When the very thing you were just saying nobody talks about anymore turns up as the subject of the new Ross Douthat column.

I was going to do one of those blog posts about noticing something that was a big topic that's gone away, but I never got around to it. Douthat notices the topic because someone on some lesser website wrote an article dredging up what was one of the big blog topics of 2005: "Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet."

Douthat calls that "a candidate for the most troubling magazine essay of 2014." In a world of scandals and suffering, women not feeling welcome on the internet is supposed to be the most troubling thing? But we troubled our asses off over the lack of women-welcoming on the internet a decade ago.

[Amanda] Hess takes a reality many people may be only dimly aware of — that female writers come in for an extraordinary amount of abuse online — and fleshes it out with detail, data and personal experience. The anecdotes, her own and others, range from the offensive to the terrifying, but there’s also a thudding, soul-crushing sameness to them: graphic threats of sexual violence, rape and murder, intertwining and repeating.

Douthat goes on about "how online forums should police abuse" and how "the Internet itself" is a "magnifer" of hate, etc. etc.

It's all been said before, but I think I was consistent back in the old days expressing the view that threats and stalking can be serious, whether they arrive by phone or by internet, and when they are, call the police. That's what I've had to do a couple times. But distinguish what we call in First Amendment law a true threat from other kinds of verbal aggression.

There's so much fighting over politics and ideology and whatever on the internet that it's absurd to hold back until you feel welcomed. The people who are already there have territorial feelings and would love to make you feel you can't enter. If you say you're holding back until people stop being so mean, you'll never get in.

In case you don't remember the old discussion that got discussed out, here's the classic "Women and Blogging" post by Kevin Drum that got everyone talking back in March 2005. I see that piece links to something I wrote, here, which linked to something Maureen Dowd wrote in a piece called "Dish It Out, Ladies." That was back before Ross Douthat was her office mate.

"hi i just thought of something/this is the last year you can sing 'when i'm 64.'"

Chris iChats me a birthday greeting.

My advice to Republicans: Don't defend Chris Christie.

Let him twist slowly in the wind — as you used to say in the Nixon era. Let him stew in his own juice — which seems like the appropriate metaphor to me. Here's my thinking:

1. Don't justify or qualify the wrongness he's balled up in, because it is wrong, and clarity about right and wrong is good, and it's a good that has been and still can be associated with conservatism.

2. The wrongness is similar to some wrongness you need to be able to criticize Obama about, notably the IRS scandal. Don't lose the footing you need for that fight.

3. Defending Christie prolongs the news story. The giant, globular body of Christie has eclipsed the Obamacare debacle and the revelations in the Gates memoir (which come just as Fallujah and Ramadi fall to al Qaeda). The stories of the failings of the Obama administration are not merely useful to the GOP, they are far more important to the American people.

4. Whoever created this Christie myth in the first place? Pollsters? Christie polled well because people knew about him. He has had name recognition because he's loud and memorable, and because the media promoted him because he walked with Obama during the Sandy storm and because he delivered the keynote address at the Republican Convention and — to the delight of liberals — without praising the GOP candidate, Mitt Romney.

5. Let Christie sunset and see who else rises. If the donors are making decisions about where the money will flow and therefore who will have a chance to become the GOP candidate in 2016, then let the oversized Christie move out of the way, so you can see who else can serve. Certainly, conservative principles can be better upheld by someone other than Christie. Don't slow the departure of the large loudmouth who — with the help of the liberal media — has made it hard to hear from more modest, more conservative voices. And I don't just mean Scott Walker, whom we need here in Wisconsin. I mean all the potential candidates of that type who are hard to see when there's one big celebrity swanning about.

Enough! Too much! Let him go. He was never good for you anyway.

Paying $350,000 at auction to hunt the endangered black rhino.

Sounds outrageous, but makes sense.

1. The money will be used in the effort to preserve the population of black rhinos from the depredations of poachers (who are strongly motivated by the extremely high market value of rhino horns).

2. There will be expert selection of the animal to be killed, which will be one of the old males "who no longer contribute to the growth of the population and are in a lot of ways detrimental to the growth of the population because black rhinos are very aggressive and territorial." These mean but useless geezers "will kill younger, non-breeding bulls and have been known to kill calves and cows."

But, of course, the auction was protested, because it just feels so wrong to be able to buy a privilege to shooting an endangered beast. Perversely, what the protesters are protecting is their own privilege to feel however they intuitively feel, without the bother of studying and understanding the facts of the natural world.

"Come on, people. If you're going to be a drug addict, be a heroin addict. It has a proven reputation."

Things overheard at Meadhouse this morning.

The newspaper article under discussion was: "Heroin deaths rise in Dane County, drug's toll increasing."

