Additional Corner hilarity: someone ought to tell n00b Lee Edwards about his colleague Andrew McCarthy’s views. Edwards puts forward Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer as a more plausible Nobel Peace prize-winner, as she supports peaceful dissent from the Chinese government over its “deliberate and often brutal campaign to suppress the Uighur language, culture, and religion (the Uighurs are Muslim).” I couldn’t agree more, but there’s that niggling “Muslim” detail. McCarthy opposed the release of any of the 17 Uighur detainees at Guantanamo, calling them “alien jihadists” who are “affiliated with a terrorist organization and have received terrorist paramilitary training.” Likewise, during the recent conflict between Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang, McCarthy deferred to “accounts of some witnesses to state-controlled media” in his sober assessment entitled “Hard to Believe the Lovable Uighurs Could Be Involved in Terrorism . . . ” Then again, this is the same McCarthy who observed that “as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.” Thus, as a man of the hard Right, McCarthy is more comfortable with a totalitarian Communist regime than he would be with a free Chinese society. I feel something has gone sort of wrong there, but—SCARY MUSLIMS OMG!

I’d like to share a little anecdote from my college years. I had a Roman History prof who would frequently make comments on my appearance, in front of the gathering class, as I made my way to my seat in the front row (because I was a very diligent student!). And at a gathering of students and faculty I decided to leave and put on my coat, but then got sidetracked into a discussion with him and said I needed to take my coat off. And he said, you can do that but if you do I’m going to stare at your breasts—but you knew that when you got that tattoo there. (The tattoo is like 3 inches below my clavicle anyway, thank you.) He actually said that to me! And then, when I was applying to graduate school, I had to approach my advisor with a problem, because normally I would ask this prominent scholar who gave me an A+ (which, I may say, I thoroughly deserved) in Roman History to write a recommendation, but I knew from previous experience that I didn’t actually want to be alone with him in his office. And so my advisor had to convince another professor, of equal status, to write me a recommendation that was somewhat fictional, on the assurance that when I did have a class with him that term he would find me everything promised, etc. He kindly did so and didn’t regret his decision. So where I’m going with this is, that fucking sucked and was a terrible experience for me, and Dr. Kealy is a fucking asshat who is even now making the lives of his attractive female students needlessly miserable. And just FYI, dsquared’s reliable, not-making-a-big-deal-out-of-it, stand up feminism makes him infinitely more sexually appealing to the leftist ladies of the world. That shit is like catnip. It is only the strict, sex-hating conventions of Crooked Timber, under which fraternization between co-bloggers is totes banned, which keeps us apart right now. And the happily married thing.

Just adding, it was particularly irritating about the grade, because I really did deserve an A+ in that class, but it was impossible to know whether my grade was influenced by my breasts. My boyfriend at the time, for example, questioned it on this basis. I doggedly went on earning the same grade in other classes until at one point my GPA was above 4.0. But the tarnish never really went away. And all of this fell under the look but don’t touch rubric, while still being humiliating and awful.

Particularly humiliating and awful in light of the fact that a teacher at my middle/high school “fell in love with me” on the first day of 7th grade (when I had just turned 13) , and proceeded to have a protracted—I don’t know what you would call it, affair, maybe—which he carefully avoided consummating until four weeks after I reached the age of consent in Washington D.C. The schmuck wrote a book about me, in addition to taking approximately one billion pictures of me (he was the photography teacher, natch.) I mean really, a whole novel. What a pitiful, yet shitty thing to do. And then I finally told my mom about it, and he got fired from the school in my senior year, and then almost all the girls at my (all-girls) school turned uniformly against me and treated me awfully for “ruining his life.” So think how happy I was to get to college, where there would be real scholarship and adults who behave with minimal decency! Hollow laughs ensue. Now I’m not writing this so you can all say, poor Belle, that’s really awful. I’m fine now and that’s not the point. But there’s a reason all those annoying strident feminists go on about how the personal is the political. Kealy doesn’t know the personal histories of the female students he’s ogling. And they deserve to be treated like human beings, not fresh-faced dollies to use as mental props during masturbation.

One of the more trenchant cartoons of the Internet era features a stick-figure man typing furiously at his keyboard. From somewhere beyond the panel floats the irritated voice of his wife.“Are you coming to bed?”
“I can’t,” he replies. “This is important.”
“What?”
“Someone is wrong on the Internet.”

How, might I ask did Douthat know that the voice in question is that of an irritated wife? And what marks the stick figure as that of a man? Oh, right, the unmarked is always male, right? It’s true that xkcd often depicts female stick figures as having longer hair, but this is not invariably so. Verdict: douchebag.

