Lisa Wade at Sociological Images muses on why commercial depictions of “lust” or “sexy” overwhelmingly involve images of women, making the implicit lust-er or perceiver-of-sexiness a straight male: Thought Experiment:  If nearly naked men had been dancing in those columns, do you think the audience would have thought “hot men for the women!” or “how […]

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For all the mocking references we see to “The One,” I find I normally associate dogmatic political cults of personality with the right. Whenever I’m tempted to think they’ve got a monopoly, though, I’ll pull up Jason Linkins’ no-punches-pulled article on Keith Olbermann’s complicity in an intra-network “truce” and skim the outraged comments from people […]

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I’m trying to figure out what to make of claims that angry folks showing up at townhall-style events on health care reform are mere “astroturf” activists. If it’s true, it seems like it must be some spectacularly bad astroturfing: My experience is that when seasoned political professionals are really in charge of stage-managing an event, […]

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I’ve seen conservatives circulating this YouTube clip, in which Andrea Mitchell, discussing polling numbers showing low support for Obama’s health care reforms, notes in an aside that opponents “may not know what’s good for them.” This incredibly tone-deaf choice of words, naturally, prompts cries of “elitism” and “arrogance.”  Insofar as “elitism” has recently been used […]

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It’s hard not to be disturbed by a recent poll suggesting that Birther Madness, while still marginal among Americans on the whole, has moved from fringe to mainstream in certain select demographics. More than a quarter of Republicans purport to believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and even more proclaim […]

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They’re a sufficiently soft target that sometimes piling on seems unsporting, but Alex Massie Knapp’s circuitous philosophical “defense” of the Birthers reminds me that it’s not so much what they don’t know that marks them as loons—it’s what they know that ain’t so. Sure, it’s sort of cranky—skepticism beyond the bounds of the reasonable—to keep […]

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I’ve said something similar before myself, but this from Conor Friedersdorf jibes with my own experience: There is this idea among movement conservatives—especially the rank-and-file—that Washington DC journalism is populated by a lot of disingenuous, careerist sell outs. These elites write to enrich themselves, to inflate their sense of self-importance, and to garner social capital, […]

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Disturbing as I find it to defend Pat Buchanan in any dispute about race, one aspect of the argument Rachel Maddow makes in this much-blogged-about exchange seems rather odd to me.  She challenges Buchanan to explain why 108 of 110 Supreme Court justices have been white, arguing that this suggests minority candidates have been unfairly […]

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Perhaps you caught some of the weekend’s silly fuss over a photo that apparently showed Barack Obama scoping out a callipygous Brazillian teen at a youth conference. If so, you probably also noted that the full video of the scene captured in the picture pretty unambiguously shows that the president was doing no such thing—though […]

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