Describing what Chris Christie did to his deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly, Maureen Dowd adopts a "sly" sexual metaphor.

I did not think modern American columnists, especially females who want to be regarded as feminist, would repeat something like this without disapproval, but here's Dowd adopting and admiring it:

Calling his deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly “stupid” and “deceitful,” he threw her off the bridge, without talking to her himself or, as Niall O’Dowd slyly wrote in IrishCentral.com, even extending the courtesy of the old Irish wedding night admonition: “Brace yourself, Bridget.”

What O'Dowd wrote — and unlike the NYT, I'll give you the link — could have been ignored. I would have ignored him. But what's Dowd doing boosting the prominence of it? Obviously, she thinks it's delightful — delightful to invite us to picture firing as fucking and to laugh about the brutality of the way that fucking is delivered to a woman. Her name is Bridget, and there's some old joke about the poor sexual aptitude of the Irish man — I had to Google it — who, confronted with his virgin bride, prepares her for the experience with nothing more than the warning "Brace yourself, Bridget."

I thought the present-day convention was to be careful with humor that involves violent sex. To laugh at this joke — to admire its slyness — is to contribute to what has been called the "rape culture." Not only is the supposed sly humor rape-y, it's perpetuating the sexualization of women in the workplace. There's nothing sexual about the Kelly and Christie story, so why invite us to picture it in sexual terms? I thought we were being careful about things like this. So what explains Dowd's use of O'Dowd's crude humor? Why isn't she afraid of being denounced for sexism and misogyny?

I see 2 possible answers. One is to say that this humor demonstrates the equality of women, since if Christie had fired a man like this, we — at least some of us — would have felt free to engage in rape metaphors, saying "He fucked him" and so forth. If women want to play in big-time politics, they must be subjected to the same metaphors that we use against men.

But has Dowd been deploying metaphors of sexual violence against political males? I don't think so. So I'm going to presume that the second possible answer is the correct one. The thrill of excitement taking down the GOP presidential frontrunner has overcome normal judgment. There's real lust here. And the niceties of refraining from delighting in images of sexual violence don't seem to apply.

"I think this is the first time I ever held a dog on my lap."

I said last Tuesday, posting pictures of me with Mr. Pepper, the Yorkie, here. Irene wrote to remind me that I had in fact held her cute poodle Poppy on my lap, and then I went back over to Irene's to hold Poppy on my lap again and get good photographic proof. Here:

At the Warm-Feet Café..

... let's get cozy.

"On Friday a Wisconsin judge struck a major blow for free political speech when he quashed subpoenas to conservative groups..."

"... and ordered the return of property to the targets of a so-called John Doe campaign-finance probe," write the editors of The Wall Street Journal, who got access to the judge's secret opinion. Judge Gregory A. Peterson wrote that the subpoenas "do not show probable cause" that the targeted conservative groups —  Friends of Scott Walker, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce Inc., the Wisconsin Club for Growth, and Citizens for a Strong America — "committed any violations of the campaign finance laws." The judge, as the WSJ puts it, "bluntly rejects the prosecutor's theory of illegal coordination between the groups and the Walker campaign."

"Most Influential Person of China," "China Earthquake Rescue Hero," "Most Well-known and Beloved Chinese Role Model," "Most Charismatic Philanthropist of China," and "China’s Foremost Environmental Preservation Demolition Expert."

Phrases that appear on the business card of the billionaire Chen Guangbiao, the rich man who's trying to buy The New York Times. This isn't on the card, but he said in an interview, "I'm very good at working with Jews."

My main reason for blogging about this is his use of the word "Foremost" — "China’s Foremost Environmental Preservation Demolition Expert." "Foremost" was the word of the day on this blog 2 days ago, and Chen's usage underscores my point that there's something comical about that word.

By chance, I was just listening to a passage in an audiobook where the word turned up. The book is one of my favorites, Bill Bryson's memoir of childhood, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid."

In 1957, the movie Peyton Place, the steamiest motion picture in years, or so the trailers candidly invited us to suppose, was released to a waiting nation and my sister decided that she and I were going to go....

On the way there my sister told me that many of the characters in the movie—probably most of them—would be having sex. My sister at this time was the world’s foremost authority on sexual matters, at least as far as I was concerned...

“Do you know what sex is?” she asked...

“No, I don’t believe I do,” I said or words to that effect.

So she told me, in a grave tone and with the kind of careful phrasing that made it clear that this was privileged information, all there was to know about sex, though as she was only eleven at this time her knowledge was perhaps slightly less encyclopedic than it seemed to me. Anyway, the essence of the business, as I understood it, was that the man put his thing inside her thing, left it there for a bit, and then they had a baby. I remember wondering vaguely what these unspecified things were—his finger in her ear? his hat in her hatbox? Who could say? Anyway, they did this private thing, naked, and the next thing you knew they were parents.

