Seeing Like a Stud

What has the PUA community been saying about my C-SPAN2 appearance a few months ago, you ask?  Wait, first you ask: What the hell is the PUA community? 

Apparently, there are men (or, if you will, half-men) so desperate for women that they must resort to the use of "game"-like techniques to lure them in.  They refer to themselves as "pick-up artists" (PUA) and often sport oddly-gay online pseudonyms such as Chateau and Magic (not to be confused with George Costanza's imaginary horses, Snoopy and Prickly Pete, nor the imaginary ponies two of my female co-workers had years ago, Misty and Shasta).  The PUA techniques involve things like surprising and confusing women, subtly undermining their self-esteem (or at least confounding their expectations) with "negs" (little negative comments and joke insults), acting aloof yet entertaining, etc., and likely having other women in reserve instead of investing emotionally in just one. 

Borrowing a bit from evolutionary psychology, the PUA guys often refer to males who are not attractive to women as betas and males who are as alphas.  Since they spend so much time studying the behavior of alphas and dreading any taint of beta behavior, I can only assume that PUA guys think of themselves as gammas, deltas, or some other dreaded Greek letter, possibly even omega, but the point is that they are putting a great deal of time and effort into seeming like alphas.  A small army of them have leapt to the erroneous conclusion that I am some sort of "beta loser" with "no game" due to my artful takedown of an ex on TV -- too much emotional investment and too blatant an admission of discontent by the almost religiously-strict PUA standards, apparently. 

Gentlemen, or perhaps I should say boys: BEHOLD ALPHA-PRIME.

Now, normally, despite some people falsely accusing me of being prone to oversharing after the rather unique C-SPAN2 appearance, I would consider it unchivalrous even to confirm that I'd had sex with any woman (and careful observers will note I am still avoiding naming names, strictly speaking), but since I am beset by doubters -- PUA doubters in particular, who struggle like inept scientists to understand the data before them -- allow me to allude at least briefly to the real Todd Seavey situation. 

First of all, as I mentioned in a recent entry, I have never really been lonely enough long enough even to resort to a real personals ad (despite the joke one noted by various media outlets after the C-SPAN2 appearance, which was really more of a lengthy veiled essay about things to avoid in female psychology -- I am a writer, after all).  Similarly, I cannot imagine spending time learning PUA rules and techniques -- let alone sniping at other males online about failure to follow these rules -- when there are, to put it mildly, women all over the place all the time to be met and, with regularity, dated.

If anything, I have placed numerous constraints upon myself in an effort to avoid being distracted from my higher callings -- writing, political endeavors, seeking to understand the cosmos -- by too many, or too many not-quite-right, females.  And still I cannot wholly prevent them having sex with me, it seems.

•I have very publicly vowed never to have children, whereas most women want

Newsweak

I go on C-SPAN2 and point out a rising, disturbing form of sadistic nihilism on the right, disguised as Catholic traditionalism, and what is the esteemed Newsweek's thoughtful reaction (in their hardcopy edition of Nov. 1, 2010)?  "Entertaining, yes -- but, dude, not the forum." 

Given that some site also joked that I was obviously confused and rambling about irrelevancies when I mentioned G.K. Chesterton (and what are all these "footnote" things cluttering up the bottom of the page?), I have to wonder whether anything, personal or political, would have sounded worth mentioning to some listeners (ones in the media who pretend to understand things, mind you).  You disappoint me, culture, and it may be time I started punishing you for it more frequently. 

At least when a friend of mine (as excerpted yesterday) used "dude" in a reaction, he was dashing off a personal e-mail.  Newsweek probably had thoughtful editors weigh in on whether "dude, not the forum" was an apt summary of the ethical and philosophical charges being brought to bear. 

But tomorrow, the real "dude" issue: how those pathetic dumbasses in the so-called "pick-up artist" (PUA) community misread the whole incident.

C-SPAN2 Personal Reactions

I would be fascinated to hear some of the people who reacted in an anti-Todd way to my C-SPAN2 appearance attempt to explain themselves, except I don't think most of them can (also, I was lying -- I don't want to hear from them anymore, despite this being a final look back I've dubbed a "Month of Haters" on this blog). 

