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LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSIONPosted by Casey Tompkins on January 15, 2008
Ron recently commented on Ms. Magazine’s recent bone-headed refusal to run an ad describing three of the women who help run Israel. You’d think feminists would get all worked up over that kind of real-world “girl power.”
Since the wyminists over at Ms. seem to have trouble with the concept, I would like to present Girls Women from the IDF. Completely work-safe, unless your boss is offended by beautiful women in uniform, with guns.
Me, I think I fell in love a couple of dozen times…
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 15, 2008
There’s no limit on what the light does in this part of town, but, you know, you have to see it.
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Posted by Ron Coleman on January 15, 2008
The New York Times has an article questioning the application of the term “midlife crisis” to excuse philandering males:
[Y]ou have to admit that “I’m having a midlife crisis” sounds a lot better than “I’m a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown.”Another patient, a 49-year-old man at the pinnacle of his legal career, started an affair with an office colleague. “I love my wife,” he said, “and I don’t know what possessed me.”
It didn’t take long to find out. The first five years of his marriage were exciting. “It was like we were dating all the time,” he recalled wistfully. But once they had a child, he felt an unwelcome sense of drudgery and responsibility creep into his life.
Being middle-aged had nothing to do with his predicament; it was just that it took him 49 years to reach a situation where he had to seriously take account of someone else’s needs, namely those of his baby son. In all likelihood, the same thing would have happened if he had become a father at 25.
Why do we have to label a common reaction of the male species to one of life’s challenges — the boredom of the routine — as a crisis? True, men are generally more novelty-seeking than women, but they certainly can decide what they do with their impulses.
It’s true, that, but it really only begs the question. The article seems to be based on a premise, not exactly spoken out, that people who refer to midlife crisis mean to excuse immoral behavior. I have never gotten the impression that this is how people use the term, however.
I think they are just talking about a real phenomenon that the psychologist who wrote this article acknowledges exists: Men reach a point where they face a different set of feelings and choices from those they have faced before, typically in middle age. They then choose either to resist the bad choices or they don’t.
This is midlife crisis. For people who never confronted such a moment in their lives — where things they thought made them happy, no longer do; or where drives they thought were quiescent or that they never even knew they had, resurface or are born — this is already a sort of crisis. And if they don’t behave, why, they will then turn this crisis of the spirit into a crisis greater still. It is possible also to take this moment to build on what one has.
That remains, always, the choice.
Now, I am only in my early 40’s (for two more months!) — so this cannot be about me. What do you think a blogger like me is, anyway — a narcissist?
Posted in Heart and spirit, Homo sapiens | 30 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 14, 2008
Emily Bazelon asks, “Who Was Hillary Kidding on Meet the Press?” when she said she sure as heck didn’t want to see gender or race injected into the Democratic primary campaign. It is to laugh!
Similarly, the ADDeRabbi blogger says, let’s face it, she can’t even tell the truth about the most important issues of the day:
[O]ne thing that Hillary said during her senatorial campaign which just totally summed up why I can’t stomach her. She was asked whether she’s a Yankee fan or a Met fan. . . .
Hillary’s answer: “I like them both”. No. You’re not allowed to say that. You can’t like them both. Clearly, she felt that she didn’t want to alienate the fans of one team by saying she supports the other. See, but that’s the point. She’s a phony. She said what she thought would be politically expedient, not what she believes. I’m not so fickle a person that I wouldn’t vote for Giuliani because he roots for a team I hate. He has his preference, and he doesn’t try to hide it. He wears his Yankee cap everywhere and attends games. Had Hillary said “Gee, y’know, I really don’t follow baseball much”, I’d have understood and respected that. Not everyone’s a baseball fan. But she didn’t say that. She tried to please them all by, for lack of a better term, lying. I understand that politicians often must do this, but when it’s so pervasive that it even extends to fundamentally trivial matters, it becomes abhorrent.
I always thought it was remarkable how hard it is for Hillary Clinton, she of the Wall Street Journal-based investment success and ersatz Southern drawl, to tell the truth about almost anything. The recent death of Sir Edmund Hillary reminded me of how, just for the hell of it, she invented a story that she had been named after the first man to climb Mt. Everest.
I praised Hillary Clinton when she was the only Democratic candidate with the nerve to admit that retreat from Iraq was not a good policy for America, back when the heat was on. Did she mean it then, or was that just what seemed to be the right thing to say, in a contrarian sense? I don’t know. But she is, fundamentally — as she constantly reminds us — a very dishonest person, and hence a perfect match for our disbarred former President… in their way… but not for you and me.
Posted in O Mores!, Politics and Poker | 8 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 14, 2008
I don’t think I’d want to eat a food item that resembled me. Further, I don’t think I’d want to watch a room full of people eating bits of food that resembled bits of me.
A fortiori, the likes of me.
