"If a man wants to bring a rival down a peg or two, he simply has to hold the door open for him."

"While the gesture of goodwill might be seen as gentlemanly when it is done for a woman, psychologists claim it is likely to diminish a man’s self esteem. Since it is unusual for men to hold open the door for men, it could be taken to imply that the recipient looks needy and vulnerable. The act is likely to clash with their masculine identity and leave them deflated...."

Things I learned reading Pandagon, which I did this morning because, as noted earlier "in search of blogging inspiration... I impulsively opened all the bookmarks in my file labeled 'left.'"

I look forward to a new era of male domination in which men aggressively vie for superiority by being polite and considerate to other men. It's like a "dick move" but not dickish at all.

"Speech and publication mean something very different from what the US founding fathers meant. It’s a very laddish argument..."

"... which is not to say that women may not also support it: but the fact that Facebook relies on it means they are not listening to women and to an alternative perspective that women may put. That’s the real issue here. Facebook needs to start listening to women. No joke."

You lose control of your writings once you hand them over to a 3d party like Facebook or Google... and not just because the government can get to it. What if Facebook decided to delete everything The Women found misogynist? What if Google decided to delete all the blogs that it deemed hurtful to women... or to the Democratic Party?

***

Here's that discussion I had back in 2011 with Bob Wright about whether "free speech" means anything outside of the individual's interaction with government.

I'm beginning to understand why that lefty blogger asked Axelrod if he knew the term "hippie punching"?

Tobin Harshaw reviews the incident in the NYT. He quotes me. You may remember that I said I'd never heard the term (and I've been something of a hippie since the original days of the hippie movement). The light bulb went off in my head when I scrolled down to the comments:

Hippy punch is frequently used on many blogs I read: Pandagon, Eschaton, Hullabaloo, to name just three. They've been using it since 2008, at least. They are among the more popular blogs on the left -- it shows that while the White House may have some sense that the so-called professional left is upset, they don't care enough to read what they are writing.

Ah! It's a shibboleth. This is a term used within an in-group. If you don't know the term, you reveal that you don't read those blogs. Here was Axelrod trying to get the lefty bloggers to help Obama out, but — gasp!!! — he doesn't even read their blogs. How devastating for them! LOL. Imagine if Axelrod sat around reading Pandagon, Eschaton, and Hullabaloo?

For the annals of anti-Althousiana.

It's Jesse at Pandagon. I clicked his profile. Jesse Taylor. But no picture. I wanted a picture because it seemed really relevant to the issue at hand. So I did a Google image search and came up with this:



Not so sure I want to pick a fight with him.

ADDED: Actually, the blogger Jesse Taylor looks like this. You can do your own snark. I'm living on love.