Again, I would contend that if you watch a good man cautiously -- and quite circumspectly -- criticize an evil woman who presents as an old-fashioned moralist but isn't, and your reaction is to become so enraged at the male that you come to nigh-hallucinatory erroneous conclusions about the man's popularity on the dating scene or even feel compelled to e-mail him -- calling him rude even while heaping on the obscenities yourself -- there is something profoundly wrong with you, morally and rationally.

I recall one nice commenter, during an earlier online dust-up of which I was a part (also involving Jonah Goldberg, come to think of it, and a really bottom-of-the-barrel lefty-vitriol site called SadlyNo), saying that he occasionally tries asking savage online commenters to talk about their upbringings -- and thereby frequently elicits incredible tales of abuse and neglect from many commenters in a single thread, so (project for psychology grad students!) maybe angry online commenters are disproportionately psychologically-damaged youth (and adult survivors of youthful abuse), finally possessed of a safe space in which to strike back at whichever target of the day happens to pass in front of them.  I don't know. 

I do know I got one or two e-mails like one from a Tony Edwards who seems fairly articulate -- enough to call me "churlish" rather than, say, "a dickwad," for example -- yet who felt so incensed about the issue that he had to close with "Todd, please know that I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you're an asshole.  Go fuck yourself." 

And most of his e-mail was complaining about the fact that my blog was down, so he couldn't post comments.  No big deal from my perspective, you might think, and yet -- why would someone care so much about posting comments on the site of someone he thinks is an asshole -- and over an incident about which the person likely knows so little?  Am I going to have to lower my opinion of the whole human race yet again and conclude that many of them are just pointlessly combative sadists with far too much time on their hands?  Good news for Helen if so, as such people are fertile recruiting material from which to cull her supporters, if past trends hold.

Luckily, though, I got far more supportive e-mail, especially from people familiar with the two principals in the conflict, and they were more prone to use phrases such as the following (each from a different individual, none of them, I trust, identifiable here):

C-SPAN2 Links Round-Up

In a world torn by war, plagued by famine and disease, how popular was the six-minute-or-so clip from C-SPAN2 in which, with admirable frankness and the evenhanded sense of justice for which I am known, I alluded to my ex's penchant for -- and philosophy encouraging -- infidelity and petty cruelty? 

Well, one YouTube posting of the clip got about a half-million views -- more popular than some cable networks out there -- and I posted an entry on October 19, 2010 that linked to many articles, some in prestigious venues, eagerly recounting the seemingly-mundane but apparently unC-SPANly incident (after which my blog was down for a couple months while I sorted out whether my clients/employers would mind me attracting attention or not and some related matters, then plotted my new-fangled 2011 media strategy). 

One viewer comment under that now-deleted copy of the YouTube clip even contained a very poorly-spelled rhyming rap about the C-SPAN2 panel, concluding that I would not be having sex again and am too stupid to be a conservative, so that fellow may be evidence of the bourgeoning trad/PUA alliance my ex once told me about.  With footsoldiers like him, etc.

That earlier blog entry barely scratched the surface of the coverage, though, so, for posterity (or until the links die), here's another round-up of pieces about it:

•Ace of Spades

•The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC apparently took an anti-Todd tack (raising serious moral questions about all involved on that show, but then again, it's NBC).  And just imagine the rude things someone might say about the Klan -- possibly even a female Klan member! -- on C-SPAN2 one of these days.  MSNBC should cover that, too. 

•No one has yet Autotuned the C-SPAN2 bit, so as compensation, I offer this link (pointed out to me by Austin Petersen) to swell -- occasionally even moving -- Autotuned Carl Sagan (with cool Stephen Hawking duet in one) narration from Cosmos, the PBS series that so beautifully captured the wonders of science back in the 80s and no doubt helped me avoid turning into some morally-stunted religious believer, thus helping to make me the kind and tolerant person I am.

•A Boston classic rock station

•Creative Loafing

•Frum Forum

•Café Mom

•Talking Points Memo

•The chronically vicious and insane DC City Paper, as noted in an earlier entry

•Coilhouse

•Crushable -- this being one of only two or three cases in which someone I sort of know, Meghan Keane, seems to lean anti-Todd -- and given Meghan's blank affect and seeming inability

Dear Mrs. Robert Stacy McCain,

Do you find it odd how viciously your husband's blog went after me in not one but two entries on his blog after my (apt) criticisms of my C-SPAN2 co-panelist ex-girlfriend in October? 

