Belle Waring

This is somewhat tangential to the recent Edwards-bloggers incident. Amanda Marcotte has been recieving some loathesome hate mail, some of which she excerpted on Pandagon. The site is down right now but I’ll insert a link when it’s back up. (It’s my understanding that Melissa McEwan has been getting similar threats, though I don’t know if she’s posted any. And yes, they are two completely different people.) Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom, in the course of a post which can pretty fairly be characterized as “they were asking for it”, notes that “some of the emails, apparently, resemble the kind that Michelle Malkin receives on a daily basis.” This moves me to note that people on left sites do say crazy sexist and racist things about Malkin all the time. I think she’s a bad person, and out at the dog-whistle end of annoying, almost outstripping the human capacity to detect maddening stimuli (cf. thisYouTube video, which achieves the heretofore-thought-impossible feat of making me wonder for a moment whether she might not be crazier than Pam Oshry). Nonetheless I often see people in comments threads go straight to the “me love you long time”. That ain’t right, people. In related news, as a feminist I heartily condemn the Iranian government’s treatment of women, just not in a way that makes me want to drop tactical nukes on the women.

This post at Dr. Helen’s blog and its attendant comments have been widely linked around, and the finest comments already excerpted here at Feministe. Having read them all it occurs to me that if you are a heterosexual man of middle years, and it has been your life-long experience that women don’t like to have sex–with the result that they regard it indifferently as a bargaining chip rather than a pleasurable activity they would be denying themselves–maybe you’re doing it wrong. Just a thought.

Blogger Gary Farber is unfortunately going through another really rough patch, and I encourage generous CT readers to help him out. Non US-readers particularly are invited to marvel at the lack of a social safety net in our otherwise kick-ass nation.

Rod Dreher has converted to Catholicism, then to Orthodoxy, and now to hippie. This is a strange personality type. Nonetheless, well done for the moment, Rod. I’ve always thought that if I were going to bother converting to a religion I’d just go on and be clasped to the bosom of the holy mother Russian church. Why mess around, you know?

Perhaps uncharitable shorter Rod Dreher: “You know, although I’d listened to the Black Sabbath song ‘War Pigs‘ many times before, I felt now as if only now I were hearing it for the first time.”

(With charity towards all, I advise readers to go out and listen to some Sister Rosetta Tharpe. If you’ve never heard her music, it will blow your mind.)

Henry’s post below reminds me of one of the 50,000 completely ridiculous things that have happened to my sister in her day. She went to a Christian day camp in Sewanee one summer when she was about 11. They all set out for an overnight camp-out, and decided upon a meadow of tall grass. The camp’s faithful golden retriever promptly got bitten by a copperhead. Now, for the benefit of our European readers, I will disclose some wisdom from the South, and that is, where there’s one copperhead, there’s another. The only solutions are either to get the hell away, or, if it’s your own yard you’re talking about, stalk around nervously with a gun until you’ve shot both of them. (I did once watch my mom chop the head off a snake with a hoe and some vigorous action, but that was only a rat-snake. It had just swallowed “Quing-Quack”, my newborn duckling friend, who unfortunately did not survive. The life of a hippie farm is not necessarily a placid one.) [click to continue…]

Readers bored by our recent all-wingnut, all the time focus are invited to read about two great things that go great together: Descartes and bees. (This is taken from our personal blog, where there are already some good comments.)

Every now and again, while I’m grading papers, I think my life might be a lot easier if Descartes had just refrained from letting his mind wander, and not come up with the wax example. It’s one of the most apparently simple, actually confusing thought experiments ever.

Also, think about this for a minute:

Let us consider those things people commonly think they understand most distinctly of all: namely, those bodies that we touch and see. I do not mean bodies in general–for general perceptions are apt to be somewhat more confused–but one particular body. Let us take, for example, this piece of wax, just come from the comb. It has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey it contained; it retains some of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered; its color, shape and size are apparent; it is hard, cool, and can be readily handled; if you tap it with your knuckle it makes a sound. In short, it has everything which seems necessary to enable a body to be known as distinctly as possible. But see how, even as I speak, I place the wax by the fire: what remains of its taste evaporates; its scent dissipates; its color changes; its shape is lost; its size increases; it becomes liquid and hot; you can hardly touch it, and if you do it no longer makes a sound. But does the same wax remain?