UPDATE: my husband informs me that brilliant unsung CT commenters have been all over this is comments to his post. But the point stands.

This NYT article, The Decline of the $20 Wage”, on the vanishing blue-collar worker with a middle-class income is both depressing and…confusing. Adjusting the numbers for inflation is at least alluded to initially:

Leaving aside for a moment those who have lost their jobs, what of those who still have them? Once upon a time, a large number earned at least $20 an hour, or its inflation-adjusted equivalent, and now so many of them don’t.

However, from this point on the article seems to talk about wages which were $20-an-hour or above in the past—even as far back as the 70s—and are now less than $20 in nominal terms.

The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts. And it is on its way to extinction….

Hourly workers had come a long way from the days when employers and unions negotiated a way for them to earn the prizes of the middle class — houses, cars, college educations for their children, comfortable retirements. Even now a residual of that golden age remains, notably in the auto industry. But here, too, wages are falling below the $20-an-hour threshold — $41,600 annually — that many experts consider the minimum income necessary to put a family of four into the middle class….

Since [the 1970s] the percentage of people earning at least $20 an hour has eroded in every sector of the economy, falling last year to 18 percent of all hourly workers from 23 percent in 1979 — a gradual unwinding of the post-World War II gains.

The decline is greatest in manufacturing, where only 1.9 million hourly workers still earn that much. That’s down nearly 60 percent since 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

The shrinkage is sometimes quite open. The Big Three automakers are currently buying out more than 25,000 employees who earn above $20 an hour, replacing many with new hires tied to a “second tier” wage scale that never quite reaches $20. A similar buyout last year removed 80,000 auto workers. Many were not replaced, but many were, with the new hires paid today at the non-middle-class scale, and with fewer benefits.

Surely $20 an hour in the 70s would be $60 or so an hour now, adjusted for inflation? It makes a big difference to this article and the author has totally failed to explain the issue. ‘Fewer people of this class make even 1/3 as much per hour as they did 30 years ago’ is a very different message from ‘fewer people of this class make this inflation-adjusted wage.’ It seems clear the article implies the former but muddies the waters with the nominal wage, ironically further masking the dramatic decline of the blue-collar middle class.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein’s commenters have objected that they don’t actually suck. This objection has merit; those guys have reasonably substantive conversations about health policy nowadays. I was really thinking of Ezra’s pre-Prospect blog, which had an Al, the Fred who I think is now Yglesias’, and Captain Toke—it was horrible. So Ygelsias’ blog is more properly considered as being in the running with Kevin Drum’s site, but he nonetheless retains the olive branch.
ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, ὁ δὲ χρυσὸς αἰθόμενον πῦρ
ἅτε διαπρέπει νυκτὶ μεγάνορος ἔξοχα πλούτου:
εἰ δ’ ἄεθλα γαρύεν
ἔλδεαι, φίλον ἦτορ,
μηκέθ’ ἁλίου σκόπει
ἄλλο θαλπνότερον ἐν ἁμέρᾳ φαεννὸν ἄστρον ἐρήμας δι’ αἰθέρος,
μηδ’ Ὀλυμπίας ἀγῶνα φέρτερον αὐδάσομεν…
(Translation here.)

In perhaps related news, some people just don’t know anything about being broke:

“The risk is that you could be modifying loans for people who don’t need it,” said Sharon Greenberg, director of mortgage strategy at Barclay’s. “There’s only so much you can do without talking to the borrower. You’re spending $60 a month on cable TV; can you get by with less? You’re spending $200 a month on food for two people, but food costs in your area show that you should be able to get by with $100 a month. These are the kinds of conversations that loan-servicing companies have to have with borrowers.”

Food costs in your area show that when there are no crawdads, you should be able to eat sand. No refinancing for you, Mr. Moneypants McRichington!!

I wanted to talk about something that would-be legalizers often hear, namely, “you’re not willing to admit that under your system there would be lots more drug addicts, and being addicted to drugs is, in itself, a bad thing.” In my experience this isn’t right at all, and everyone who advocates decriminalization will admit that more people will use drugs if they are more widely available and there are no legal penalties. This means more people would become addicted to drugs. How could it be otherwise? This doesn’t mean that I think it’s good thing for people to abuse IV drugs—it’s obviously a bad thing. But the costs our own nation incurs in the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs are crushing: citizens jailed for drug possession and minor sales; the wholesale violation of civil rights that attends aggressive enforcement of anti-drug laws; the fundamental unfairness of denying sick people access to drugs give them relief. With decriminalization we would need fewer police officers, and those we had could focus on violent crimes. We could reverse pernicious trends in which more and more African-American men are shoveled into the maw of the prison system. That’s not even considering the violence and misery spawned around the world by our insatiable appetite for drugs. You’ll pretty much have to convince me that decriminalization will mean free samples of heroin-enriched enfamil before I even bother to reconsider my cost-benefit analysis.