(And, look, my addressing these questions to you is a literary device, Mrs. Robert Stacy McCain, so please don't get bent out of shape if in fact you're already divorced from him, institutionalized, suffering from cancer, or deceased due to committing suicide from years of having to deal with him.)

I mean, fine, your husband thinks of my co-panelist, not me, as his friend -- so he gets points for loyalty, maybe, which is about all his friend cares about, not ethics in the conventional sense, when she cares about either.  But doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that your husband -- ostensibly a homeschooling Christian type -- is so gung-ho about defending a young woman whose only relevant attribute for purposes of the current discussion is calculated trampling on monogamy and kindness?  Might it be the case that you should be more nervous about photos I've seen of my ex hanging out with at least one of your children than about me being at odds with your husband in cyberspace? 

Come to think of it, isn't it a little weird that your husband has a reputation for showing up at every conservative event in DC and flirting with young females?  What time does he normally get home to plan the next day's Bible-friendly homeschooling lessons for your half-dozen kids anyway? 

•••

But hey, if he thinks discretion is the paramount virtue, I can understand him thinking I'm an unchivalrous jerk for criticizing my ex.  Oh, but wait -- one of your husband's biggest claims to fame, if I can call it that, is writing a whole book about inappropriate sexual behavior by Democrats.  So he's not exactly a model of circumspection himself, is he?  Might he be projecting a bit with all of his anger at truth-telling Todd?  (And speaking of writing projects, wasn't he part of that cabal of somewhat inept Washington Times editors who let a reporter take the fall for an errant line inserted by the editors themselves?)

Of course, your husband has said he's "a poor excuse for a Christian," which at first glance sounds humble but which I'm beginning to think is a sort of code for a pattern (more disturbingly common than I'd been aware of before recent events) of Christians priding themselves on bad

Comics to the Left of Me, Joker to the Right

I was a bit disappointed to see Jonah Goldberg quoted in the Washington Post, after my somewhat tense exchange with one of his co-workers on a C-SPAN2 panel in October, as saying that he wasn't expecting the exchange, hadn't seen it as a way to increase publicity, and thought I'd behaved badly and self-servingly.

I'd sent him an e-mail beforehand telling him that I wouldn't lay into his co-worker if he felt that by doing so I'd be sandbagging him but that I thought it might even increase book sales if I did (buy Proud to Be Right, edited by Jonah and containing my "Conservatism for Punks" essay -- as made notorious by my C-SPAN2 appearance -- now!).  He replied to the e-mail by encouraging me to self-promote but also by saying he had no problem with what he called "[h]uge Jerry Springer style 'who's my baby daddy' type fights." 

If I wanted to be maximally negative about it, I could say that over the years NR editors have now at least slightly misrepresented my actions (Jonah), sadistically romantically manipulated people (Rittelmeyer), and even plagiarized me (Buckley himself, no joke), but I still owe them a great deal -- and even being on net harmed by America's most prominent conservative magazine would be something of an honor -- so I still hope NR will long endure, and I will not harbor resentments (even these "Month of Haters" blog entries effectively end on the 23rd, absent another week's worth of hatin' arising).  I will be playing up my purely-libertarian side more in the months ahead, though.

I suppose Jonah has to be expected to keep the peace with his co-worker, not an easy task.  And admittedly he did not know that, for instance, I'd casually consulted with a military psychologist about how best to confront the sort of psyche I was likely up against on the C-SPAN2 panel, so things may have been a bit colder and more strategic than he'd anticipated.  But hey, using psy ops is kind of neocon, so I think I should get some credit for that (I'm no neocon-basher, but these do tend to be the kinds of people who defend barbarities such as dodgeball as somehow conservative). 

One evolutionary psychology expert I know has been a bit harsher in judging Jonah's response to events, calling him "a wanker," and when an evolutionary psychologist levels that charge, it has to be taken more seriously than usual -- but no hard feelings, and I will hardly deny it was a weird situation in which Jonah, who I admire, had to play peacekeeper and ringmaster at the same time -- and then go back to working regularly with our co-panelist. 

