inspired windy beach beyond crazy sorrow,” he writes murderously of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” You love this man’s work enough to deliver a book-length tribute? Then just let him speak for himself.

Ha. Do you ever amuse yourself talking just like Bob Dylan approximately? Do you ever find a photograph of a man walking down the street with his girlfriend intensely erotic?



IN THE COMMENTS: Paul Zrimsek said:

This cries out for a photo of The Freewheelin' Meade.

Paddy O hears the cry:

"I think the internet encourages a kind of acedia...."

"... an increasingly listless wandering that can exacerbate a frenetic soul. Fasting from it, whether wholly or in a lurking state that calms our need to say something to everything, can be wonderfully re-centering."

On the occasion of vbspurs's reemergence in the comments — Paddy O. — tells us about an a sin we may not have heard of.

"Obama's lack of fervor may be one reason he rejects and perhaps cannot comprehend the religious passions..."

"... that perennially erupt around the globe and that will never be waved away by mere words. By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like 'scholarships,' 'internships,' and 'online learning' — as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism."

Camille Paglia on Obama's Cairo speech.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. writes:

She seems to want some kind of Mullah Obama, who can parse religions in expert ways so as to provide a path in which all religious devotees can, at the same time, be convinced by their own misunderstanding of others and the wrong nature of their own religious awareness that invokes chaos.

She wants a Messiah, a clear figure who dashes aside millennia of religious and cultural conflicts within a single speech. And, the fact is, people don't even want to listen to a messiah on these topics. The issue is religious but it's so much more than religious. It's about ego, and power, and control, using religion as a tool as much as a source.

Obama's lack of fervor is probably the best thing that can be delivered to a region wracked with fervor. Blessed are the peace-makers, after all.

Fervor is not overcome by more fervor, a waged war of passion. Rather, fervor is overcome by refusing to engage in the frenzy, absorbing and deflecting the rage into something constructive. The sins of the world are not addressed by talking them over in excited and rhetorically impressive ways.

She is conflating fervor with belief and frenzied excitement with persistent character. Most fundamentalists aren't acting out of real fervor for their chosen god, most are acting out of insecure egos who are attempting to manipulate the seen world so as to secure their own identity as dominating and secure their meager faith in some kind of obvious sign of their supposed devotion.

The religious passions of so many are not really religious at all, but are expressions of a deep-seated insecurity in the face of a rather dismissive world.

Obama's approach won't really change anything, but America is not the salvation of the middle east, and cannot leap into the frenzy with the same passion. We are the people who can show, in our actions, what it means to live for something greater -- our children, our future, our peace -- and how a steady approach is the way lives are built and rebuilt.

The Middle East does not need more fervor. It needs calm, but a calm that is trustworthy, and listening, and pushes for real changes in substantive ways within the societies themselves, pointing out that the answer is within not by changing someone else.

"Should I stay with my girlfriend after she gave up sex for religion?"

For some reason, I read that as: Should I stay with my girlfriend after she gave up religion for sex?

I thought that was a more interesting question!

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. said:

"I wonder how many married men would have agreed to marry their wives if she told him in advance that she would never, ever have sex with him, even after they were married."

I would have. I would have been heartily disappointed in some ways but the chance to spend my life with my wife far outweighs the delights of sex.

That's how much I love her. I would be willing to give up even that. Sometimes that's not always a choice. If there was an accident, or something happened that physically prevented sex, that would in no way mean I'd see the relationship as over. It would just mean living the life as it was handed to me, and being the better person for walking with her throughout my life.

As far as the article goes, of course he should break up with her. Unless he's on the same page spiritually they will run into problems no matter what. Good for her that she's taking a step to find more wholeness and inner peace, and it'll be better for her to get away from this guy and find someone who is a much better match.

"You are also a paid astrotroller."

A comment on the "Brokaw's bizarre" post that got me wondering.

I know what an astrotroll/astrotroller is (and it hasn't even got an Urban Dictionary definition, which makes me feel very in-the-know). It's a commenter engaged in astroturfing.

Wikipedia says:

Astroturfing in American English is a neologism for formal public relations campaigns in politics and advertising which seek to create the impression of being spontaneous "grassroots" behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf.

The goal of such a campaign is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event.

Does anyone really think that some of the commenters here are paid representatives of any political campaign or cause? It seems to me that there are many self-appointed boosters of one candidate or another, willing to put in a lot of effort for no pay. I've seen the comments of the particular individual who was accused of astrotrolling, but I can't believe a campaign would pay someone just to post numerous boring/abusive comments. Wouldn't the campaign hire someone competent who would blend in with the style of the blog comments section, seem like a real person, and slip in strong pithy arguments?

The real AstroTurf™ is green, not orange. The real Althouse astrotroll should be offbeat, funny, and smart -- with a memorable pseudonym and some personal details. Up your game if you're getting paid.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. quotes my questions -- "Wouldn't the campaign hire someone competent who would blend in with the style of the blog comments section, seem like a real person, and slip in strong pithy arguments?" -- and says "You miss Titus, don't you?" Well, let me ask you people:

Do you miss Titus?
	Yes! Whatever that dispute was, I wish he'd come back.
	I'd like him back, but "miss" is going a bit far.
	No! He was off-topic/obscene/a troll/unfunny.
	Who's Titus?
pollcode.com free polls

Will pro-choice activists give any moral weight to the unborn?

They will when they have to.



SUBSTITUTE UPDATE: The video is working now.

ADDED: I have long supported abortion rights, but I cringe at the level of moral reasoning in this short clip. Rebecca Traister says that technological advancement is making it harder to support late-term abortion, and the technological advancement she refers to is not the way doctors can keep a very premature baby alive, but the clarity of the images we now have of the being in utero. As if not being able to see someone deprives him or her of moral significance!

We can't see the people in other countries or in prisons, but we still realize we have to take account of them. Could it possibly be that without advanced imaging technology, you just couldn't summon up the picture of what was inside a 7-months pregnant woman? Why should I listen to the moral reasoning of someone with such a dangerous lack of imagination? And I don't mean to let Michelle Goldberg off the hook. Her baby-or-blob quandary is worse.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. responds to my comment ("As if not being able to see someone deprives him or her of moral significance!"):

We would want this to be true more than it is a human reality. There's a reason why images have changed global politics over the years. Auschwitz is simply unimaginable. But there are pictures. Movies like Blood Diamond and Hotel Rwanda makes a difference. In exactly the same way that Uncle Tom's Cabin made an impact.

We honestly have a hard time really caring for those we don't know, and can't see. Most of us anyway. That's why brutality likes to stay hidden and de-humanize the brutalized.

If we don't see the victims our rationalizations work. So we commit to not seeing them. We avoid the images. We avoid the stories. Even if we are not proponents we are saved from the burden of becoming opponents by the victims just being blobs, or uncivilized, or 2/3 human.

They don't feel like we do. Don't have pain like we do. So they can work harder, become conveniences to cast off or prize upon our whim.

Images change that. Because we can't help but see ourselves when we see other humans, in native dress or inside the womb. Our rationalizations become strained, even if we are desperate to hold onto them.

Humans are visual creatures who need visual stimulus for our emotions and empathy. Out of sight, out of mind, out of concern.

Technology is changing that in global affairs and in personal choices that seem to actually not just be about our own private choices at all but involve others-- real, feeling humans--whether we like the idea or not.

This is an important point about the power of photography.