So I'm making a tag for "foremost," and with this, I declare that I have become The World's Foremost Philosopher of Foremost.

ADDED: I'm not going to retrospectively add the tag to every post on this blog — The World's Wisconsin's Foremost 10-year-old Blog — but I did go back and look at them all. There are perhaps 20, and I think there's only one that's not inside a quote.

Of the quotes, by far the most common usage is in the phrase "first and foremost," which I'd recommend avoiding, since it's a cliché and a redundancy. For example, "I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process." (Click here to see who said that.)

The second most common usage is to avoid 2-word expressions like "most common" and "most important." For example, from an article about manboobs: "The foremost reason is the rise in obesity...."

The best usage of the word — to my ear — is to get a concrete image of something being in front of other things, which is what I did the one time it felt like the right word to me:

The 2008 election cannot be read as a mandate for health care reform, especially not for the aspect of it that is challenged in the current lawsuits: the  individual mandate to buy health insurance. That could not possibly have been foremost in the voters' minds. First, during the campaign, Obama spoke emphatically against it. And second, even after a year of talk about the reform, people don't really understand what the individual mandate is going to be.

"His legacy is dissipating away because people don’t know how to deal with this. They suppress it as if he’s not there."

And now, he is no longer there. Ariel Sharon has died.

"Members of the Satanic Temple have unveiled their design for a 7-foot-tall statue of the devil they want to locate at the Capitol building in Oklahoma..."

"... right next to a monument of the Ten Commandments that has stood since 2012."


Here's the Supreme Court case that thwarts a claim that the Constitution requires that Oklahoma accept the monument, so don't hyperventilate. The question is whether Oklahoma should choose to add this work of art to its monument collection. Or, really, to me, the truly compelling question is whether this group deliberately designed an atrocious monument for the purpose of challenging and aggravating the people of Oklahoma. I assume they did, based on the daft expression on the young boy's face.

Robert Gates writes in his memoir that he was offended that Obama thought people might be writing memoirs.

"I was put off by the way the president closed the meeting. To his very closest advisers, he said, 'For the record, and for those of you writing your memoirs, I am not making any decisions about Israel or Iran. Joe, you be my witness.' I was offended by his suspicion that any of us would ever write about such sensitive matters."

Quoted here.

"Playing in Traffic" — a Barry Blitt cover for the New Yorker.

(Link.)

"After years of talk, 2013 marked a watershed moment in the government’s Cool Japan campaign."

"Which begs the question: Is Japan cool?"

“Cool Japan” means different things to different people. If you’re a fan of manga or anime or “Godzilla” flicks, you might reasonably assume that the moniker covers your interests, which it does. But the Japanese government is using Cool Japan as a catch-all to fund all sorts of cultural endeavors — not just the “usual suspects” of anime and manga, but also fashion, music, food and even traditional arts and crafts. With such a broad focus, it’s all too easy to imagine Cool Japan policies being spread too thin to effect real change in the anime industry, which arguably jump-started the entire Cool Japan phenomenon in the first place.

Isn't government the antithesis of coolness? Getting government on anything makes in uncool. And that's the way it ought to be.

I had never heard the term "Cool Japan," but I see there's a Wikipedia article on the topic. 

The concept of Cool Japan (クールジャパン Kūru Japan^?), along with that of "Gross National Cool," was coined in 2002 as an expression of Japan's emergent status as a cultural superpower. Gaining broad exposure in the media and academia, the brand of "Cool Japan" has been adopted by the Japanese government as well as trade bodies seeking to exploit the commercial capital of the country's culture industry. It has been described as a form of soft power, "the ability to indirectly influence behaviour or interests through cultural or ideological means."

"This should play at JFK for every small town gay man who arrives in NYC."

Says the first comment at the Film Experience article "Let It Go... (In More Ways Than One)" about this sequence from the Disney flick "Frozen":



I got there via this Atlantic article, "Does Prince Charming Really Need to Be Reinvented?," which is partly about the effect of the movie on the minds of young girls — "Does Prince Charming Really Need to Be Reinvented?" — but also says:

Providing girls with this fantasy is arguably important to their psycho-sexual development. ... Indeed, Disney has often appealed to gay boys as much as girls: Pinocchio thinks traditionally masculine activities like drinking, smoking, and swearing will make him a real boy and help him earn his father’s love; in The Little Mermaid, Ariel’s father doesn’t understand her and she wants to be part of another world; and now even Frozen is being credited with a queer subtext with Queen Elsa’s song as a drag anthem.