There is no such excuse for the execrable Robert Stacy McCain (a.k.a. "The Other McCain"), about whom, more tomorrow.

•••

•Lest I sound too negative about my own extended political family here, let me

Book Selection of the Month: "Passing Strange" by Joseph A. Citro

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month: Passing Strange: True Tales of New England Hauntings and Horrors by Joseph A. Citro


You might say this irrational, dopey, trashy volume about New England -- which I read while traveling there last month -- is an antidote to literally half of my Book Selections for last year (links to which I promise to fix soon, along with twenty other things), about half of them having been about or by the British and inclined toward rationality.

The two things that most define me are of course regional pride and belief in the supernatural -- no, wait.  I don't care about either of those things.  Nonetheless, I thought it would be interesting to read a collection from my native New England of tales of the supernatural, a reminder it's not all just minutemen and rationalists up there.  (We're also uptight Puritans, liberal Ivy Leaguers, Red Sox fans, and scrimshaw aficionados.)

Besides, I've long thought (in a no doubt culturally biased way) that New England is the perfect setting for supernatural tales, since it's the region where the New World was most clearly still rooted in strange, extreme forms of Old World religious belief.  Freedom may in some sense have been born in New England, but a century and a half earlier, they'd cut your ears off there if you blasphemed on Sunday.  Really.  The Taliban would have been fairly comfortable in New England four centuries ago, though conservatives don't tend to like thinking about it that way. 

Too, the sparseness of the environment -- so little history compared to Europe, except for those bitter Native Americans lurking in the woods -- and the dour image of the Puritans both lend themselves well to notions of late-night chain-rattling as punishment for unwholesome thoughts, etc. 

I remember being young and not yet skeptical and thinking that the Connecticut woods seemed all too plausible a location for a ghost sighting (or perhaps Bigfoot attack) compared to, say, downtown Chicago or Paris.  The Blair Witch Project may have taken place in Maryland but would have worked perfectly if set in rural Massachusetts.  And for those in distant lands unsure about the definition of "New England": it's precisely the six states of Maine, New Hampshire (where my dad grew up), Vermont, Massachusetts (where I visited friends and philosophers last month), Rhode Island (where I went to college), and Connecticut (where both my mom and I grew up) -- but not, for instance, New York (where I now reside).

•••

In any case, this dopey book of New England ghost stories and creature sightings, which

The Game Itself Is the Point (plus: "Black Swan" revelation)

Since there's some tech-nerdery in this entry, now's a good opportunity to assure everyone that I will resume my thus far minimal and experimental Twitter use very soon and will then "follow" the intrepid people who've been kind enough to follow me already.  I'm putting a few pieces (professional and unprofessional) of the post-Fox Todd media empire in place, and then it will all come together with synergistic smoothness before my February dance performance and RLC talk, I'm sure.

The meaning of "nerd" is ambiguous and complex, and I think it was during a Star Wars convention back in the 90s that I realized some nerds are more interested in aggression and one-upmanship than my kind of nerd is.  Indeed, it was right around the moment that some larger-than-average nerd angrily said of me within earshot of two of my friends (themselves employees of sci-fi book operations): "That writer guy was talkin' ta my girl!!" 

I had always thought of myself as more of a Wars guy than a Trek guy before that moment, but you just don't hear that kind of turf-protecting machismo at the Trek events, save perhaps among the Klingons, who perceive tolerance and kindness as weakness.  (I say all this as a guy who, I swear, has been to only about three sci-fi or comics conventions in the past fifteen years.)  More broadly: we standard non-aggressive nerds dream of talking to Arthur C. Clarke on the Moon about telecommunications.  Your aggressive-type nerd pulls the wings off flies (perhaps does taxidermy as a hobby) and loves to keep track of who has been "Pwned" in massive multiplayer online games.

And some of the latter-type nerd surely weighed in on my C-SPAN2 appearance in October, sometimes with very intense opinions on whether I had "Pwned" my co-panelist (much as I appreciate being seen as the victor), whether I was in some strange sense now "over" (as if I'd used up my life points or something), and whether both my co-panelist and I look heinous. 

