כ"ד באלול ה'תש"ע (Friday 3 September 2010) · 0 comments
One of the most momentous conversations of my life came about ten days after 11 September 2001. I lived in New York at the time and, having been about two blocks from the World Trade Center when the first tower fell, was very much in a “12 September” mindset then as I am today. Some friends and I were gathered uptown to discuss something or another, and we naturally turned to the recent act of terrorism that we’d all witnessed, several of us without having had to watch it on television. Were we, one of us wondered, in a religious war?
Yes. No. Maybe. Hard to tell. Islam this and Muslims that. Christianity, the west, etc. For all the reasons we could think to name.
Finally someone piped in: if two groups of people are at war, and one side says it is a war about x but the other side denies it, then yes, it is a war about x. That doesn’t mean it’s not necessarily a war about y and z, but it doesn’t take mutual agreement between enemies to agree on the nature of their hatred for one another. That pretty much ended the conversation.
This is something that most American conservatives get pretty well. Newt Gingrich gets it. Progressives think that they can, by denying the religious nature of America’s conflict with Islam, transform it into one that doesn’t make them participants in a religious war. The progressive rush to denounce conservatives who admit that America is in a religious war reflects, besides progressive arrogance, a sort of machismo and zero-sum approach to conflict that I’d rather expect to see among Israelis.
Tagged as:
9/11,
America,
conservatives,
islam,
muslims,
New York,
newt gingrich,
progressives,
slate,
world trade center
כ"ב באלול ה'תש"ע (Wednesday 1 September 2010) · 0 comments
Sometimes I can read an advice column just for the questions, and ignore the answers. This is one of those times:
Dear Prudence,
Twenty years ago, I had a child out of wedlock. I had slept with two men during that period, “Tom” and “Mike.” I assumed Tom was the father, but when I told him, he said he was infertile because of a childhood illness, and he showed me some paperwork to prove it. When my daughter was born, she looked just like Mike. I told him he was the father, but he didn’t want anything to do with her. When my daughter was 5, I got married, and my husband was the only father my daughter has known. She loves him, but she always had questions about her biological father that I couldn’t answer. I eventually got divorced, and when my daughter was 18, she wrote a letter to Mike. They started corresponding, and he flew out to meet her. They developed a relationship. We did a DNA test because he needed proof to add her as beneficiary to his will and other things. When the test came back, it proved Mike was not her father. So now my daughter wants to go to Tom’s house and meet him. What do I do?
Holy bat-crap, Batman. Let us list all the ways this horrid woman fucked things up:
- Sleeping with two men in the same time period.
- Sleeping with two men in the same time period and not using birth control with either of them.
- Having a child without getting married.
- Jumping to the conclusion that she knew which of the two men was her child’s father (by the way, if she admits to having slept with two men during that time, it means she was sleeping with those two men regularly, but we have to assume a girl who sleeps with two men regularly also has one-night stands with various other men, presumably with birth control).
- Taking his denial at face value (He showed me some paperwork? Come on!).
- Confirmation-biasing her belief that the other guy was the father after she let herself be convinced of it.
- Getting married and divorced within a few years during her daughter’s childhood (besides knowing that her father was just one of her mother’s flings, having a father figure introduced and then taken away in the crucial formative years will destroy the poor daughter’s self esteem and almost surely turn her into a worse slut than her mom).
- Not doing a DNA test to confirm things as soon as it became possible.
- Not telling the real father immediately upon finding out the news.
Wow. This woman is a piece of work. By my account, she’s fucked over: her daughter (immeasurably), her daughter’s biological father, the other guy she misled into believing he was her daughter’s biological father, the guy she married who was presumably her daughter’s adopted father, and of course all manner of friends and family members who’ve also been misled, confused and outright lied to (like the not-father’s parents who thought they had a granddaughter but actually didn’t). By being an acutely horrible person, she gave her daughter three potential father figures – but no father.
By no means would I say that this sort of behavior is typical of girls, but I also think many, many girls would read the above passage and not find much wrong with what the woman did. Certainly girls these days are led to believe that they can fuck their way through life with multiple male partners (at a time or in a row) and never have to deal with the inevitable consequences.
In fact, while the woman above signs her letter “So Ashamed,” it’s hard to figure out just what she’s ashamed of having done. Has she bothered to list all her fuck-ups like I did for her?
Tagged as:
dear prudence,
Girls,
shame,
slate,
sluts