In case you missed it, Dr. Helen defends herself from Neiwert’s (willful?) misinterpretation of her post, which started this whole brouhafuffle. EcoPunk reads back a little ways, but not to the radish of the issue. John Cole’s brain hurts. Personally, I don’t think that makes him feminine. And I have a confession to make: I like Regina Spektor’s music. Does that (in and of itself) make me teh ghey? Feel

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