On that last question, let me just note: we do not, but then, most people -- including ostensibly tech-savvy gamers and media obsessives -- are unaware just how much make-up people are normally wearing under the glare of TV studio lights, whereas in this case, we not only had no make-up, we weren't even really under C-SPAN2 lighting -- let alone normal-network lighting -- but simply under the same unflattering (Georgetown) classroom lighting under which some of my detractors probably took their most recent history exam.  In person, you would surely deem me a demigod.  Yet, people with nothing to say still manage to say things that are insulting, I find.  (I, by contrast, often do self-effacing humor, even when using phrases like "demigod," but you earn no points for being self-effacing when dealing with aggressive-type nerds or garden-variety jerks, so it's all pearls before swine, with no clear solution.)

But here are some other nerd-combat notes of interest:

Interesting Things About Gender

Some of my online detractors last year were feminists.  I sparred with feminists online even before that, perhaps due to my likening feminism to white supremacism -- by which I mean not that feminism has done as much damage to the world as Naziism, obviously, but rather that I reject any philosophy that insists (as it seems to me virtually all forms of feminism in the real world do) that I hold certain seemingly-empirical claims about the relative merit of one subset of the population to be true a priori (and I would reject being told to do this on principle, for obvious reasons, even if empirically it turned out to be the case that whites had the highest IQs and women were precisely as capable as or more capable than men). 

Your average Nazi would insist white people are inherently awesome (though I recognize that for many of them this claim was perceived as an empirical one backed by various pseudo-scientific measures, not ostensibly an a priori claim), and, in practice, you know darn well feminism just boils down to being told in advance to root for the female.  It's all just dumb tribalism and will likely be recognized as such by future generations who've ceased to care about these particular pseudo-philosophies. 

But rather than have another online fight with feminists, I here present ten interesting items related in some way to gender issues, or to the mixture of sex and politics:

•A two-timing North Carolinian is in the headlines again.  Sounds like the Hunter is a lonely heart.

•Penelope Trunk tells us "What It's Like to Have Sex with Someone with Asperger's," in an article pointed out to me by a methodically neat friend with fairly muted facial expressions who likes to keep things alphabetized, not that I'm one to point fingers.

•Unless he just has a very unusual method of drumming up advance interest in a project, accused rapist Julian Assange's quote in paragraph 4 of this article is so honest that it may be more evidence of Asperger's.

•In a strange coincidence, pointed out in a comment by Gerard Perry on this blog, Moe Tkacik, whose insulting piece about me I complained about in yesterday's entry, sounds like she may have been demoted a couple weeks ago after (but ostensibly not over) a piece she wrote about Julian Assange, who I've repeatedly joked is my doppelganger.  So, some kinda cosmic justice there, maybe.

•Gender-bendy demigod David Bowie turns sixty-three tomorrow (whereas Julien Temple, who has directed Bowie more than once, is a mere fifty-seven, I notice, so he -- like the British generally -- still has years ahead of him in which to figure out how to make the sound seem less muffled).

•I have bet Dan Raspler that he will enjoy Kick-Ass, largely due to the character Hit Girl.  By contrast, I do not want to see Zack Snyder's upcoming

Moe Hatin'

To reiterate: during this blog's "Month of Haters" throughout January, I'm looking at the various categories of people who, strangely, denounced me for confronting a fellow C-SPAN2 panelist last year about her chronically deceitful, manipulative, and petty-sadistic ways -- and the disturbingly dark, artfully obscured philosophy that she believes justifies those ways.  (I do not thereby mean to disregard or slight the dozens of people, friends and strangers alike, who e-mailed or called to hail me as a hero.  I am grateful to you all, and rest assured your generally better-informed take on things is what I'll remember when all this recedes into the past.)

But might an even bigger jerk than my co-panelist have emerged from the conflict?  Hard as that is to imagine, I think Maureen "Moe" Tkacik may qualify (she writes for the City Paper in Washington, DC, where sexual assaults were up in 2010 by almost half again what they were in 2009, which somehow does not surprise me, given some of the lousy people who live in that town). 

