"Research suggests that, on average, boys in traditional US public primary (elementary) schools exhibit more externalizing behaviors—such as higher activity levels, impulsivity, restlessness, and disruption—compared to girls, who tend to show greater self-regulation, compliance, and prosocial engagement."
"And yet, in Western societies, boys are often expected to act like girls. Starting in school, where they’re expected to sit down, be still, be quiet, and pay attention. If they don’t, there’s something wrong with them."
Chiming in briefly to note that the underlying assumption in Charles' comment is that sitting still and paying attention are somehow feminine behaviors.
nous, I really appreciate your comment, it is always hard to talk about this stuff. This isn't to keep the conversation going and draw you out, but I would make an additional observation. You wrote: I’d posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been “shared” with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives. That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
I'd also add that sexual desire is often less about the specific object and more about the internal meaning we project onto it. Your suggestion that the breaking of a societal taboo may be the focus seems likely, and because there is a shame factor involved with sex, it's easy to see how breaking those taboos can be become intertwined with sexual desire.
Just in case anyone forgot, Frum was the one who coined the phrase 'Axis of Evil', which started out as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and was expanded to include Cuba, Libya and Syria. Including Iraq cost the US $800 billion to $1.1 trillion, and while Frum isn't responsible for the full price tag, he doesn't seem to think the mistake should impinge on his bona fides.
"I was powerfully swayed by the fact that the proposed invasion of Iraq was supported by those who had been most right about the Cold War, and was most bitterly opposed by those who had been wrongest about the Cold War."
Pro Bono - I'm not getting into your first diagreement since that was with GftNC's comment, and I'm not going to assume that I know all the particulars of her critical perspective and would rather not distort her position. But the other two...
It’s not exclusively about sex. But it’s a biological fact that, for a man, rape has to be partly about sex.
Standard warning I would give if this were a class in which the conversation turns to subjects that can be difficult for survivors of sexual violence to manage - mediate your engagement with this as necessary for your own wellbeing...
Rape, sexual assault, and sexual or gendered violence do not at all have to be about sexual desire on the part of the person perpetrating the violence. A heterosexual man can rape another male with an object and feel no sexual arousal. Likewise, rape during war often has less to do with any sexual desire than it does with "spoiling" the enemy's women, which is why, again, it can often involve inanimate objects. The purpose of such things is not the sexual pleasure of the attacker, but rather for the person subject to the violence to be penetrated against their will - preferably in front of witnesses - to demonstrate to them their powerlessness and lack of agency, to reduce them to the status of a woman if they are male, or to demonstrate to any males that the woman "belongs to" that they were powerless to protect their women from harm.
(Disclaimer - this conversation assumes a patriarchal society. People who do ethnography in matrilineal cultures say that the individuals in those cultures have a hard time making sense out of these attitudes because none of those assumptions about personal agency and dominance have a place in their worldview - and those societies have very little in the way of sexual violence. I've just read about this in the last couple days since this conversation came up.)
It's for these reasons that I said that rape was not about sex. Rape often has more in common with torture than it does with sexual desire gone rogue.
I don’t think that’s true of Epstein’s associates – those men had widely acknowledged power and status. Nor can it be true in the Pelicot case, where the rapes were largely secret, and the victim was unconscious.
If I had to try to make sense of the Pelicot case in relation to my points above, I'd posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been "shared" with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives.
That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
----
That was unpleasant, but hopefully helpful for understanding the positions I've taken on both patriarchy and sexual violence. I don't necessarily want to discuss more, but I've had to put in the time to understand all this in my research on war and violence, and in all those classes where we read and discussed the history of feminist thought. I'm happy if any of this can move our collective understanding more towards the direction of those non-patriarchal cultures I mentioned above.
russell, I think Frum was identifying both of THEM as resistance liberals. And though he/they might not have stood toe to toe with cops, they both spoke very highly of the people of Minneapolis who had done so. As I've said before, I would never have believed this in the "axis of evil" days, but I find myself wishing these were the kinds of people we were opposing nowadays.
I know what you mean about who are these leftists, though. I don't know enough about all the people he or you mention to understand it, but he does seem to have it in for Mamdani. However, he said he would (reluctantly) vote for AOC over Trump, and I thought in US terms she counts as something of a leftist?
My question is: who are these real leftists? I don't mean college kids, or some online rando. I mean people who have some public voice, and some IRL feasible path to creating an actual outcome, and who also want to "smash bones".
I can think of - maybe - a handful. Thom Hartmann? Bill McKibben? Chomsky? And Hartmann primarily wants something like a restoration of republican self-governance, as opposed to oligarchy. And McKibben primarily wants us to stop burning the world up. So I'm not sure they acually qualify as folks who want to "tear down the institutions", unless "the institutions" are grossly unregulated capital.
Which, perhaps, they actually are at this point.
But I guess I'm looking for names here. Who the hell is Frum talking about? Black bloc kids? Portland anarchists? Are they a realistic example of effective political actors - people who actually might make substantive changes to anything at all?
"Resistance liberal" sounds like, basically, people like me. I understand, and in many cases agree with, the idea that we are ineffective and not quite what is needed at the moment. And it's definitely true that, for most of us, there is a limit to what we are willing to put at risk. It is, frankly, a lot easier to be bold and uncompromising when you have little to lose. So, there is all of that.
FWIW, my wife and I had a conversation a few years ago about the whole carbon economy thing. We both have - and at this point to a large extent live off of - our 401k's. I'm sure we have some holdings in carbon-based energy - oil companies or similar.
A huge amount of the book value of those companies is oil that is still in the ground. Were there to be any public action to prevent that oil (or similar) from being extracted, the value of those companies would probably collapse. At the time I did a sort of very rough back of envelope calculation and figured that, were that to actually happen, we - my wife and I - would take a significant haircut. I forget what the actual seat-of-the-pants number was, but it was a lot. Enough to make a difference in our daily lives, for the rest of our lives.
And we both agreed we'd take the hit if it was on offer.
Maybe we are extraordinarily exceptional, but I find that unlikely. I'm not seeing us as the root of the problem(s). And I really and truly do understand and appreciate that young people coming up now face challenges we did not, but the fact that we have a house and 401k's is not the root cause of all of that.
It is, frankly, not that big of a house. And we only have one.
