Quicktime has redeemed itself after a reinstall, as it now allows me to use Finnish for Foreigners to work on my pronunciation. What is annoying me is luggage size restrictions. On one hand I'm mad at the fact that I can only bring a suitcase's worth of stuff on the bus home, and again on the plane to Dayton, which means I have a very small amount of my possessions at my disposal for the summer (and it probably means several important items -- I'm already missing my dress shoes -- are packed away in Alex's storage room). I'm also annoyed at the restructions imposed on my luggage by my own physical strength. My suitcase is medium-sized and has wheels, but it was still difficult to drag it down Main Street to the bus station. On the way back I'm definitely taking a cab. Given my usual commitment to non-materialism and packing light it seems weird to be complaining about this, but then again three months is hardly a weekend trip.
So, luggage size restrictions head for the kiosk.
Stentor Danielson, 21:51,
(more Blogger issues. grr. This is again additional commentary on the link in the previous post.)
There are two spinoff directions that I can go with this. First, it emphasizes that when we talk about gender roles, we're not talking about a single male role and a single female role. Each gender has a (limited) plurality of possible roles to fill. Some of these -- like the independent and objective Descartes-like "man of reason" that feminists have written much about, or the woman as bearer of culture and civilizer of society -- are deemed desirable, while others -- like the rapacious man or the excessively emotional woman -- provide categories into which we can fit "deviants" (and on which deviants will draw in constructing their own identities).
The second ties in to some speculation I've done about homophobia. In reading commentary about the Rick Santorum flap, I noticed that many supporters of Santorum tended to assume that homosexuality means male homosexuality (even the famous passage in Leviticus talks only of men lying together, though St. Paul does later condemn both male and female homosexuality). The stereotype of the sex-crazed man, and its corrollary the uninterested-in-sex woman, may incline holders of traditional gender attitudes to discount lesbianism as both a reality and a problem. If sex is something predominantly sought by men, the concept of a lesbian is more difficult to make sense of. But it's also not a threat. The concept of the traditional family is to temper a man's sex drive with a woman's frigidity. This means that a relationship between two men lacks this element of balance -- it's two wild male sex drives. The implicit association in much of this commentary between homosexuality and promiscuity may be related. The archetype of the heterosexual relationship is the monogamous marriage, whose idealized regulation of sex is opposed to the uncontrollability -- and hence promiscuity -- of relationships with too much man and not enough woman. It's this imbalance and uncontrollability that makes homosexuality dangerous to the social order.
Stentor Danielson, 21:33,
Ampersand points to an excellent Trish Wilson post about how traditional gender roles can be degrading to men -- a point that often gets lost in the focus on how they degrade women.
Aren't men insulted by such a derogatory view of fatherhood and maleness? Popenoe is saying what men have accused women of saying for aeons: that men think with their dicks. He is saying that men need to be corralled by social institutions such as marriage, otherwise they will act like sluts; they'll stick it into anything that moves, they'll drop babies left and right, and they'll make poor partners in relationships.
Amp is right that should feminism succeed that the resulting diminishment of sexism would be a victory for all victims of sexism, female and male. What he hasn't said -- and what I believe needs much more attention -- is that men have a responsibility to stand up to their own sexist attitudes that they have about themselves and each other. Some men's and father' rights attitudes are discriminatory against the men they claim to want to help.
You see the most extreme versions of this line of thinking in things like the explanation for the burqa -- women have to cover themselves because men can't be relied upon to control their sexual thoughts and actions should they happen to see female skin. What's interesting about this is the way that negative stereotypes of men wind up being used to justify oppression against women. Wilson points out that the conclusion drawn from the stereotype of the sex-crazed man is not that men are a lower form of human, but that women must bear the responsibility and burden of "civilizing" their husbands and sons, while implicitly excusing male wildness as natural.
Stentor Danielson, 21:32,
(For some reason Blogger was giving me errors when I tried to post that last post, saying "Server Error: HTTP request too long." So here's my comments on the article I quoted in the last post)
This is a pretty standard way of framing the order versus freedom question these days. Any deviation from the traditional is seen (by both opponents and supporters) as the replacement of rules with chaos. But I think this framing is the result of two mistakes. First, it conflates moral order with the particular 1950s brand of American Christian morality. So it proposes a false choice of points along a one-dimensional scale from a specific form of Puritanism to total amorality. But why must this particular morality be the moral code, allowing only for degrees of greater or lesser adherence? Maybe it's just my conservative upbringing, but I think a strong moral code is important. I just don't think the traditional American one is the best one.
Linked to that is the mistake of seeing social liberalism as a form of anything-goes relativism or libertarianism. Certainly that's the image that's most often used to argue for it, as saying "freedom" is a powerful bit of rhetorical strategy in our culture. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, society -- even in the most radical groups -- abhors anarchy. Spend some time in a community with a strong socially liberal bent, and you'll find there's a powerful moral code regulating behavior. In fact, I would venture to say that to effectively combat one moral system, you must have some vision of an alternate moral system. One of the few worthwhile passages in Plato's Republic was, I think, his discussion of why injustice -- which in his formulation had similarities to the kind of chaotic libertarianism at issue here -- in unsustainable in its pure form. To put it in a concrete example, the Mafia is able to show such disdain for the wider society's moral and legal rules because it has a strong moral system operating in its internal affairs.