After a friendly-seeming e-mail exchange and, I believe, after having attended one or more of the debates I used to host in Manhattan, Moe was moved to write an entire column -- two of them, actually, one addressed to me and the other to my co-panelist -- that read like a pair of the nastiest tossed-off comments thread outbursts stretched into venomous rants hundreds of words long, complete with enraged-sounding hyperbole about me being the kind of "dumbshit" testosterone-fueled male running and ruining the country.  Why?  Does the City Paper actually pay her for this, or is it all unpaid contributors recruited from a psychiatric outpatient clinic?  (Ah, an online check suggests she was in fact recruited from places like Jezebel and Radar.  I see.)

The simplest, saddest explanation may be that Tkacik, like a substantial subset of the population, does not really understand what the rest of the population means by humor but has noticed it often involves an element of aggression or cruelty and has thus concluded that these things alone qualify something as funny.  And in that, perhaps Tkacik, after all, isn't so unlike my co-panelist, who at some point early in life seems to have concluded -- without too openly warning the public about it -- that cruelty equals not only wit but intelligence, sexiness, cultural excellence, and even virtue (one good thing about the Tkacik column is that the eighth comment down, a Nov. 17 one from reader D.Caf, at least hits the proper tone of Todd-regard, in my humble opinion, regardless of whether his precise psychological analysis is accurate, and he even understands my humanitarian motivations).

Lest we dismiss Moe Tkacik as a mere ranter, though, I think it's worth noting she has a lengthy piece in the recently-unveiled Vol. 2, Issue 1 of the newly revived Baffler, in which she attempts to sum up and explain the entire financial crisis in a straight, analytical tone.  I mention this not to redeem Tkacik but, on the contrary, to make you think twice about the kinds of people who write sober-sounding, ostensibly objective analyses of complex financial or political phenomena.  Is the columnist who confidently tells you how Goldman Sachs works today the same one who'll be shrieking and throwing garbage at you tomorrow after her stand-up comedy show goes over poorly?  Tkacik has never, as far as I know, literally thrown garbage at people, I should note, but then, she put quotes around something in her piece about me that I never actually said, so I think I'm allowed a bit of metaphor. 

Tomorrow: feminism.

Heroism Gone Wrong

People are suckers for rules fashioned to fit neatly into the mental grooves created by instinct.  Those rules feel, as it were, instantly corroborated.  It doesn't take much effort, for instance, to create war poems that convince people to slaughter their foes, if instinct already whispers that all war is total war. 

(And they may never discern or analyze the underlying reasons for their instinct-fueled intuitions, leading them to believe they have simply directly-intuited virtue or aesthetic greatness, as UNC Chapel Hill philosopher Susan Wolf seems to think we do without any deeper utilitarian implications, judging by her speech at last week's APA convention, in a slot traditionally devoid, alas, of a question and answer period -- unless they just claimed that after spotting a utilitarian in the second row.) 

It's not surprising, then, that a fair number of the misguided Todd-mocking online commenters after my C-SPAN2 appearance in October seemed to act out of a hasty and poorly thought-out sense of chivalry (undermined and rendered inadvertently ironic by their uncivilized nastiness).  Long story short: sperm is cheap and plentiful, eggs rare, men strong, women small, so: protect the precious female and attack the expendable male no matter who's right, says opportunistic instinct, chivalric tradition, and nowadays, with barely-discernible tweaks, feminism -- and I'll discuss the last of those three on Friday, after tomorrow's intermediary look at the bizarre he said/she said approach of Washington's City Paper to the whole affair. 

Heroism, like courage in general, is a very valuable impulse all too easily yoked to bad causes.  Or just dumb ones.  And that leads us inevitably to superhero comics, which is the important thing.

•••

Ali Kokmen alerts me to the fact that J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5 and writer of the acclaimed (and, bizarrely enough, true) film The Changeling, has earned the site ComicsAlliance's award for worst comic book of 2010, with his Superman story arc in which Superman, after a year or so of fighting a spectacular war in space that involved most of his major friends and foes, takes a long walk (refusing to fly) across the U.S. and meets some ordinary people with ordinary problems along the way. 