The regulatory arms of the government have basically been crippled under Trump. The folks who are in a position to do something about that - primarily Congress, but also the freaking SCOTUS - have been captured and are beholden, not to me and people like me, but to the great big bags of money that keep them in office. And, FWIW, line their pockets, personally.
Maybe that's the problem, right there.
I've stood toe to toe with cops to exercise my "resistance liberalism". I didn't see Frum there that day. Maybe he could try it on before he dismisses it.
I've hesitated, as a man, to say anything about this...
I disagree with several things said or quoted on this thread:
of course men want to rape! It’s just most men can’t rape because...
I don't want to rape. Nothing to do with morality, or what I can get away with, or self respect. I just don't want to. I could be wrong, but I think most man are the same.
it’s not about sex...
It's not exclusively about sex. But it's a biological fact that, for a man, rape has to be partly about sex.
It occurs when someone (the rapist) feels the need to demonstrate his power and status.
I don't think that's true of Epstein's associates - those men had widely acknowledged power and status. Nor can it be true in the Pelicot case, where the rapes were largely secret, and the victim was unconscious. __
But I agree with a lot of the rest. It's an ugly fact that, as the Pelicot case shows, not a few men do want to rape. And yes, patriarchal attitudes to women make it much easier for those men to tell themselves that their rapes don't count as rape.
If that's right, the question addressed by this thread is how to stop those men who want to rape, but are not sociopathic, from feeling entitled to do what they want.
cleek - I agree with what you are saying. It's a problem. The one thing I want to make sure doesn't get lost in the great evening out of "none ouf us are main characters" is that the beltway media people, donors, and political analysts are the gatekeepers between those politicians and the precariat, and they are going to pass on the voices of the resistance liberals and explain away the voices of the precariat as having no beliefs because the gatekeepers work for the billionaires.
I'd love for the resistance liberals and the bonesmashers to start talking to, and listening to, each other. The reports I am getting from places like Minnesota are that they are - mostly as they end up in the same place at the same time engaged in active resistance.
I'm not sure that Frum and Miller are aware, though, because their own participation is much more mediated.
They sure aren't listening to the precariat, or they'd know better than to decide that those people have no beliefs.
I donated blood yesterday. The phlebotomist felt around the scar tissue for a whole, then asked, "Is it okay with you if I use the vein over here?" pointing about an inch away. That worked out well, since the undamaged vein stopped quickly when the needle was pulled. The vein with all the scar tissue can be reluctant to stop.
Partly because of wj's example, I signed up to be an election judge. The county only has the one job title, but it covers positions with all sorts of part-time assignments (everything from collecting from the mail ballot drop boxes to face-to-face stuff at the vote centers to working in the counting bunker). I won't know what they'll need until closer to the primaries. "Job title" is intentional; they don't use unpaid volunteers.
Earlier this afternoon California's CAISO electricity supply was >75% renewables; Texas' ERCOT was >65% renewables; my local power authority was nearly 100% renewables. The local PA was also running a bunch of excess coal and even natural gas. We're having another wind event. My understanding is that excess is because someone else in the region has lost a transmission line and we're the backup (coal for bulk power, NG for frequency control).
Isn't curious, though, that the likes of Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world - which I have to think makes him the richest person in all of human history - seems intent on upending the system of institutions in which he became so obscenely rich. (Or at least that's how it looked to me when he was out DOGEing for Dear Leader.)
I guess in his mind the system was holding him back. Ketamine, anyone?
Ha, nous, I was hoping you'd be our informant on the cool leftist kids! I considered directly asking you. Hugely reducing (or eliminating) the existence of the precariat and the policies which produced them is necessary, and fairly fast. "Making ICE do more training" is nothing near what is necessary.
Also, cleek and I cross posted. You're not all in it together, cleek. The billionaires aren't in it with you. They're building their compounds in order to be self-sufficient in New Zealand while the world burns. Reversing the policies which have made them richer and richer while making working people's salaries stagnant does not have to threaten the life savings of the lower X%. (X% because obviously the calculation will be difficult - 80%? 90%?)
>Real reform is going to feel dangerous to the resistance liberals
>because they profit from many of the structures that are harming the
>precariat.
alternately: if you're threatening to take someone's life's savings away in the name of your revolution, yes you will get resistance. that doesn't mean people love the status quo, it means they don't see your ideals as being worth giving up everything they've worked for.
the 'precariat' aren't the main characters in this story. there isn't a main character. we're all in it together. so we can work together, or we can work at odds with each other.
Never let Frum and Miller be your translators for what the cool leftist kids are saying.
But the other thing that seems to be going on, to the extent that this is a real phenomenon I’m describing, is a feeling that simply having beliefs is, in itself, a sign of lameness and that the cool thing is not to have any.
It's not that The Activist Kids (which, again, seems to include Millennials who are in their 40s) have no beliefs and think that Resistance Liberals are cringe. What they really feel is that they are not being seen or listened to by the politicians, the donors, and the media. They have plenty of beliefs, they just don't see that a return to the politics of the Clinton, or Obama, or Reagan years (since this is Frum trying to square the kid's circle) is going to fix any of the specifics of their lives that keep them trapped in the precariat.
The "bonesmashers" are not nihilists or deluded Marxist idealists; what the "bonesmashers" are actually feeling and thinking is something more like what Spanish Civil War anarchist Buenaventura Durruti was talking about when he told The Toronto Daily Star:
We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.
The heart of this clash of worldviews is not so much about whether or not the status quo should be obliterated, but about whether or not the institutions who are trying to guide the resistance are willing to give up their own privilege and comfort in order to build a more just future for those who have been harmed by the institutions that the resistance liberals are trying to preserve.
The resistance liberals 401(k)'s are built on the bones that keep the bonesmashers paying off predatory student loans, and that keep a runaway carbon cycle heading for collapse within the bonebreakers' lifetimes.
The sort of institutional reform they need is going to take more than just making ICE go through more training. Real reform is going to feel dangerous to the resistance liberals because they profit from many of the structures that are harming the precariat.
