I Thee Bed

The cons center on the issues of gender inequity. Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse. Also, there’s an increased likelihood of sexual assaults because hooking up is often fueled by alcohol.

-Charles M. You'll Pardon the Expression Blow

Listening to straight people have conniptions about hooking up is hilarious. Oh no, no one wants to date or get married! Yeah. Fagz have been hooking up for-like-ever, yo, and now all they want to do is get married.

Anyway, the "cons" of the so-called hook-up culture are interesting insofar as they rest upon the presumption that what all women really want is "a relationship," as opposed to men (let us now break into songs from The King and I), because, after all, that was the story arc of Sex and the City, a show, recall, written by marriage-loving homos. While in reality hooking up just proves that men and women are equally opportunistic about sex, horrors! Meanwhile it is true that hooking up increases the likelihood of sexual assault. You know what else increases it: dating and marriage!

Dusty Springfield

Dear The Blogosphere,

The capital of Illinois is not Chicago.

Love,
IOZ

Atavism

Everyone is running around, shouting like crazy, the country is falling apart, oh no, blarrgggh! Would that it were. Uh, were that it would? I have been dreaming of a general social collapse for lo these many years, but no, no, this is not it. While I sympathize with John Cole, for instance, for his frustration that our national government and its media interlocutors remain mired in triviality while Rome burns, the truth is that Rome isn't really burning. It is not, god help us, an "existential threat," in the parlance of our times. We built a speculative bubble of debt-backed, over-leveraged investment. It's bursting. We used new home construction as a means of enrichment rather than . . . a means of expanding housing stock relative to growth in population. It's no longer feasible. We built cars on the assumption that our energy supply would never contract or get more expensive. It was a lousy assumption. So at the risk of callousness, let's call it all a correction.

Much as I'm sorry that the Bank of America is going to lay of ten gazillion workers as part of its impending merger, here's a hard fact: a full-employment model based on millions of pseudo-white-collar workers working in middle management is not tenable, no matter what Tom Friedman barfs up on any given . . . whatever day it is that he writes for the Times. Much as I regret that many autoworkers are going to lose their jobs in the near future, subsidizing failed corporate entities in order to avoid crafting a public provision for the newly jobless is not tenable. We may yet be moving toward an economy in which profits are generated by producing goods and offering services that people need to buy. Good lord, the sky is falling!

Non Seckwitter

Because he is a cruel man, Daniel Larison reminds us all that Camille Paglia . . . exists . A . . . passage:

The slaughter of the Holtzbergs and other Jews at Chabad House should be a wake-up call to Western liberals who believe that jihadism can be defeated through reason and happy talk. Only other Muslims can launch the stringent internal reform necessary to stomp this barbaric extremism out. But the events in Mumbai confirmed my opinion about the looming problem of a nuclear Iran: While I oppose all American military operations and bases in the Mideast, I continue to believe that Israel, whose security is directly threatened, has every right to take preemptive military action against Iran.

So. The killing of Jews in an Indian City by Islamic Radicals from somewhere around Punjab or Kashmir "confirmed [her] opinion" about a nuclear Iran and the rightness of Israel launching a bombing campaign? Yeah, the divorce and remarriage of French President Sarkozy confirmed my opinion about the necessity of banning gay marriage in California. What? Why?

How Much Is that Baby in the Window

Via Kerry Howley, I see that the WSJ and Thomas Frank, who I'm pretty sure wrote some book about how crazy it is to let moral and cultural predispositions take precedence over rational decisions about economic well-being, are arguing that it is fundamentally important that we do not let rational decisions about economic well-being take precedence over moral and cultural predispositions. But of course, the subject is wymyn, and we all know how emotional they can be.

Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years. To summarize briefly, it is a class-and-gender minefield. When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling. It threatens to commodify not only babies, but women as well, putting their biological functions up for sale like so many Jimmy Choos. If surrogacy ever becomes a widely practiced market transaction, it will probably make pregnancy into just another dirty task for the working class, with wages driven down and wealthy couples hiring the work out because it's such a hassle to be pregnant.

Oh no, baby-selling!

Now. International adoption costs from $20-40,000. Domestic adoptions less, between $15-25,000. Adoption is already transactional. Would it not be more equitable, more just, and more utilitarian to cut out the middle-men and allow people who desire babies to buy them directly from people who do not, especially when those in the latter category are impoverished and socially immobile?

Insofar as Frank has anything other than a prudish, aesthetic, essentialist objection to surrogacy (a practice, by the way, as old as civilization), it seems to be that the rich will employ the poor for the task. Yes. As opposed to . . . quoi? Remarkably, it's possible to regret, even to seek to ameliorate, the extreme division of wealth in society while nonetheless understanding that in any society with a division of labor there will be some stratification of economic privilege, and that those with less money will be employed by those with more. Ironically, since he's supposed to be some kind of social democrat, Frank's argument against surrogacy, egg- and baby-selling is strikingly Reaganesque; it harkens back directly to the hoary welfare-queen anecdotes, ghetto women pumping out more babies just to cash in on the government check. It's false moralizing of the lowest order. Riddle me this: why is it morally acceptable to terminate a pregnancy but not to profit from it?