Those opposed to decriminalization are no doubt tired of hearing about the dangers of alcohol, but unfortunately it’s just a very telling point: everything that is true of other drugs is true of alcohol (it is addictive, impairs judgment, fuels crimes, can kill in large doses, etc. on down the line). Either all these things are so bad that we should return to the days of Prohibition, or these harms can be mitigated in various ways, or should be tolerated for the sake of liberty, in which case there’s no reason for other drugs to be illegal. I also think it’s worth considering that many of the people who would become junkies in my America simply become alcoholics now. Some people have addictive personalities; these people like to get fucked up wasted, and they’ll snort, drink, or inject whatever they can get their hands on. There will undoubtedly be more people with drug or alcohol addictions overall, but I think there will actually be a large amount of substitution.

sg objects that “the markets [for heroin and alcohol] are radically different, the drugs are radically different, and the drug use careers of their respective users are radically different. Libertarians (and, less criminally, left-wing drug decriminalization advocates) don’t admit this, and consistently fail to recognise the damage which would be done to society – and particularly to young people – if heroin use were to become more accessible.” This seems to overlook a few things. For one, many people use heroin without becoming addicted, or become slowly addicted but manage their drug use in such a way as to maintain a decent-seeming life for quite some time, before quitting or falling to pieces. NB: this is not at all a good idea, but it is a fact. Since these people aren’t getting dragged off into jail all the time before our eyes, we don’t think much about them, but a comparison of the “ever tried x” rates with the “did drug x last week” rates in any poll indicate that lots of people experiment with drugs and then stop. Lots of people descend into a nightmare of addiction and misery, but lots and lots of people descend into a nightmare of alcoholism and misery all the time, and we don’t seem massively exercised over that—at least not to the extent that we go all Carrie Nation on our neighborhood liquor store.

Further, there’s a causation/correlation problem. The type of person who, in our current society, tries heroin, is not just like the type of person who does not. Risk-taking, thrill-seeking people who want to get as wasted as possible with the world’s gold-standard high, are not plausibly a control group on which to test questions of relative addictiveness. If it turns out a lot of those people end up in messed-up life situations, well, it might not just be the drugs .

It’s true that I am probably imagining a society in which the use of hard drugs, while legal, is frowned upon in a way that drinking is not (anyone opposed to legalizing marijuana has just got their head up their ass, and I am unable to worry about a dystopia in which the ENDO act is passed). Perhaps after many years people’s attitudes would change to the extent that you might get offered organically produced cocaine sourced to various micro-climates in Bolivia on entering a fancy bar. That would be…not terrible. Not an intrinsic good, but on balance that world, with no DEA and many fewer citizens getting ground exceeding fine in the mills of the prison-industrial complex, would still be better than this one.

Via the Instapundit, I recently read this Michael Yon piece in which he proposes to offer his articles for free to US newspapers so that they can serve as a corrective to the misleading, negative reports on Iraq one reads today. I also read all the comments, because I am a peculiar person. My loss is your gain, however, since I am able to promote this moving, yet mysterious comment from its lowly position at 129 in the thread:

Carol Says:
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who read Michael Yon, and therefore know the truth and those who do not.

It’s easy to figure it out, I just ask. I’ve stopped tipping black cab drivers who don’t know about you Michael, the smart ones do, they deserve the tip.

I will definitely send you a tip and will spread the word in deepest darkest Kensington.

I’m afraid I can’t muster any response to this more eloquent than, “wha—?” I briefly considered instituting a new practice of tipping Singaporean Tamil taxi drivers only when they had heard of dsquared, but it seems comparatively lackluster. Chinese taxi drivers only when they are willing to spit on a wallet-sized photo of Tom Friedman?

UPDATE: helpful readers point out that the commenter is talking about “black-cab” drivers, rather than cab drivers who are black. I didn’t know that. So, 100% less racist, but still crazy.

Private-equity executives say they never dreamed that the tax status of their payouts would be questioned. “I don’t think that anybody felt it would ever be challenged,” said Scott M. Sperling, managing director of Thomas H. Lee Partners, a private-equity firm. Managers’ earnings are “capital gains in every technical and spiritual sense.”

That guy is so far at the front of the line that he may be up against the wall right this minute, absent any revolution whatsoever.

Apparently—and this is the latest pronouncement from the Reality-Based Community—we are not supposed to study things that happened 74 years ago, or perhaps longer.