Sorry guys, very soon after that I got a notification from the Atlantic about the transcript of David Frum's interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark, which includes this question from Frum:
Now, I wanted to ask you about something that—and I don’t know how real this is, but people who keep up with this more than I do tell me that there is a mood among the young that there’s something lame about the project that you’re engaged in, and I guess I’m engaged in, too, of standing up for what they would call “resistance liberalism.” And this is somehow unfashionable, uncool. And I wonder, is this a perception of something that actually exists, or is this just chat? And if, to the extent it exists, let me ask you about two different strains that I can see for what’s motivating it.
One is—and there’s just nothing to be done about this—is real leftists who say, "Look, you’re standing up here for the Constitution, the rule of law, for international free trade, for—you don’t wanna say open borders; you just wanna say orderly police procedures without abuses and without violence. So you’re not a real leftist. You’re not smashing the system. You’re not overturning the hierarchy. You’re not socializing the means of production. You’re not globalizing the intifada. It’s just lame". So, okay, real leftists, I get why they would have a beef.
But the other thing that seems to be going on, to the extent that this is a real phenomenon I’m describing, is a feeling that simply having beliefs is, in itself, a sign of lameness and that the cool thing is not to have any. Am I talking about anything real? You’re at the center of this business. Do you see this? Am I describing something you recognize?
Plus, there was also a lot of interesting stuff about Minneapolis.
So I reckoned there was a chance that some of you might be interested in reading about this. Apologies for monopolising the thread, I'll go away now.....
And, as part of my continuing mission to bring various diverse but interesting voices to ObWi, including those of Never Trump Republicans, this is David Frum on last night's SOTU (which I actually watched, for my sins). It was a) embarrassing, and b) the ultimate illustration of what it looks like to be in a completely post-truth world:
This is Alastair Campbell's diary from Ukraine, in The New World:
My weekly diary I’m in Ukraine, a nation let down by AmericaAfter all the warnings to bring thick coats and thermals, Kyiv was reasonably dry, and the temperature a bearable one degree Celsius as we stepped off the train at 5am on Monday. The sleeper train was something of a misnomer. Well, it was a train for sure, albeit an old and clunky one, which reminded me of those black and white movies when goodies were chasing baddies from carriage to carriage, and almost falling through the cracks. But as for the sleeper bit, during a twelve hour stop-start journey through the night from the border with Poland, I reckon I slept for about three of them, max. In general, I think being tall is an advantage in life. Sleeper trains are very much an exception to this rule.
The trip coincided with the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and I was invited to accompany the EU’s enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, a Slovenian diplomat and former champion swimmer, who surely has one of the trickiest jobs in global politics right now.
Ukraine is one of several countries currently in the queue to join the EU, and while she wants to see the day when they all join – Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, Serbia and more – she also has to make sure the necessary political and economic conditions are met. There are times when bureaucracy and rules can get in the way of political will, however much of it there may be, and she has plenty.
Ukraine’s president Vlodymyr Zelensky is clear that he wants to join the EU by January 1 2027. Commissioner Kos has the unenviable task of telling him that is impossible, while keeping alive the hope that one day it will happen.
Kos points out that the methodology used to assess new entrants today is not that different to the process which led to Spain and Portugal coming in four decades ago. “That was peace time. This is war time. We have to find ways of speeding up the process,” she says. You sense she feels the current crisis is existential not just for Ukraine but, if they fail, for Europe.
So there may be a way of getting countries into the EU in some shape or form as part of the process rather than the conclusion of the process. There are various ways that might be done, currently the subject of intense debate. Some are calling it gradual integration, others reverse membership.
This all bodes very well for my grand vision for European enlargement – that Ukraine, the UK and Canada all sign up on the same day.
Now we’re talking. And before you dismiss that as impossible… so was Brexit, until it wasn’t. You might imagine hope is not an easy commodity to find in a place that has been on the receiving end of Putin’s war machine for four years, with over 100,000 Ukrainians dead and half a million injured. It may be a source of some pride that these are dwarfed by Russian losses, but they are horrific numbers nonetheless. Add in the fact that five million Ukrainians are living elsewhere in Europe right now, mainly women and children, with little likelihood they can come back soon, and millions more displaced internally, and you understand why there is such a sense of war fatigue.
There is also among some here a feeling of shock and isolation that the world seemed to care so little when Putin decided to turn winter into a weapon of war. It has been freezing in recent weeks and in one nearby bombing strike on an energy plant the Russians deprived 350,000 people of heat in an instant. As the EU ambassador, Katarina Mathernova, put it to me: “Kyiv is a frontline city now. But it was so hard to get anyone interested. Too much is happening elsewhere in the world.”
The consequences of war are visible – and deliberately so. The carcass of a train carriage has been moved from the scene of its bombing last month to a track at the main station. It is there to shock, and to underline that Putin’s pretence not to be targeting civilian life is exactly that. Indeed even he has given up pretending. But then, walk a couple of yards down the platform, and there is another carriage, this one turned into a viable intensive care unit, used whenever the hospitals are overwhelmed. The third carriage is a children’s recovery unit, with beds even smaller than the one I couldn’t sleep in.
We then went to a briefing with the head of Ukraine’s railways, who on the one hand explains that the rail infrastructure suffered more than a thousand Russian attacks last year, including more than fifty locomotives damaged or destroyed, but on the other hand shows me a film of Ukrainian children brought home for a week’s holiday from their current homes in the EU. Smiling kids. Singing kids. Dancing kids. Hope.
Grok clearly doesn't search out all the sources
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2438589/
Research suggests that rates of sexual victimization in prison may be as high as 41% or as low as less than 1%.12 A recent meta-analysis estimates a conservative “average” prevalence estimate of prison sexual assault at 1.9%. While the estimated rate of victimization varies significantly across studies, the characteristics of the victims reported in these studies are more similar. First, rates of sexual coercion are higher than rates of sexual assault or rape, independent of gender. More specifically, unwanted and sexually suggestive touching of breasts, genitals, or buttocks is more typical inside prison than the act of rape itself. Second, in the vast majority of studies, male facilities have been found to have higher rates of sexual assault compared to female facilities. Yet the perpetrators of sexual assaults against female inmates, compared to male inmates, are less likely to involve staff. Third, younger inmates are at greater risk of sexual victimization, particularly if they are new arrivals to a facility and are serving their first convictions. This may explain in part why rates of sexual victimizations vary across facilities within the same prison system. Facilities with a younger population would be expected to have higher rates of victimization than those facilities with a more mature and acculturated prison population. Fourth, inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization has an interracial bias, with victims most likely being White and sexual aggressors most likely being Black. This interracial pattern of victimization has been attributed to revenge for historical oppression and the reversal of racial dominance inside prison.