Has any of you looked at a honeycomb lately? I have. The hotel we stayed at in Vietnam had a thick sheet of comb suspended in a wooden frame over a polished trough, and honey slowly dripped out of it and slid down to the bottom of the trough. It was really excellent honey, thin and floral tasting. But do you know what the most salient feature of the comb was? That would be the distinctive, mathematically regular, hexagonal structure. How does that not merit a place in Descartes discussion? It’s clear he chose the wax carefully both for its appeal to all the senses and its transformational power. In what world is that hexagonal structure of the comb not more salient than that it makes a sound (a dull, feeble sound, I might add) if you rap it with your knuckle? I mean, ‘its shape is apparent’, OK. But that description could just as well fit a blob of slightly melted, cooled wax or a ball made by crushing a piece of fresh comb with your hands. But this is ‘fresh from the comb’. Why is that not worth mentioning? Doesn’t it make the transformation more complete, as it moves from its regular lattice to undifferentiated liquid? Now, of course all Descartes’ readers knew what wax fresh from the comb looked like, certainly better than we. But it really seems strange to me that he would lavish all these sensual descriptions on the wax and just pass over in silence its single most notable feature. Why?

If the incoming populist Democrats would only slap a softwood-style tariff on foreign pundits, we would be spared much suffering. Plain People of the Internet, I give you Mark Steyn, on why weak-willed women are leading the West down the path to Eurabia:

I heard it anecdotally from two friends in the space of a week…You wear the head scarf and a head to toe dress or you’re not showing bare legs, bare arms, uncovered hair. They were stunned at how much more relaxing it was to stroll across the park, stroll to the corner store. They suddenly felt far more secure, they felt far more safe, they weren’t jeered at for being an infidel whore or anything – and I would imagine that, you know, it’s not actually that big a stage from sort of passing for Muslim in the street to actually embracing it in some kind of way of residual way at least nominally for the advantages of a quiet life.

That’s why they do it. I mean, I was told by some French guy that 4 out of 5 converts in Islam in Europe, to Islam, are women. I don’t know what basis he produced that statistic. When I talk to people, they don’t actually disagree with it if you ask around. [Fact-esque!–Belle]

It gets way better below the fold. [click to continue…]

Mario Loyola is quickly emerging as a hack to be reckoned with at The Corner. Here’s something that I find so wrong that I fear I must have completely misunderstood him:

I asked one of Michael’s guests at the AEI event whether anyone in Lebanon talks about the crimes Hezbollah committed against the laws of Lebanon. His response (this was a Lebanese moderate) really brought home for me the vast gulf in political consciousness between the Islamic World and the West. He said, in essence, that if we resolve the issue of the Sebbah Farms, then Hezbollah will not have an excuse to continue armed resistance, because of course everyone has a fundamental right to resist the occupation of their land.

This response seemed to me so strange. Imagine that the Canadians went berserk and occupied Minnesota. Then imagine that a militia formed to “resist the occupation” but the Federal Government ordered it to disband. Would any American say that the right of resistance trumped obedience for the rule of law? No, of course not. Nothing trumps obedience for the rule of law in this country, not even religion.

What now? Seriously, what? Is Loyola one of these cut-rate Canadian or British pundits we keep getting saddled with? Because I am quite certain that every single damn person in America disagrees with him. A foreign country invades a US state and the quisling Feds tell the local militia to stand down? And Loyola thinks people would say, ‘oh well, rule of law and all that. Let’s go turn in our guns at the occupation depot’? This may be the single most wrong-headed thing I have ever read about politics on the internet, and I think we all know that’s saying a lot. Live free or die, baby. Live free or die.

I was going to post this in a comment to John’s post below, but it’s just so funny that I have to put it up here. From the the one, the only Hugh Hewitt’s post-election reverie:

President Bush will not flag in the pursuit of the war, and Senator Santorum is now available for a seat on the SCOTUS [em. mine] should one become available. GOP senators will have the chance to select leadership equal to the new world of politics which, as the past two years have demonstrated, does not reward timidity.

Justice Santorum. That’s plausible (I mean, he’s got K-Lo’s vote, right?). Excuse me for a moment while I apply a Tiger Balm plaster to my side, which aches from laughing–but this is the man who went to the mat for Harriet Miers, after all.

[click to continue…]

Michael Ledeen blew my mind today:

More on Media Coverage [of the Kerry flap–Belle] [Michael Ledeen]
Nothing at all on the front page of the WSJ, quite disgraceful. In case you wondered about the WSJ newsroom, the main political story is an allegation of graft against a Republican congressman.

A story that should have been delayed until after the election. Talk about journalistic ethics! Get a new editor for the news section.

