In an effort to determine how masculine I appear to others — and what role perception plays in that determination — I spent the better part of this afternoon in my front yard, lifting weights in a sleeveless tartan flannel and steel-toed work boots, sipping gin gimlets and listening to a mix tape heavy with Depeche Mode and Erasure. The idea was to contrive a social text consisting of a

Amanda Marcotte is still blogging? Even after being exposed as an embarrassing opportunist and a purveyor of gross libels against those wrongly accused of rape (and their defenders)? Wow, who knew? And about my cock again, no less… Not that she can help herself, the poor dear. Much as she tries, she just can’t seem to quit the hypermasculinist bad boys. — Which, on the plus side, there’s yet another

Enforcing illegal immigration laws = enforcing runaway slave laws, according to Latino Movement USA’s Juan Jose Gutierrez (not surprisingly, a hard-core Marxist). Which, I guess the quickest way to pawn yourself off as the Latino Frederick Douglass is to set up the rhetorical conditions for your own reluctant self-importance, profess outrage on behalf of “your” people, then let a fawning press sympathetic to the strained historical analogies pushed by grievance

Give David Morris and Salon credit: they certainly do their best to cram into a single sentence as much of the progressive narrative orthodoxy as they can before certain inconvenient facts (which themselves seem to take on a greater urgency somehow when surrounded by Marines) compel them to veer a bit toward the optimistic center: Despite Bush’s deceptive rhetoric and mishandling of the war, the Marines I rode with here

In the unlikely event some of you might still be interested in David Neiwert’s increasingly embarrassing attempts to foist his own personal view of “masculinity” on the universe by way of sheer “intellectual” will, here is his response to yesterday’s post on the subject. For those interested only in the abridged version of Neiwert’s rejoinder, here’s Slart in the comments, offering a concise summary: All of this is just proving

Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee is making quite a career out of picking up the telephone these days. To wit, an AP story published Friday made the following claim — sure to bring about the same kind of “concern” among the anti-war types (and their media enablers) as did NBC’s (inadvertant) infomercial for Dragon Skin body armor: Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing

In his New Republic book review of Lucy Riall’s Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, Alexander Stille writes: Riall does not overemphasize the modernity of Garibaldi; she recognizes that he is not quite our contemporary. One of the interesting cultural differences that separates us from the culture of the Garibaldi cult is the almost willful use of wholly invented stories and details in the vast majority of Garibaldi biographies that circulated

Me: “So, tell me about your relationship with Mike. Did he ever, y’know –” Hush Puppies: “– If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not talk about that asshole right now. Okay?”*

Tell me if any of this sounds vaguely familiar to you. From Theodore Dalrymple, writing in the City Journal: In an effort to ensure that no Muslim doctors ever again try to bomb Glasgow Airport, bureaucrats at Glasgow’s public hospitals have decreed that henceforth no staff may eat lunch at their desks or in their offices during the holy month of Ramadan, so that fasting Muslims shall not be offended

Dan did a fine job yesterday pointing up the almost surreal blinkeredness of David Neiwert’s bizarre attempt to play Dr Phil to the blogosphere’s troubled hypermasculinist “conservatives” — which Neiwert does in a strained argument for redefining masculinity that echoes not only Jim Henley’s musings on the topic, but also the much longer disquisition from Dr Ric Caric, whose essay on the “weenie man” I linked and (obliquely) commented on