I also looked at your Grok summary and your takeaway seems to be remarkably narrowly focussed. I'll leave it to others to point out how your takeaway points are misleading.
A libertarian on these very pages years ago, in a fit of drollery, once said that what really bothered him about weaponry near at hand was how bothersomely noisy gunfire can be to innocent bystanders; it hurts HIS ears!
Perhaps I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but loud noises of all kinds have always been a problem for me.
An all-male prison is, by that way of figuring, still a patriarchal society, as is an all-female prison because the larger society in which they exist is patriarchal in structure.
This surprised me: "Inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization: 4% men vs. 21% women (mostly abusive sexual contact)."
"Research suggests male prisons in the US tend to feature more rigid, hierarchical gangs focused on protection, status, and black-market governance, while female prisons more commonly involve pseudo-family or kinship-style groups that emphasize emotional support and relational bonds."
when wonkie posted, I was tempted to post, but I realized that what I was writing was just me happy to, as they say in the commons, 'attach myself to the statements'. I was born in 61, so the 70's and 80's were my cultural memories, so discussions, like the famous bear example, seem a bit overblown. I do think that there were mechanisms to protect women, but those mechanisms were also to keep women in line and there was an implicit bargain that if you don't rock the boat, you won't get thrown to the sharks. What underlies that is power relationships, and I think you can't erase those relationships or declare them out of existence, you can only be truthful about their existence and make sure that they aren't being exploited to do something they aren't supposed it.
As an example, in my FB feed, I've recently had a bunch of people talking about the French figure skater Suraly Bonaly, who was the first person to do a backflip in competition and she did it in 1998. The only problem was that it was an illegal move and she was penalized. However, in these Olympics, it was allowed in 2024 and included in the programs this time. So, just going by the fb posts, this was a female skater (who was also black) being mistreated while the two male skaters were allowed to do it.
None of these posts told the story of Bonaly doing the backflip in the warmups, inches from Midori Ito's head, in 1992, during her warmup just before the short program. This apparently got into Ito's head, because she subsequently missed her triple lutz in the short program and was only able to get the silver by making a comeback in the last program.
It seems indicative of something that it ended up with a black skater trying to throw an Asian skater off her game. In the Rodney King riots, it was Korean stores that took the brunt of protester's rage, and the whole 'Natural Conservative' push (Reagan said something like 'Latinos are Republicans, they just don't know it yet') tells me that the pressure is going to be exhibited more in the groups oppressed. Hurt people hurt people.
So I'd argue that the 'there are no women in the Epstein files' is reflection of a collection of power, not of some unavoidable darkness in the souls of all men. Next to the substack GftNC posts, I'd suggest reading Amelia Gentleman's Guardian piece Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club. Setting aside the irony of the writer's last name, she points out that Epstein's whole enterprise was on the backs of women who booked tickets, organized plans, etc etc. Wonkie's mention of Mad Men is interesting, because while the series revolves around the men being assholes, another important thread is how the women, in the background but vital to keep the machinery running, slowly begin to assert their own power.
While the apparent absence of asian and black victims in the case of Epstein can probably be traced to his own bent, which then gets passed thru his whole enterprise, I also wonder if the absence of asian or black men in the Epstein files might also suggest that minorities are more attuned to the transactional nature of ALL things, and therefore avoided being drawn into it.
"And yet, in Western societies, boys are often expected to act like girls. Starting in school, where they’re expected to sit down, be still, be quiet, and pay attention. If they don’t, there’s something wrong with them."
Boys and girls alike are also expected to leave the guns and ammo at home in this western society, where they can used against the neighbors and Census workers, as God the Gunrunner intended, rather than bringing them into the schools to shoot teachers and fellow students dead.
Yet, only one of those sexual persuasions* seem to ignore that rule, along with those other shut-up-and-learn inconveniences mentioned heretofore.
A libertarian on these very pages years ago, in a fit of drollery, once said that what really bothered him about weaponry near at hand was how bothersomely noisy gunfire can be to innocent bystanders; it hurts HIS ears!
Which seems kind of feminine in its delicacy, ya know, in the generalizing course of things. I would think your normal Texas hombre would wave off hails of deafening gunfire like Colonel Kilgore on the beach in 'Apocalypse Now' unflinchingly, but wistfully citing his love of the smell of Napalm in the morning as ordnance goes Ka-plow! mere yards from him and his surfboard.**
And, is a little like the Yiddish lady complaining about the atrociously bland food served in her nursing home ..... "AND, such small portions!"
*OK, in the abiding interests of both sides do it, I concede there are way too many MAGA conservative Mar-A-Lago-faced gunslinging, gorgons and harridans like the Greenes, the Boeberts, with big swinging testicles who do not demur at a little fully automatic gunfire in the school cafeteria or the U.S. Capitol or even in an otherwise peaceful Minneapolis neighborhood.
** I must mention I personally witnessed that scene being filmed while "performing" as a movie extra (army ranger grunt) in the Philippines while temporarily on "leave" from the Peace Corps there back in the late 1970's.
It was a movie being filmed, but in that and other scenes, it was as deafening, disorienting and dangerously violent as one might imagine real war to be. The ordnance was real and way to close. If not for the blanks in my M-16, I'd have shot most of fellow extras and maybe a star or two. If not for Coppola yelling "Cut", I'd have spent some time in a VA wing stateside entitled "Ward for The Cinematically Shell-Shocked"
Back to Lurking.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Girls don’t get restless in class?
Less so than boys at the same age.
"Research suggests that, on average, boys in traditional US public primary (elementary) schools exhibit more externalizing behaviors—such as higher activity levels, impulsivity, restlessness, and disruption—compared to girls, who tend to show greater self-regulation, compliance, and prosocial engagement."
Gender Differences in US Primary School Behavior
"
From Charles' Grok summary about prisons
Disciplinary outcomes differ sharply. Women receive misconduct tickets at higher rates—often 39–155% more—for “defiance” categories (disrespect, disobedience, hygiene, tone).