That sounded boring enough to begin with (not that I read comics anymore, you understand), but this came at the same time that JMS was writing a Wonder Woman story arc in which some sort of time-shenanigans completely rewrote WW's history, with the major discernible side effect being that she now wears pants instead of the little star-spangled panties. 

(I can't help wondering whether this was all a convenient excuse to cover up some of WW's flesh in time to have her appear in a crossover miniseries with the Islamic

We Have Always Been at War with Aristasia

One of the more insightful conservative couples I know say they suspected, well before I did, what I was up against in the struggle that culminated on C-SPAN2. 

They recall over a year ago likening my sparring partner to the Anthony Powell temptress/destroyer character Pamela Flitton from the novel series A Dance to the Music of Time -- and, perhaps even more interestingly, to heretical British right-wing lesbian Miss Martindale, leader of the non-spatially-located lesbian "nation" of Aristasia, which claims to admire discipline but not necessarily s&m.  Behold footage of Miss M. herself, and do not be surprised if some of you perceive striking similarities of comportment and attire to someone else (I am also struck by the pretense of maintaining strict traditional roles even in a strange alternate social universe clearly predicated on abandoning traditional locales, a la the irrational and destructive insistence on completing the bridge on the River Kwai).  I suppose Miss M.'s traditional look beats going to great length and expense to achieve androgyny and ending up with something as off-putting at this. 

(By contrast, there was some lovely, rail-thin, and fashionably suspenders-wearing she-Jagger creature, Italian I think, on the APA panel about Twitter last week, an androgynous philosophy professor with New Wavily teased short hair who could probably teach Americans even more about fashion than about tech-enhanced consciousness, not that I'm knocking either.  She was one of the rare cases where the tragic Italian trend toward avoiding weight gain and curviness paid off -- but in general, I still recommend Italian women try to catch up in size to their Italian-American counterparts.  Waste of genetic potential not to.  Monica Bellucci is a sex symbol.  Pinocchio is not, as far as I know.  I can't say that often enough.)

I'm not claiming for a moment actually to have contended with a Powell villain or an Aristasian -- not even a British person -- but there were at least comparable layers of philosophical weirdness, which should give pause to anyone tempted to think it was all a typical intra-conservative or intra-nerd spat, let alone a mere dumped guy with sour grapes. 

And none of it, admittedly, mapped tidily onto conventional utilitarian models of happiness, except in so far as people will eagerly adhere to and even promulgate, I now think, just about any set of rules coherent enough to "feel" like a familiar heuristic in a frightening

Scandal Retrospective: Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Eliot Spitzer

As a new, Tea Party-influenced Congress is sworn in, it may be a fitting time to reveal that failed, Tea Party-backed, abstinence-promoting Republican Senate candidate from Delaware Christine O'Donnell and I have kissed the same woman -- a punk in fact, but not a conservative.  (Prior to her religious awakening, the young O'Donnell had wild parties and wild acquaintances, some with tattoos and heroin habits, though it wasn't a junkie that kissed us both.)  I would not necessarily conclude that O'Donnell is bi, though her sister is a lesbian, and my impression is that homosexuality and a certain open-mindedness often run in families. 

I would imagine that some of the same people who think I was "oversharing" on C-SPAN2 (as one tweeter far too close to that situation to judge put it) would have loved some additional O'Donnell "dirt" prior to the election (and they'll get absolutely no more details from me now, by the way, so don't bother asking no matter who you work for and what TV show you want to put me on; the election is over, and indeed was probably effectively over by the time Elvira was parodying O'Donnell's "I am not a witch" campaign ad).  I'm not indiscriminate with the inside info, though, and it's not so clear to me that O'Donnell is guilty of any real hypocrisy warranting more pummeling. 

If anything, that Gawker piece about one fellow's night in bed with a post-conversion O'Donnell sounds to me like pretty good evidence that she's trying, in her rather dumb, technical way, to stick to her principles, after what she admits was a lusty youth.  O'Donnell probably isn't a hypocrite.  More likely just nuts.  Crazy chicks and sexual moderation are at best uneasy, temporary allies, for some reason.  Add either rock n' roll or religion -- in some cases both -- to the mix, and, much as I might wish otherwise, you have to expect trouble, I've repeatedly found.  (I don't know why these things go together, but as I age, I'm becoming more resigned to the fact that certain constellations of psychological attributes just do -- like childhood molestation victims turning into adult anorexics.)

