Nazis and Porn, Plus: In Defense of Alex Kuczynski

Sometimes, as my friend Dan Greenberg wisely said once, it seems as though the world only contains about thirty characters and you keep bumping into them — and familiar situations — in different combinations:

•I notice Kerry Howley quotes a comment left by Jacob Levy on my blog (defending feminism as un-fascistic) and headlines it “Reasons to Marry Jacob Levy.”  Well, good for Jacob (and his real wife, Shelley).  Again, though, and I will try to say this more diplomatically: I’m not saying the Jacob way of life is bad, just that it is merely one way among others and as such should not be treated as a morally-privileged outcome within libertarianism proper.  If I can’t even get libertarians themselves to agree on this point, though, maybe it’s time to just move on to other topics…

•…and a topic of interest to both me and Kerry, given our mutual interest in science-based reproductive alternatives, is the denunciation by leftist doofus Thomas Frank of Alex Kuczynski — who was one of my fellow St. Martin’s Press editorial assistants back when I worked there.  She has now caused female-type controversy of her own by marrying a billionaire, hiring a surrogate mom (since Alex’s womb wasn’t working, which you’d think would earn her some sympathy), and then making the mistake of enthusing, in her capacity as a New York Times writer, about how hiring the impoverished surrogate enabled Alex to stay thin and rich and enjoy her four homes (and when I say thin, crucially, I also mean the strong-shoulders, used-to-be-on-the-swim-team type thin, something I think we can all applaud).

It’s fine if people want to condemn Alex’s attitude as tacky, but Frank just hates commercial exchanges, always — and you’ll notice that feminism, by priming us to think of females everywhere as exploited and oppressed, especially when their privates are involved, has made his dirty work easier.  Seeing feminism and (anti-science, anti-reproductive-weirdness) social conservatism hand in hand is always enough to make me feel as if libertarianism should say good riddens to both — but I will try to be more nuanced for the rest of the month, despite everyone except me being a complete jerk.

•In other sexual weirdness, I see that my old hometown of Norwich, CT (hi, Mom and Dad!) — home of Benedict Arnold and novelist/Todd’s high school teacher Wally Lamb — is making another rare appearance in the media, due to a substitute teacher there who’s just a couple years older than me, Julie Amero, being arrested for accidentally opening porn on a school computer and causing kids to see it (I was alerted to this case by a mass-e-mail from the Sam Adams Alliance’s Paul Jacob, himself the recent target of legal lunacy for collecting ballot signatures despite not being a resident of the state where the initiative was being voted on, for which Oklahoma bureaucrats were keen to throw the book at him).

I say, assume the substitute teachers are just technically-unsavvy unless they somehow show naked pictures of themselves to students or actually have sex with the students — and even then, if the teacher is hot and female, you know darn well that the male victim is probably now considered the luckiest boy in school, whatever the law may say about it (not that this is necessarily reason to change the law).

•Speaking of feeling old and non-media-savvy, I was checking a list of ten nerd movies I want to see in 2009 — and I realized that I don’t even understand whether one of them actually has a release date.  I speak of the movie Iron Sky, a sci-fi comedy about a 1940s colony of Nazis on the Moon returning to Earth in 2018 (again with the Nazis).  It turns out Iron Sky is an “open source production” being worked on in pieces by volunteer computer animation contributors (you could be one!) who get assigned remaining unfinished pieces of the script, all controlled by a coordinating team in Finland.

When does it actually “come out”?  Does it?  I don’t know — I don’t know if I know anything anymore.