If they just wouldn't act like boys, they wouldn't get punished!
"
"And yet, in Western societies, boys are often expected to act like girls. Starting in school, where they’re expected to sit down, be still, be quiet, and pay attention. If they don’t, there’s something wrong with them."
Chiming in briefly to note that the underlying assumption in Charles' comment is that sitting still and paying attention are somehow feminine behaviors.
Girls don't get restless in class?
"
nous, I really appreciate your comment, it is always hard to talk about this stuff. This isn't to keep the conversation going and draw you out, but I would make an additional observation. You wrote:
I’d posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been “shared” with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives.
That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
I'd also add that sexual desire is often less about the specific object and more about the internal meaning we project onto it. Your suggestion that the breaking of a societal taboo may be the focus seems likely, and because there is a shame factor involved with sex, it's easy to see how breaking those taboos can be become intertwined with sexual desire.
"
I'm going to be out most of today, so won't be able to comment on what Pro Bono and nous said til later. But I definitely will then!
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
Just in case anyone forgot, Frum was the one who coined the phrase 'Axis of Evil', which started out as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and was expanded to include Cuba, Libya and Syria. Including Iraq cost the US $800 billion to $1.1 trillion, and while Frum isn't responsible for the full price tag, he doesn't seem to think the mistake should impinge on his bona fides.
"I was powerfully swayed by the fact that the proposed invasion of Iraq was supported by those who had been most right about the Cold War, and was most bitterly opposed by those who had been wrongest about the Cold War."
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Pro Bono - I'm not getting into your first diagreement since that was with GftNC's comment, and I'm not going to assume that I know all the particulars of her critical perspective and would rather not distort her position. But the other two...
It’s not exclusively about sex. But it’s a biological fact that, for a man, rape has to be partly about sex.
Standard warning I would give if this were a class in which the conversation turns to subjects that can be difficult for survivors of sexual violence to manage - mediate your engagement with this as necessary for your own wellbeing...
Rape, sexual assault, and sexual or gendered violence do not at all have to be about sexual desire on the part of the person perpetrating the violence. A heterosexual man can rape another male with an object and feel no sexual arousal. Likewise, rape during war often has less to do with any sexual desire than it does with "spoiling" the enemy's women, which is why, again, it can often involve inanimate objects. The purpose of such things is not the sexual pleasure of the attacker, but rather for the person subject to the violence to be penetrated against their will - preferably in front of witnesses - to demonstrate to them their powerlessness and lack of agency, to reduce them to the status of a woman if they are male, or to demonstrate to any males that the woman "belongs to" that they were powerless to protect their women from harm.
(Disclaimer - this conversation assumes a patriarchal society. People who do ethnography in matrilineal cultures say that the individuals in those cultures have a hard time making sense out of these attitudes because none of those assumptions about personal agency and dominance have a place in their worldview - and those societies have very little in the way of sexual violence. I've just read about this in the last couple days since this conversation came up.)
It's for these reasons that I said that rape was not about sex. Rape often has more in common with torture than it does with sexual desire gone rogue.
I don’t think that’s true of Epstein’s associates – those men had widely acknowledged power and status. Nor can it be true in the Pelicot case, where the rapes were largely secret, and the victim was unconscious.
If I had to try to make sense of the Pelicot case in relation to my points above, I'd posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been "shared" with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives.
That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
----
That was unpleasant, but hopefully helpful for understanding the positions I've taken on both patriarchy and sexual violence. I don't necessarily want to discuss more, but I've had to put in the time to understand all this in my research on war and violence, and in all those classes where we read and discussed the history of feminist thought. I'm happy if any of this can move our collective understanding more towards the direction of those non-patriarchal cultures I mentioned above.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
russell, I think Frum was identifying both of THEM as resistance liberals. And though he/they might not have stood toe to toe with cops, they both spoke very highly of the people of Minneapolis who had done so. As I've said before, I would never have believed this in the "axis of evil" days, but I find myself wishing these were the kinds of people we were opposing nowadays.
I know what you mean about who are these leftists, though. I don't know enough about all the people he or you mention to understand it, but he does seem to have it in for Mamdani. However, he said he would (reluctantly) vote for AOC over Trump, and I thought in US terms she counts as something of a leftist?
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My question is: who are these real leftists? I don't mean college kids, or some online rando. I mean people who have some public voice, and some IRL feasible path to creating an actual outcome, and who also want to "smash bones".
I can think of - maybe - a handful. Thom Hartmann? Bill McKibben? Chomsky? And Hartmann primarily wants something like a restoration of republican self-governance, as opposed to oligarchy. And McKibben primarily wants us to stop burning the world up. So I'm not sure they acually qualify as folks who want to "tear down the institutions", unless "the institutions" are grossly unregulated capital.
Which, perhaps, they actually are at this point.
But I guess I'm looking for names here. Who the hell is Frum talking about? Black bloc kids? Portland anarchists? Are they a realistic example of effective political actors - people who actually might make substantive changes to anything at all?
"Resistance liberal" sounds like, basically, people like me. I understand, and in many cases agree with, the idea that we are ineffective and not quite what is needed at the moment. And it's definitely true that, for most of us, there is a limit to what we are willing to put at risk. It is, frankly, a lot easier to be bold and uncompromising when you have little to lose. So, there is all of that.
FWIW, my wife and I had a conversation a few years ago about the whole carbon economy thing. We both have - and at this point to a large extent live off of - our 401k's. I'm sure we have some holdings in carbon-based energy - oil companies or similar.
A huge amount of the book value of those companies is oil that is still in the ground. Were there to be any public action to prevent that oil (or similar) from being extracted, the value of those companies would probably collapse. At the time I did a sort of very rough back of envelope calculation and figured that, were that to actually happen, we - my wife and I - would take a significant haircut. I forget what the actual seat-of-the-pants number was, but it was a lot. Enough to make a difference in our daily lives, for the rest of our lives.
And we both agreed we'd take the hit if it was on offer.
Maybe we are extraordinarily exceptional, but I find that unlikely. I'm not seeing us as the root of the problem(s). And I really and truly do understand and appreciate that young people coming up now face challenges we did not, but the fact that we have a house and 401k's is not the root cause of all of that.
It is, frankly, not that big of a house. And we only have one.