Department of Counterintuition

Yeah, but let me ask you this. Why would the person willing and able to pay the most for a US Senate seat necessarily be the most compromised? Consider this, me droogs: if the Illinois legislature impeaches the Governor, changes the law, and calls a special election, isn't the seat going to go to the person willing and able to pay the most for it?

The Statue of Gliberty

Hitchens Agonistes has long believed that vociferousness is a sign of certainty, so caveat lector. Let us nonetheless grant his thesis. The Assad dictatorship assassinates its critics in Syria and Lebanon, and some elements within the Pakistani state were involved in the Mumbai attacks. So . . . what? What's the takeaway? Hitchens wants major media outlets to validate his inferences . . . and his high dudgeon. For what it's worth, cool, brother, good talk. Do what ya gotta do. But he seems to imply some practical outcome beyond further proof that he, Christopher Hitchens, is in the right. Is the United Nations supposed to invade Syria? Is India supposed to go to war with Pakistan, again? What are you blathering about? I get emails with some regularity asking why I sit around snidely dishing America instead of raising hell about how the Somalis are stoning 13-year-olds to death for chewing bubblegum. Yes. An outrage! Are there not, however, practical limits to a philosophy of outrage? That is to say, can we not feel badly for the poor and suffering of the world without ever-bruiting the necessity of war, more war?

Hey, rather than bombing more countries and opening more fruitless investigations, why don't we just reopen the borders and allow foreigners to immigrate to America? Isn't there a statue with a poem about that shit somewhere? I seem to recall.

Department of Dipshit Double Standards

Okay, so when Russia does it:

Now, the Kremlin seems to be capitalizing on the economic crisis, exploiting the opportunity to establish more control over financially weakened industries that it has long coveted, particularly those in natural resources.

Ooga-booga! Fortunately, we live in America.

At least Bad Vlad has the wits to seize industries that are actually going to make him some fucking cash. The most galling aspect of the ongoing American program of nationalization is just how preternaturally wasteful it is, how full of cant about saving the economy, or whatever. I mean, which is the more appealing strategy? The Russian government says, We are going to enrich the state by nationalizing resource extraction and energy production. The American government says, We are going to impoverish the state in order to ensure that unprofitable businesses that employ an ever-diminishing number of Americans do not enter bankruptcy. The former may be the road to serfdom, but at least it makes some goddamn sense.

Here is The Elect describing the, ahem, plan:

“They’re going to have to restructure,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “And all their stakeholders are going to have restructure. Labor, management, shareholders, creditors — everybody is going to recognize that they have — they do not have a sustainable business model right now, and if they expect taxpayers to help in that adjustment process, then they can’t keep on putting off the kinds of changes that they, frankly, should have made 20 or 30 years ago.”

I'll translate: make a public show of firing some executives and make sure that the new ones receive modest direct-salary compensation so the rubes think they're making some kind of sacrifice; force labor unions into new, concessionary CBAs and lay off as many workers as possible; fuck individual shareholders, those morons; make sure the creditors make as good as they can to major investors. And the government will pay for it.

In the end, best-case scenario, we have a much-reduced domestic auto industry slowly repaying loans at extremely favorable interest rates. Lemme repeat, for the cheap seats: that's the best case scenario. I mean, fuck Larry Summers. Why not just put Terry Gilliam at Treasury?

George W. Bush - An Appreciation

If his eight years taught us anything, it was that nothing can traduce Americans' limitless sense of virtuous self-regard. To his supporters, he was an emblem of our continued cultural virility, steadfast and Western, who knew right from wrong, trusted his gut, trusted God, knew evil when he saw it. To his opponents, he was the exception that proved the rule, an aberrant figure who violated all the high standards of our exceptional civilization, and in doing so provided fodder for eight years of kvetching that "this isn't who we are," until finally, exit, pursued by Obama, coming to "take back America." To conservatives who soured on him as his popularity declined, he proved the continued vitality of their "movement" by allowing them to gainsay that they were a mere cult of personality. To liberals who lost two elections to him, he was a standard under which to ride into battle against the real villains, Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky. He was an empty vessel into which all of our sweet and bitter draughts were poured. He was our mirror.

But who, in fact, was he? And I think the plain answer is that he was no one special, one more failed scion of a failing family, a ruler who could only be considered remarkable, whether for better or worse, in a nation that still fancies itself a democracy. Were we communists, or better yet a monarchy, his vapidity and mediocrity wouldn't shock us at all. People less in thrall to the myth of their own great, national, deliberative process are less inclined to surprise when a bumbler, an asshole, or a moron shows up in the imperial palace, playing dress-up and treating international affairs like a board game. Your own experience in a hierarchy without democratic pretensions should tell you as much. It might drive you nuts, but when was the last time you were surprised that the boss turned out to be an idiot? One could make the case, perhaps, that elections are a reasonable scheme for a city-state somewhere, but a hundred million harried citizens making hazy decisions after two years of propaganda isn't qualitatively different from the happenstance of heredity or the rolling of dice. And George W. Bush, god bless him, is the proof.