You’d probably like to hear Ross Douthat explain how Margaret Mead, Stanley Fish and a bunch of hippies are responsible for the excesses of racist BMOC frat boys who hire strippers. C’mon, you like that sort of thing in small doses, admit it. It’s a good thing that last month’s secret feminist world-domination meeting involved a solemn pledge by all sexually active women to deny young Mr. Douthat any sexual contact outside of marriage, or going beyond the plain vanilla missionary-position type sanctioned by traditional mores, otherwise all this insufferable priggishness might have a whiff of hypocrisy about it. Best comment: “Yeah, raping strippers is awful, and meaningless sex isn’t great either. Also, some academics are crazy. I guess we should ban birth control.” Roy’s suggestion is bumper stickers reading “If you can eat pussy, thank a liberal.” I am afraid that a cold appraisal of continuing sexism leads me to conclude that advertising to men that they owe liberals a thank-you note for every blowjob would be even more effective. Black ink on white or cream stationery only, please. I suppose you can send them to Norbizness.
I see that “Aaron Swartz”:http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads is running for the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board. I’ve known his blog for a little while; he’s an occasional commenter here; he set up Rick Perlstein’s “website”:http://rickperlstein.org/ and he created the “New York Times Link Generator”:http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink?q=http://www.nytimes.com/, beloved of bloggers who don’t want their NYT stories to succumb to linkrot. All of which is to say that any of you who qualify as a member of the electorate (400+ edits on Wikipedia; I don’t know about other Wikimedia forums rules), should seriously consider voting for him (note that this is a personal endorsement on my part; CT doesn’t do endorsements as a collective).
The New Republic‘s “Open University”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity blog is up and running. While I’m not at all a fan of the magazine itself in its Martin Peretz incarnation, this new venture has some very good people blogging for it, as well as others who’ll be quite interesting to watch from a safe distance.
I was also going to review Glyn Morgan’s The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration, but it’s fortunate I didn’t, as Henry has done a better job of most of the points I was going to make. So let me make just one more point, about the implications of soft power.