The regulatory arms of the government have basically been crippled under Trump. The folks who are in a position to do something about that - primarily Congress, but also the freaking SCOTUS - have been captured and are beholden, not to me and people like me, but to the great big bags of money that keep them in office. And, FWIW, line their pockets, personally.
Maybe that's the problem, right there.
I've stood toe to toe with cops to exercise my "resistance liberalism". I didn't see Frum there that day. Maybe he could try it on before he dismisses it.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
I've hesitated, as a man, to say anything about this...
I disagree with several things said or quoted on this thread:
of course men want to rape! It’s just most men can’t rape because...
I don't want to rape. Nothing to do with morality, or what I can get away with, or self respect. I just don't want to. I could be wrong, but I think most man are the same.
it’s not about sex...
It's not exclusively about sex. But it's a biological fact that, for a man, rape has to be partly about sex.
It occurs when someone (the rapist) feels the need to demonstrate his power and status.
I don't think that's true of Epstein's associates - those men had widely acknowledged power and status. Nor can it be true in the Pelicot case, where the rapes were largely secret, and the victim was unconscious.
__
But I agree with a lot of the rest. It's an ugly fact that, as the Pelicot case shows, not a few men do want to rape. And yes, patriarchal attitudes to women make it much easier for those men to tell themselves that their rapes don't count as rape.
If that's right, the question addressed by this thread is how to stop those men who want to rape, but are not sociopathic, from feeling entitled to do what they want.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
cleek - I agree with what you are saying. It's a problem. The one thing I want to make sure doesn't get lost in the great evening out of "none ouf us are main characters" is that the beltway media people, donors, and political analysts are the gatekeepers between those politicians and the precariat, and they are going to pass on the voices of the resistance liberals and explain away the voices of the precariat as having no beliefs because the gatekeepers work for the billionaires.
I'd love for the resistance liberals and the bonesmashers to start talking to, and listening to, each other. The reports I am getting from places like Minnesota are that they are - mostly as they end up in the same place at the same time engaged in active resistance.
I'm not sure that Frum and Miller are aware, though, because their own participation is much more mediated.
They sure aren't listening to the precariat, or they'd know better than to decide that those people have no beliefs.
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I donated blood yesterday. The phlebotomist felt around the scar tissue for a whole, then asked, "Is it okay with you if I use the vein over here?" pointing about an inch away. That worked out well, since the undamaged vein stopped quickly when the needle was pulled. The vein with all the scar tissue can be reluctant to stop.
Partly because of wj's example, I signed up to be an election judge. The county only has the one job title, but it covers positions with all sorts of part-time assignments (everything from collecting from the mail ballot drop boxes to face-to-face stuff at the vote centers to working in the counting bunker). I won't know what they'll need until closer to the primaries. "Job title" is intentional; they don't use unpaid volunteers.
Earlier this afternoon California's CAISO electricity supply was >75% renewables; Texas' ERCOT was >65% renewables; my local power authority was nearly 100% renewables. The local PA was also running a bunch of excess coal and even natural gas. We're having another wind event. My understanding is that excess is because someone else in the region has lost a transmission line and we're the backup (coal for bulk power, NG for frequency control).
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Isn't curious, though, that the likes of Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world - which I have to think makes him the richest person in all of human history - seems intent on upending the system of institutions in which he became so obscenely rich. (Or at least that's how it looked to me when he was out DOGEing for Dear Leader.)
I guess in his mind the system was holding him back. Ketamine, anyone?
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>The billionaires aren’t in it with you.
no doubt.
but nous said "resistance liberals 401(k)’s". the implication there isn't billionaires, it's people with retirement savings.
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Ha, nous, I was hoping you'd be our informant on the cool leftist kids! I considered directly asking you. Hugely reducing (or eliminating) the existence of the precariat and the policies which produced them is necessary, and fairly fast. "Making ICE do more training" is nothing near what is necessary.
Also, cleek and I cross posted. You're not all in it together, cleek. The billionaires aren't in it with you. They're building their compounds in order to be self-sufficient in New Zealand while the world burns. Reversing the policies which have made them richer and richer while making working people's salaries stagnant does not have to threaten the life savings of the lower X%. (X% because obviously the calculation will be difficult - 80%? 90%?)
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>Real reform is going to feel dangerous to the resistance liberals
>because they profit from many of the structures that are harming the
>precariat.
alternately: if you're threatening to take someone's life's savings away in the name of your revolution, yes you will get resistance. that doesn't mean people love the status quo, it means they don't see your ideals as being worth giving up everything they've worked for.
the 'precariat' aren't the main characters in this story. there isn't a main character. we're all in it together. so we can work together, or we can work at odds with each other.
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Never let Frum and Miller be your translators for what the cool leftist kids are saying.
But the other thing that seems to be going on, to the extent that this is a real phenomenon I’m describing, is a feeling that simply having beliefs is, in itself, a sign of lameness and that the cool thing is not to have any.
It's not that The Activist Kids (which, again, seems to include Millennials who are in their 40s) have no beliefs and think that Resistance Liberals are cringe. What they really feel is that they are not being seen or listened to by the politicians, the donors, and the media. They have plenty of beliefs, they just don't see that a return to the politics of the Clinton, or Obama, or Reagan years (since this is Frum trying to square the kid's circle) is going to fix any of the specifics of their lives that keep them trapped in the precariat.
The "bonesmashers" are not nihilists or deluded Marxist idealists; what the "bonesmashers" are actually feeling and thinking is something more like what Spanish Civil War anarchist Buenaventura Durruti was talking about when he told The Toronto Daily Star:
The heart of this clash of worldviews is not so much about whether or not the status quo should be obliterated, but about whether or not the institutions who are trying to guide the resistance are willing to give up their own privilege and comfort in order to build a more just future for those who have been harmed by the institutions that the resistance liberals are trying to preserve.
The resistance liberals 401(k)'s are built on the bones that keep the bonesmashers paying off predatory student loans, and that keep a runaway carbon cycle heading for collapse within the bonebreakers' lifetimes.
The sort of institutional reform they need is going to take more than just making ICE go through more training. Real reform is going to feel dangerous to the resistance liberals because they profit from many of the structures that are harming the precariat.