Is this supposed to be satirical in some way? I think not, but then again surely he doesn’t think…that is…I

Moving on, John Derbyshire continues to stoke my guilty admiration:

Yes, But [John Derbyshire]
John Kerry is awful, and anything we can do further to degrade his political prospects is worth doing. But really, I saw a clip of him making the much-deplored remark, and it was obvious that the dimwit in Iraq that he referred to was George W. Bush, not the American soldier. It was a dumb joke badly delivered, but his meaning was plain. My pleasure in watching JK squirm is just as great as any other conservative’s, but something is owed to honesty. There’s a lot of fake outrage going round here.

Is this why Derbyshire always posts from home, so as to avoid uncomfortable moments around the NR watercooler? Do they have tenure at the National Review? This blithe insouciance, these outright accusations of bad faith against one’s colleagues, seem to me rightly to belong to the tenured. Perhaps William F. Buckley has given him an endowed chair in Disarmingly Frank Racial Prejudice/Old-fashioned Tory Studies.

Internet legend Gary Farber is going through a really rough patch right now and needs lots of medicine he can’t afford to buy. If any of you fine CT readers could kick him a few bucks that would be great. Gary tends to run hot and cold, but when he’s fired up about a topic he’s a prodigious blogger. Also, he can be kind of a prickly fellow, as he would be the first to admit, so don’t let the fact that he pwn3d you with unnecessary harshness one time in a comments thread hold you back. (Remember that time, when you said something interesting, and then Gary said he’d already blogged about it like two months ago? Yeah, that time.) You know what they say: charity begins at blog.

From today’s Washington Post, an interesting paper by Vanderbilt economist Joni Hersch on the correlation between skin color and economic success among recent immigrants. (Pdf here.)

Immigrants with the lightest complexions earned, on average, about 8 to 15 percent more than those with the darkest skin tone after controlling for race and country of origin as well as for other factors related to earnings, including occupation, education, language skills, work history, type of visa and whether they were married to a U.S. citizen.

In fact, Hersch estimated that the negative impact of skin tone on earnings was equal to the benefit of education, with a particularly dark complexion virtually wiping out the advantage of education on earnings….

Hersch based her results on 2,084 men and women who participated in face-to-face interviews for the federally funded 2003 New Immigrant Survey. All of the respondents had been admitted to lawful permanent resident status during the seven-month period, May to November 2003. As part of the survey, interviewers also rated the skin tone of each individual on an 11-point scale ranging from zero to 10, with 10 representing the darkest possible skin color and zero the absence of color, or albinism.

Why should pale people earn more? “I don’t think that any explanation other than discrimination is possible — and I am not one to draw such inferences lightly,” Hersch said in an e-mail. “I am stunned by the strength and consistency of the findings, even controlling for race, even controlling for nationality, and . . . everything that could possibly matter.”

This was true even for white european people; Estonians would apparently sail past swarthy Mediterranean types (not a particular finding from the paper, mind.) In her paper she mentions that among US-born black men there is also correlation between lighter skin and higher wages, but doesn’t say whether among US-born whites there is a premuim placed on paleness. I would be inclined to say not, but then, it seems hard to imagine how this pressure could apply only to immigrants. Rather striking results, though. It’s also easy to see why the nigh-transparent complexions of Irish university profs give them an edge in the US job market.

Searching for a ray of light in the Foley gloom, Ramesh Ponnuru points us to a voice of calm:

Hugh Hewitt [Ramesh Ponnuru]
The House Republican Conference is sending around his take on Hastert’s role in Foley-gate.

Kathryn Lopez responds:

re: Hugh Hewitt [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I often assume our friend actually works for the House Republican Conference, or RNC!

You know, when K-Lo thinks you’re kind of a hack…weelllll.

But what do Hewitt’s readers ‘think?’:

Thank you Hugh!
I first read the editorial by Dean Barnett and became “alot” annoyed! I did post my opinion of it on that comment section. So, I was so happy when I read your opinion because , well, it’s shared by me! The truth and facts about the Dim.s sickening dirty tricks are with us and we now have the FBI looking for hopefully truth/facts.

Indeed.

New York City Councilman Joel Rivera (representing the Bronx) wants to change the zoning laws to restrict the number of fast food restaurants. The Times notes that Calistoga, CA has a similar law on the books banning chain restaurants from its historic downtown, for aesthetic reasons. Mr. Rivera’s reasoning may be aesthetic as well, though he would surely defend it as hygenic: he thinks New Yorkers are too fat. He’s probably right about that, but his proposed solution seems of dubious utility, in addition to being a gratuitous restriction of his constituents’ right to do what they please. And now let’s hear one of the least compelling defenses of the nanny state ever offered by a well-intentioned politician: [click to continue…]