Our Sex Lives

Matthew Yglesias has this to say about Elana Kagan, and the firestorm surrounding her:

This strikes me as part of a broader set of questions where I tend to see older straight liberals seeing things one way and gays and younger straight liberals seeing it differently.

When you think about it, the whole reason these “it’s none of your business” situations arise is precisely because facts about your sexual orientation aren’t considered on a par with questions about one’s sex life. Straight people don’t normally discuss our sex lives with casual acquaintances or unknown readers, but we’re expected to over time bring dates to events or make passing reference to current or former partners. It’s when someone doesn’t do that stuff that people begin to wonder if the person is gay.

Oh my god.

I didn't realize...

Faithful readers, I'm looking back in my archives and, well, I don't see any passing references to current or former partners. I haven't been talking about current or former partners in passing with any except my closest friends... I haven't been seen in public lately with a date. I didn't have a date in the audience of any of my most recent shows...

I'm thinking about it, and, well, normally I'd keep this sort of personal information to myself -- I've never denied it, but I haven't been open with this aspect of my life before. I'm not necessarily sure people in my community would approve, actually. But I think it's important for me to come clean, and tell you about something which I thought effects only me, but may actually be a strong part of my identity and influence how I look at the world.

I...

I'm a virgin.

Yes, that's right. There are no current or former partners for me to discuss, and I haven't had any dates lately. I try to keep this to myself because I didn't feel it was relevant to my work as a public figure, but reading Yglesias' post, I realize that my quiet on the subject may have led you all to speculate that I am gay.

I am not gay.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyways, sarcasm aside, as one of the small community of people who have retained their virginity past graduating from college, as well as being one of the few who do not drink, and from my unique vantage point of puritanism, I've noticed that what Yglesias is saying about the assumptions people make when you don't participate in the conversation.

Living amongst the college aged, believe you me I've seen entire conversations -- of upwards of an hour -- of people just talking about drinking exploits. Hell, some people make careers of it. Conversations that I am, by definition, excluded from. (I usually break in at some point to say, "And this one time, I had a cup of chamomile that had me slightly peppy for like twenty minutes!")

And that's what people talk about when they mean "peer pressure." Not "HEY YOU SHOULD DRINK THAT BEER" (although I've seen one or two examples of that), but just a culture in which people are expected to have some fun stories about sex or drinking stupidities to prove that they've "been there" and "done that."

If you don't, apparently it is completely fair to wonder about their identity. In Yglesias' context, it is wondering whether they are a closet case, but it applies equally to wondering if they're other things as well. That's the acidic effect of making assumptions.

Court Commentary:Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

A brief juxtaposition. Here's Matthew Yglesisas on the campaign finance ruling that just came down in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which basically said that because corporations are people (an idea with its own fascinating court history), there should be no limit on their campaign spending:

Something worth mentioning in the context of the Citizens United decision, though not directly tied to the issue at hand there, is that a group doesn’t actually need to spend vast sums of money to have a decisive influence on politics. It just needs to be able to credibly threaten to spend said sums. Bank of America, for example, dedicates $2.3 billion to marketing in 2008 so it’s clear that they’ve got the budget to mount a $100 million series of scathing attacks on a Senator who pisses them off and basically laugh that off (and note that in 2004 total spending on Senate campaigns was just $400 million). And if you can have it be the case that just one Senator goes down to defeat for having pissed off BofA then everyone else will learn the lesson and avoid pissing them off in the future. You don’t need to actually sustain that volume of campaign spending.

Here's a quote from Anne Bogart (h/t Monica Reida) about Athol Fugard and his views on censorship:

Athol Fugard, the South African playwright, described censorship as hesitation. For him censorship is not necessarily the proximity of government inspectors or a threat of imprisonment but, rather, on the physical hesitation of his hand while writing. Censorship is his own private vacillation provoked by whatever doubts are out to ambush him. Censorship is a physical hesitation in the light of fleeting thought or doubt about how his peers might receive what he is writing, whether or not they will like it or if it will be published.

Two writers writing in different contexts about the same phenomenon. I think both of them speak to the heart of why this case sincerely disappointed me.

Global Government.

Matthew Yglesias has a post about Will Marshall's idea for a Global NATO.