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Sorry guys, very soon after that I got a notification from the Atlantic about the transcript of David Frum's interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark, which includes this question from Frum:
Now, I wanted to ask you about something that—and I don’t know how real this is, but people who keep up with this more than I do tell me that there is a mood among the young that there’s something lame about the project that you’re engaged in, and I guess I’m engaged in, too, of standing up for what they would call “resistance liberalism.” And this is somehow unfashionable, uncool. And I wonder, is this a perception of something that actually exists, or is this just chat? And if, to the extent it exists, let me ask you about two different strains that I can see for what’s motivating it.
One is—and there’s just nothing to be done about this—is real leftists who say, "Look, you’re standing up here for the Constitution, the rule of law, for international free trade, for—you don’t wanna say open borders; you just wanna say orderly police procedures without abuses and without violence. So you’re not a real leftist. You’re not smashing the system. You’re not overturning the hierarchy. You’re not socializing the means of production. You’re not globalizing the intifada. It’s just lame". So, okay, real leftists, I get why they would have a beef.
But the other thing that seems to be going on, to the extent that this is a real phenomenon I’m describing, is a feeling that simply having beliefs is, in itself, a sign of lameness and that the cool thing is not to have any. Am I talking about anything real? You’re at the center of this business. Do you see this? Am I describing something you recognize?
Plus, there was also a lot of interesting stuff about Minneapolis.
So I reckoned there was a chance that some of you might be interested in reading about this. Apologies for monopolising the thread, I'll go away now.....
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/02/david-frum-show-tim-miller-counterculture/686141/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCdeJRjbNQ3nJbg9K2eprfR0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
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And, as part of my continuing mission to bring various diverse but interesting voices to ObWi, including those of Never Trump Republicans, this is David Frum on last night's SOTU (which I actually watched, for my sins). It was a) embarrassing, and b) the ultimate illustration of what it looks like to be in a completely post-truth world:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/trumps-childish-state-of-the-union/686133/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCatXRzFLbHu8MkuaA3ijO-A&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
I have not yet watched the Dem rebuttal, that treat awaits.
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This is Alastair Campbell's diary from Ukraine, in The New World:
My weekly diary
I’m in Ukraine, a nation let down by AmericaAfter all the warnings to bring thick coats and thermals, Kyiv was reasonably dry, and the temperature a bearable one degree Celsius as we stepped off the train at 5am on Monday.
The sleeper train was something of a misnomer. Well, it was a train for sure, albeit an old and clunky one, which reminded me of those black and white movies when goodies were chasing baddies from carriage to carriage, and almost falling through the cracks. But as for the sleeper bit, during a twelve hour stop-start journey through the night from the border with Poland, I reckon I slept for about three of them, max. In general, I think being tall is an advantage in life. Sleeper trains are very much an exception to this rule.
The trip coincided with the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and I was invited to accompany the EU’s enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, a Slovenian diplomat and former champion swimmer, who surely has one of the trickiest jobs in global politics right now.
Ukraine is one of several countries currently in the queue to join the EU, and while she wants to see the day when they all join – Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, Serbia and more – she also has to make sure the necessary political and economic conditions are met. There are times when bureaucracy and rules can get in the way of political will, however much of it there may be, and she has plenty.
Ukraine’s president Vlodymyr Zelensky is clear that he wants to join the EU by January 1 2027. Commissioner Kos has the unenviable task of telling him that is impossible, while keeping alive the hope that one day it will happen.
Kos points out that the methodology used to assess new entrants today is not that different to the process which led to Spain and Portugal coming in four decades ago. “That was peace time. This is war time. We have to find ways of speeding up the process,” she says. You sense she feels the current crisis is existential not just for Ukraine but, if they fail, for Europe.
So there may be a way of getting countries into the EU in some shape or form as part of the process rather than the conclusion of the process. There are various ways that might be done, currently the subject of intense debate. Some are calling it gradual integration, others reverse membership.
This all bodes very well for my grand vision for European enlargement – that Ukraine, the UK and Canada all sign up on the same day.
Now we’re talking. And before you dismiss that as impossible… so was Brexit, until it wasn’t.
You might imagine hope is not an easy commodity to find in a place that has been on the receiving end of Putin’s war machine for four years, with over 100,000 Ukrainians dead and half a million injured. It may be a source of some pride that these are dwarfed by Russian losses, but they are horrific numbers nonetheless.
Add in the fact that five million Ukrainians are living elsewhere in Europe right now, mainly women and children, with little likelihood they can come back soon, and millions more displaced internally, and you understand why there is such a sense of war fatigue.
There is also among some here a feeling of shock and isolation that the world seemed to care so little when Putin decided to turn winter into a weapon of war. It has been freezing in recent weeks and in one nearby bombing strike on an energy plant the Russians deprived 350,000 people of heat in an instant. As the EU ambassador, Katarina Mathernova, put it to me: “Kyiv is a frontline city now. But it was so hard to get anyone interested. Too much is happening elsewhere in the world.”
The consequences of war are visible – and deliberately so. The carcass of a train carriage has been moved from the scene of its bombing last month to a track at the main station. It is there to shock, and to underline that Putin’s pretence not to be targeting civilian life is exactly that. Indeed even he has given up pretending.
But then, walk a couple of yards down the platform, and there is another carriage, this one turned into a viable intensive care unit, used whenever the hospitals are overwhelmed. The third carriage is a children’s recovery unit, with beds even smaller than the one I couldn’t sleep in.
We then went to a briefing with the head of Ukraine’s railways, who on the one hand explains that the rail infrastructure suffered more than a thousand Russian attacks last year, including more than fifty locomotives damaged or destroyed, but on the other hand shows me a film of Ukrainian children brought home for a week’s holiday from their current homes in the EU. Smiling kids. Singing kids. Dancing kids. Hope.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Grok clearly doesn't search out all the sources
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2438589/
Research suggests that rates of sexual victimization in prison may be as high as 41% or as low as less than 1%.12 A recent meta-analysis estimates a conservative “average” prevalence estimate of prison sexual assault at 1.9%. While the estimated rate of victimization varies significantly across studies, the characteristics of the victims reported in these studies are more similar. First, rates of sexual coercion are higher than rates of sexual assault or rape, independent of gender. More specifically, unwanted and sexually suggestive touching of breasts, genitals, or buttocks is more typical inside prison than the act of rape itself. Second, in the vast majority of studies, male facilities have been found to have higher rates of sexual assault compared to female facilities. Yet the perpetrators of sexual assaults against female inmates, compared to male inmates, are less likely to involve staff. Third, younger inmates are at greater risk of sexual victimization, particularly if they are new arrivals to a facility and are serving their first convictions. This may explain in part why rates of sexual victimizations vary across facilities within the same prison system. Facilities with a younger population would be expected to have higher rates of victimization than those facilities with a more mature and acculturated prison population. Fourth, inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization has an interracial bias, with victims most likely being White and sexual aggressors most likely being Black. This interracial pattern of victimization has been attributed to revenge for historical oppression and the reversal of racial dominance inside prison.