So our choice is not so much between order and chaos as between two forms of order. What chaos exists is due not to the simple absence of traditional morality but to the coexistence of two (probably more) alternative moralities, neither of which can exercise total hegemony. I'm glad for the degree of freedom that moral pluralism provides, while recognizing that it comes from pluralism, not the breakdown of absolutism.
Stentor Danielson, 19:13,
That Other War Why is there a culture war to begin with? Why did the old moral consensus break down? It's because we live differently now. Human beings can't live together in peaceful and stable social groups without moral rules. Yet the more we live as independent individuals, instead of as members of tightly knit communities, the less we want or need moral rules.
... Our relative independence of others is the key to the rise of the new social liberalism. Yet, no matter how independent we get, the ineradicable fact of childhood dependence creates demands for a stable family structure governed by certain moral rules. This is the root of our contemporary culture war. Our lived individualism continually pulls us toward a full-fledged libertarianism, while our childhood dependence exerts a countervailing pull toward moral traditionalism.
... There are many problems with the sort of middle-ground position I'm offering here. I think I've given some pretty clear and principled grounds for preferring some changes to others. Nonetheless, both religious traditionalism and strict libertarianism are more consistent — or at least more straightforward — than the middle ground position I'm discussing here. I can't claim to be more consistent than the two warring ends of the moral-cultural spectrum. But I do think my middle ground position is where most Americans live — and where our society is going to be staying for some time, like it or not.
MSN UK is creating what Microsoft calls the world's first Internet outhouse, or iLoo, complete with flat-screen plasma display, wireless keyboard and broadband access. MSN UK spokesman Matthew Whittingham described the portable toilet as the first "WWW.C," referring to the term W.C., or water closet.
... The portable lavatory is being tested and will debut at festivals around Great Britain this summer. Microsoft plans to build a single prototype MSN iLoo that will travel the festival circuit, and may build more if the response to the pioneering potty warrants it, Whittingham said.
Wow. We truly live in the most advanced society on earth.
And farther down the article, vindication for me on an old argument:
"Reading in the loo, or the bog, is a traditional English pastime," said Jeremy Davies, an analyst with U.K.-based market researcher Context. "We've all seen the magazine racks, loo paper with jokes and cartoons on the walls in toilets up and down the land. You've got to hand it to the creative--and uniquely English--minds at Microsoft."
Finally, an answer to a question that has long puzzled me. When I wrote my flag burning commentary, I wondered how frequent flag burning actually was. I knew that it was extremely rare, but I couldn't find any numbers anywhere. But the ACLU has provided the answer:
Only 200 incidents of flag burning have been reported in the entire history of the United States. A person is more likely to be struck by lightning or win the lottery than to be exposed to a political flag burning. The proposed constitutional amendment is, therefore, the very definition of a solution in search of a problem.
The sad thing is that I got this information because a flag-burning amendment has once again been introduced in Congress. I like to think of this amendment as the Freddy Krueger Act -- it's evil, and it just won't stay dead.
Given the rarity of flag burning, I don't understand what supporters of this amendment hope to gain. In fact, the rarity of flag burning is actually used as an argument for prohibiting it. The amendments don't contain all the Whereas'es that most bills have to explain the reasoning behind them, but I did manage to find this one opinion column written by amendment sponsor Diane Feinstein (the proprietor of the site claims it's the only explanation he's been able to get from Congressional supporters of the amendment). She says essentially that since it doesn't happen very often, it's no big deal if we ban it. Yet if it's no big deal, why go through all the trouble of passing a Constitutional amendment (which is a lot harder than passing a regular law)? Feinstein says that the flag is a very special and important symbol. I agree. That's what makes it so meaningful when a person chooses to demonstrate respect for the flag. Feinstein seems to think that the importance of the symbol is enough to justify banning its desecration, but she neglects to describe what possible harm is done by burning a flag, and what good is done by patriotism that is feigned out of fear of punishment. As conservatives like to say, you don't have a right not to be offended.
Stentor Danielson, 14:13,
[Jack Chick's] formula and drawing style have changed little in five decades. When an archivist at the Pasadena Playhouse began rooting through old boxes in the late '90s, she discovered drawings that he had done in 1948. The single-panel cartoons revealed the same perspiring characters, pop-eyed faces, and 1940s Sunday-comics sensibilities of his current tracts. "He's not worried about impressing other cartoonists, which is kind of what motivates a lot of cartoonists to pick up their chops a little bit," says Clowes. "There's something really interesting about seeing a cartoonist not develop at all." Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, is less kind. "It makes me despair about America," says Spiegelman, "that there are so many people who read these things."
debitage 
Quicktime has redeemed itself after a reinstall, as it now allows me to use