I think that, eventually, there will be something like a Global NATO. But not for a long, long, time. You see, history (from my perspective) is the slow unification of small, atomized societies (even as the individuals within those societies seem more atomized because of how large the society they live in is--does that make sense? The whole gets larger but the individual gets more diluted? Eventually, I think, we're going to have a very, very loose global government with a more effective system than the current Global Government (the UN).

But what do we do in the meantime? Well, NATO and the EU are ahead of the game: they've unified Europe. But how did it happen? Well, by the end of the 20th Century, the member states of NATO and the EU had two things in common: very similar forms of government (comparatively; whatever differences in government there are between, say, Poland and Ireland, it pales in comparison to the difference between Communist China and England), and very aligned interests. At the end of the day, all of the states of NATO and the EU stand together or fall together.

Will Marshall seems to believe that we should take all of the countries that have interests aligned with the US/Europe, and put them into a Super-NATO. But the obvious interests we have aligned can't paper over the interests we don't have aligned. That isn't to mean that there are specific issues that Japan and the US butt heads on (no more or less than between France and Germany); it's that certain interests that are very important to Japan and South Korea are considered unimportant to countries like Poland and Italy. To a certain extent, it would be like California weighing in on certain issues that really only matter to New England.

A regionalized system, although imperfect (and in certain areas, doomed to failure) is the beginnings. It is part of the reason that the UN doesn't work.

Suppose NATO and the EU were to create a model for North America. The United States would start to take a greater interest in the way that drug gangs have caused chaos in Mexico; the resources of the NAFTA nations would be greater applied to create peace an stability. Then, say that the OAS bridges the gaps between Latin and South American countries. Suppose the AU slowly develops (over many, many years) into becoming an actual supra-government for Africa, bridging their interests, decreasing wars, increasing train. The Arab League creates a supra-government for the Arab member-states, bridging divisions between Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc. Maybe SEATO would, in a meaningful way, bring the nations of the South East Asia together.

Then we get six or seven region-blocs. Where they cooperate, they could work jointly. And whatever interests they share together, that would be the groundwork for a greater global government; rather than corralling the 192 countries into a global government (or letting five countries decide the fate of the world). The individual countries could also be represented (see: House of Representatives versus Senate).

That's my dream, but I'm warning you I don't see it happening in this half-century. The groundwork might be laid by the end of the century--Turkey and Israel joining the EU, the AU starting to come into its own, China somehow coming to a better relationship with its regional neighbors, NAFTA becoming a more genial organization.

But what I don't think will work is creating axises of opposing interests; some greater NATO linked only by their belief in Democratic Capitalism, and some hodge-podge of Chinese, Iranian, and Russian ally states (mostly rogue states and unstable states whose backers are the Chinese, the Iranians, or the Russians), and then a handful of completely isolated nations.

Comment On Election Law

Again, Matthew Yglesias's post (itself a reaction to Rick Hasen)

I think having a national standard of elections is a good idea. A few issues:

1) The Legal Issues: I think the Civil Rights Act of 1960 sets a legal precedent that the Federal Government can regulate elections of local elections. But that law really is only a negative law: it says what states can't do. Again, standardized state and local elections might come under a lot of legal battle, but I think overall the Constitution will back it up, and the Supreme Court (which, although Republican leaning, tends to be very pro-Federal) wouldn't really strike it down.

2) Political Issues: There are interested parties who will stand up for states' rights and such, but I think it'd be a hard battle to convince people that making our elections cleaner, simpler, and less open to fraud is somehow a good thing.

3) How to do it: The posts I pointed at talked about having every interaction with the government interface register you. They talked about a voter registration ID number. I think I would like to take it one further. A Citizen's ID Number. I mean, I think we should have National Identification--not one that stores all your information in a central database: all it has to verify is three things: 1) Name 2) Address 3) Citizenship status. That's all. This amalgam of drivers' licenses, passports, state IDs, birth certificates, social security numbers, etc. does not work.

I went to get a job once I turned 18, and I discovered that although I had been naturalized at the age of 8, the Social Security Administration had not received notification from the INS that I was a citizen. Thus, my Social Security Number indicated to my employer that I was a legal alien, not eligible for work. Rather than using a SSN as my identifier, I'd like to have some administration, I don't care whom, have a name, address, and my citizenship status. Then, whenever I try to do something with the government, they just look up my name, and go, "Ah, he lives there and he's a citizen." If they need more info, they can ask me themselves, but those three facts are, at this point, public knowledge.