If O'Donnell is uncertain about the need for a separation between church and state (which, in her defense, is not the Constitution's own phrasing of the principle) and admits to having had a date on a "Satanic altar" in her pre-conversion youth, I'm surprised none of her foes put two and two together and issued an ad warning that she might institute a Satanic government if elected.  But trying to make people sound like heretics can backfire, a fact beautifully exploited by the Rand Paul senatorial campaign in one of my favorite political ads of 2010, after Paul's foolish opponent tried to make it sound as if Paul literally worships the god Aqua-Buddha, who was conjured up for a college prank in Paul's own youth. 

•••

But it wasn't really the religion or the sex or even the overall weirdness that did in O'Donnell.  By the

Catholicism Not So Catholic, APA Not So Atheist

A site called TheAmericanCatholic claims in its mission statement to be "an online community of Christians, motivated by a rich heritage of Catholic spiritual and intellectual tradition, seeking to engage American society and culture in pursuit of the common good."  As I've learned, though, for some religious people, "the common good" means nothing more than "defense of our own sect's members at all times regardless of the moral implications."

How else do you explain a site presumably dedicated to such longstanding Catholic institutions as monogamy (i.e., the moral rules that I actually practice and that I was condemning someone else for maliciously violating) summing up my C-SPAN2 appearance like so:

Todd Seavey, a libertarian, decided that a C-Span panel was an excellent time to go after Helen Rittelmeyer, a Catholic Conservative, who had broken up with him after a romantic relationship.  Rittelmeyer handled herself with aplomb under the onslaught and Seavey behaved like a Triple A Grade Jerk.

But I suspect it doesn't matter to them who has done what, really (details, schmetails) -- just spot the in-group members ("Catholic Conservative") and the out-group members ("a libertarian").  If you don't believe me, just try and imagine them condemning a female Catholic if she had made shocking on-air accusations about an ill-behaved libertarian/atheist male.  I don't recall the Bible having harsher words for people who expose evil on C-SPAN2 than for people who do evil, but, hey, I'm atheist -- not to mention a libertarian -- so what do I know, right?  Thou shalt not publicly shame a Catholic, I guess, especially a young female one. 

Rendering the site still more absurd, in the comments, some Catholic snake calling himself Blackadder -- perhaps the same contributor who posted the event summary above -- actually praised my friend Tim Carney, who must confuse the site contributors terribly by being both Catholic and (largely) libertarian, saying the following (with telling autobiographical note):

Thankfully not all libertarians are like Mr. Seavey.  After listening to the C-SPAN panel, I caught this episode of Bloggingheads (cause there's not a lot to do in my Mom's basement) with socially conservative libertarian Tim Carney.

I may be arguing with a fourteen year-old here for all I know, but it's never too early to ask people who

Philosophy vs. C-SPAN2 Reactions

One of the things I miss about philosophy class is the assumption there that an argument can be protracted and serious without anyone getting bent out of shape or overly emotional.  By contrast, there seems to be no argument online so brief or so petty that it fails to bring out frothing rage in (even the most superficially-invested) comment thread participants. 

I'm told psychologists have taken to studying online rage, trying to determine why it's so commonplace.  I have never been a sunshiny optimist when it comes to human nature, so I think the simplest answer is: most people are complete jerks (this is, after all, the same human race so prone to smashing, burning, and raping even during riots in which the participants don't know the cause or purpose of the riot -- many people are just itching to behave like savages, I think, instinctively relishing any opportunity for tribal warfare and other combat). 

More troublingly, in an era of sites like Gawker, the jerks have come to think snarkiness proves them to be intelligent rather than mere members of a cretinous mob, as though snark requires effort or insight (even idiots do it these days -- really).  The jerks theory would certainly explain some of the reactions (not, thank goodness, all) to my heroic confrontation with a profoundly (albeit coyly) morally-problematic fellow-panelist on C-SPAN2 back in October. 

Also, as one of my young colleagues -- far more objective than I about the whole thing -- put it, it seems as though smart people tended to side with me and stupid people with the other panelist -- and there are a