I also looked at your Grok summary and your takeaway seems to be remarkably narrowly focussed. I'll leave it to others to point out how your takeaway points are misleading.
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A libertarian on these very pages years ago, in a fit of drollery, once said that what really bothered him about weaponry near at hand was how bothersomely noisy gunfire can be to innocent bystanders; it hurts HIS ears!
Perhaps I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but loud noises of all kinds have always been a problem for me.
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An all-male prison is, by that way of figuring, still a patriarchal society, as is an all-female prison because the larger society in which they exist is patriarchal in structure.
This surprised me: "Inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization: 4% men vs. 21% women (mostly abusive sexual contact)."
"Research suggests male prisons in the US tend to feature more rigid, hierarchical gangs focused on protection, status, and black-market governance, while female prisons more commonly involve pseudo-family or kinship-style groups that emphasize emotional support and relational bonds."
Gendered Social Dynamics in US Prisons
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when wonkie posted, I was tempted to post, but I realized that what I was writing was just me happy to, as they say in the commons, 'attach myself to the statements'. I was born in 61, so the 70's and 80's were my cultural memories, so discussions, like the famous bear example, seem a bit overblown. I do think that there were mechanisms to protect women, but those mechanisms were also to keep women in line and there was an implicit bargain that if you don't rock the boat, you won't get thrown to the sharks. What underlies that is power relationships, and I think you can't erase those relationships or declare them out of existence, you can only be truthful about their existence and make sure that they aren't being exploited to do something they aren't supposed it.
As an example, in my FB feed, I've recently had a bunch of people talking about the French figure skater Suraly Bonaly, who was the first person to do a backflip in competition and she did it in 1998. The only problem was that it was an illegal move and she was penalized. However, in these Olympics, it was allowed in 2024 and included in the programs this time. So, just going by the fb posts, this was a female skater (who was also black) being mistreated while the two male skaters were allowed to do it.
None of these posts told the story of Bonaly doing the backflip in the warmups, inches from Midori Ito's head, in 1992, during her warmup just before the short program. This apparently got into Ito's head, because she subsequently missed her triple lutz in the short program and was only able to get the silver by making a comeback in the last program.
It seems indicative of something that it ended up with a black skater trying to throw an Asian skater off her game. In the Rodney King riots, it was Korean stores that took the brunt of protester's rage, and the whole 'Natural Conservative' push (Reagan said something like 'Latinos are Republicans, they just don't know it yet') tells me that the pressure is going to be exhibited more in the groups oppressed. Hurt people hurt people.
So I'd argue that the 'there are no women in the Epstein files' is reflection of a collection of power, not of some unavoidable darkness in the souls of all men. Next to the substack GftNC posts, I'd suggest reading Amelia Gentleman's Guardian piece Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club. Setting aside the irony of the writer's last name, she points out that Epstein's whole enterprise was on the backs of women who booked tickets, organized plans, etc etc. Wonkie's mention of Mad Men is interesting, because while the series revolves around the men being assholes, another important thread is how the women, in the background but vital to keep the machinery running, slowly begin to assert their own power.
While the apparent absence of asian and black victims in the case of Epstein can probably be traced to his own bent, which then gets passed thru his whole enterprise, I also wonder if the absence of asian or black men in the Epstein files might also suggest that minorities are more attuned to the transactional nature of ALL things, and therefore avoided being drawn into it.
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CharlesWT recited, from his gonadal reserve:
"And yet, in Western societies, boys are often expected to act like girls. Starting in school, where they’re expected to sit down, be still, be quiet, and pay attention. If they don’t, there’s something wrong with them."
Boys and girls alike are also expected to leave the guns and ammo at home in this western society, where they can used against the neighbors and Census workers, as God the Gunrunner intended, rather than bringing them into the schools to shoot teachers and fellow students dead.
Yet, only one of those sexual persuasions* seem to ignore that rule, along with those other shut-up-and-learn inconveniences mentioned heretofore.
A libertarian on these very pages years ago, in a fit of drollery, once said that what really bothered him about weaponry near at hand was how bothersomely noisy gunfire can be to innocent bystanders; it hurts HIS ears!
Which seems kind of feminine in its delicacy, ya know, in the generalizing course of things. I would think your normal Texas hombre would wave off hails of deafening gunfire like Colonel Kilgore on the beach in 'Apocalypse Now' unflinchingly, but wistfully citing his love of the smell of Napalm in the morning as ordnance goes Ka-plow! mere yards from him and his surfboard.**
And, is a little like the Yiddish lady complaining about the atrociously bland food served in her nursing home ..... "AND, such small portions!"
*OK, in the abiding interests of both sides do it, I concede there are way too many MAGA conservative Mar-A-Lago-faced gunslinging, gorgons and harridans like the Greenes, the Boeberts, with big swinging testicles who do not demur at a little fully automatic gunfire in the school cafeteria or the U.S. Capitol or even in an otherwise peaceful Minneapolis neighborhood.
** I must mention I personally witnessed that scene being filmed while "performing" as a movie extra (army ranger grunt) in the Philippines while temporarily on "leave" from the Peace Corps there back in the late 1970's.
It was a movie being filmed, but in that and other scenes, it was as deafening, disorienting and dangerously violent as one might imagine real war to be. The ordnance was real and way to close. If not for the blanks in my M-16, I'd have shot most of fellow extras and maybe a star or two. If not for Coppola yelling "Cut", I'd have spent some time in a VA wing stateside entitled "Ward for The Cinematically Shell-Shocked"
Back to Lurking.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.