That seems like a reasonable way to characterize the point that one wouldn’t usually get worked up reading a squib entitled “70 years ago this week in monetary policy.” Anyhoo,

Dude: I don’t care how long ago this pathetic and frightening policymaking fiasco occurred. It is appalling that it ever happened and in order to make sure that no President ever again thinks of arrogating unto himself/herself the authority to engage…

See, now here I got confused because it seemed as if the train was barrelling straight into Limit Unchecked Executive Authority station, but luckily it was shunted at the last minute onto the Kevin Drum Is a Communist siding. Yousefzadeh’s main point, though, is that turnabout is fair play, and that Kevin Drum’s failure to denounce the incessant, venomous anti-Hoover diatribes one hears from the left shows his true colors. No, that really is his point.

Of course, if a Republican President engaged in this kind of nightmarish policymaking, we would never hear the end of it . . . even if this hypothetical Republican President was in office 74 years ago, or longer. And Kevin—Dude, if I may—if you’re so hung up on the need not to beat dead historical horses, why don’t you write a post telling Democrats to stop raising the specter of Herbert Hoover at the drop of a hat?

Why indeed? The ‘my opponent fails to denounce this atrocity’ charge has always been a little tired, but when it’s spruced up with ‘fails to denounce this entirely fictitious atrocity’—well that, my friends, lends the whole outfit a jaunty air, much as a moth-eaten bird lolling its single glass eye might add panache to a threadbare, workaday hat. Naturally I moseyed on over to Technorati to glean the very latest anti-Hoover blog posts. I leave you with the wit and gentle Lileksian wisdom of Cape Cod Today’s Jack Sheedy, from his post “Happy Herbert Hoover Day!”:

Think about the length of a year. Four seasons. Twelve months. Fifty-two weeks. Three hundred and sixty-five days (366 during a leap year). That’s a long time! Too long if you ask me! During that long, long year we have these little breaks called weekends wedged in between Friday and Monday. Two days to unwind, to mow the lawn, to change the oil in the Chevy, to read a book, to write a blog, and to sip a nice cool beer or two….But sometimes, even weekends aren’t enough. So God, in his infinite wisdom, scattered “holidays” throughout the calendar to spice things up….Therefore, I propose that we find a way to provide August with a holiday … or perhaps two. The most obvious choice would be to celebrate a President’s birthday. Actually we have four to chose from: Aug 10 for Herbert Hoover, Aug 19 for Bill Clinton, Aug 20 for Benjamin Harrison, and Aug 27 for Lyndon Johnson. My vote is for Hoover on the 10th, as his birthday falls right in between Independence Day and Labor Day. And it would be a nice way of making it up to Hoover for always blaming him for the Great Depression.

There you have it. I await Drum’s denunciation with but little hope.

“Fred is a perfect example of chivalry. He’s the kind of man little girls dream about marrying, who opens doors for you, lights your cigarettes, helps you on with your coat, buys wonderful gifts. It’s every woman’s fantasy.” Thompson, who wooed Baroness Thatcher [?!—Belle] during a visit to London last week, is expected to announce officially next month that he is running for president. He is already challenging Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, for first place in polls of likely Republican voters.

Morgan remembers encouraging Thompson to run for president when they were together. “I think he has a great chance of capturing the women’s vote. He’s majestic. He’s a soft, safe place to be and that could be Fred’s ticket. Women love a soft place to lay and a strong pair of hands to hold us,” she said.

First of all, are women voters, taken as a whole, really so much like retarded kittens in our motivations? And secondly, doesn’t Fred Thompson pretty much look like a basset hound who’s just taken a really satisfying shit in your hall closet? Finally, even if we restrict our field of play to Republicans who have played prosecutors in the later seasons of Law and Order, I would much, much rather have sex with Angie Harmon, even though I’m not gay. Think about it. So, no sale. Via RedState

This afternoon Zoë asked me in the elevator why most Barbies have blonde hair, and I said it’s the most popular sort of Barbie, but they do come in other colors. “I think that’s not good,” she said. “Because most people have brown or black hair, and brown eyes, and different colors of skin. If somebody wasn’t very smart and they played with those blonde Barbies they might think that they can’t be pretty. That makes me feel weird. Next time if we get a Barbie I want her to have brown skin and black hair like LeAnn, or dark skin like Fope.” Yay Zoë! This was music to my ears compared to the time I overheard her playing that the biggest Russian nesting doll was so fat that she couldn’t wear any nice clothes, and then she went away and lost weight and came back as Barbie. Great, let’s just get the eating disorder started now!