Posted in Americana, Jocularity | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 14, 2008
On the other blog, I said this in reference to the attempt to make intellectual property a profit center at all kinds of companies and for all kinds of silly reasons:
Fun in our age is only available via a written license, with royalties, reversions and attorneys’ fees upon breach.
Posted in Gelt, Lex scripta | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 14, 2008
There is something depressing about this time of day in general. This awe-inspiring painting, which I photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings up a mix of melancholy feelings despite the presentation of nature’s magnificence.
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Posted by Ron Coleman on January 13, 2008
After the failed Camp David summit of 2000, George Will pronounced then prime minister Ehud Barak “perhaps the most calamitous leader any democracy has ever had” for the way he had succeeded in “delegitimizing all previous [Israeli] positions….”By that standard, our current Ehud is worse.
Read the rest here.
Posted in Orient, Past is prologue, Stragety | 7 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 13, 2008
Huckabee continues to use his faith as a weapon against those who question not his faith, but his political populism — much of which he shares with secular progressives. And he is clearly hoping to stir up resentment among Evangelical Christians against the other elements of the conservative movement and Republican Party as a way of encouraging them to vote in the caucuses and primaries. This is a tactic right out of Saul Alinsky’s playbook. Of course he wants us to believe the Reagan coalition is dead because he cannot win with it intact. But he cannot win either the nomination or presidency with the narrow focus of his appeal. This is why I find Mike Huckabee’s tactics and candidacy so deplorable.
I’ve re-read this about six times and it strikes me merely as a series of non-sequiturs. Here’s the “logic”:
This is just such utter gobbledygook I don’t know what to do with it. The first point, actually, is interesting. But the second point — wha? The “Reagan coalition” consisted of conservative voters plus blue-collar, mainly unionized voters who tended to vote Democrat but who were moved by appeals to anti-abortion policies and strong foreign policy, and it mainly held for two elections. It was not the coalition between evangelicals and secular and Catholic conservatives. What does this have to do with what Levin is saying in the first point — or with Huckabee at all?
Then his last two points: He will lose, because he is reading someone — is it non-evangelical GOP voters? blue collar Democrats? free-love libertarians? — out of his electoral base… and “this” is what is deplorable.
It’s deplorable that he is going to lose — not even get the nomination, you say? If he loses, that’s good, because you don’t like him, right Mark? Isn’t it good if a political tactic you don’t like will lose? Or, it’s deplorable because it’s dishonest — how, again?
It sounds actually pretty honest: I am a real evangelical, says Huckabee, not a fake one, which frankly Ronald Reagan (an immensely greater man than Huckabee will ever be, but no evangelical) was; and if evangelicals want to try to control the party, I’m the man to do it. Sounds very honest.
It’s dishonest, maybe, because he is cloaking populism in the mantle of religious belief? Well, what is your source, Mark, for the proposition that populism is not consistent with being evangelical? From here — I’m not an evangelical, obviously — but it seems as if it is very consistent. He is daring the evangelicals to try to take control of the GOP. He’ll likely fail, but is there something “deplorable” about running on an actual discernible political platform just because it’s a platform neither Mark Levin nor Ron Coleman is likely to vote for?
I guess I understand why there are no comments on The Corner.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News.
Posted in Politics and Poker | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 11, 2008
Instapundit knocks out Meryl Yourish’s server with this post:
NOT ALL WOMEN ARE ROLE MODELS, at Ms Magazine. Israeli women don’t count, apparently.UPDATE: More here.
As the second link (Powerline) explains:
The American Jewish Congress submitted this understated advertisement about the status of women in Israel to Ms. Magazine. Underneath the attractive photographs of Israel’s foreign minister (Tzipi Livni), Supreme Court president (Dorit Beinish), and speaker of the Knesset (Dalia Itzik), the ad reads: “This is Israel.” I think it is fair to say that in most parts of the United States it would be deemed an utterly innocuous ad.
Ms. rejected the ad.
Israel is just too controversial for the daring chicks at Ms. As the Powerline story says, the
AJC claims, “When Director of AJCongress’ Commission for Women’s Empowerment Harriet Kurlander tried to place the ad, she was told that publishing the ad ‘will set off a firestorm’ and that ‘there are very strong opinions’ on the subject — the subject presumably being whether or not one can say anything positive about Israel.”
This is just such a nice piece of red meat for conservatives and, really, any kind of social critic. It doesn’t get much jucier — the lefty hypocrisy about free expression (yes, this is not a First Amendment issue; but it remains a free expression one), the fashionableness of antisemitism-veiled-as-anti-Zionism, even among a readership that must have a significant Jewish component, and the need the AJC obviously felt to try to buy this ad in the first place — too little, too late, it seems.
UPDATE: More here. Ms.‘s statement doesn’t move the needle, in my book — it’s preposterous.
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