Rape and the Poisoned Chalice of Liberalism

First, some background: while I am sensitive to the criticisms of many in the manosphere that statutory rape laws are misandrist Victorian relics, I am more sensitive to the concerns of parents that their minor sons and daughters not be whored out to the world. So I would only support reforms that both (a) recognize that teenaged girls are not actually innocent snowflakes corrupted only by predatory adults and (b) preserve parental authority over their children.

And since I'm exceedingly unlikely to get (b), then I'll stick with the status quo, thank you very much, if the alternative is the weakening of the legal sanctions that deter (I hope) men from trying to have sex with my daughters, the social, financial, and emotional consequences of which I would be liable.

Which brings me to the furor over the recent sentence handed down in the case of Stacey Rambold, convicted of statutory rape of then 14-year-old Cherice Moralez. The case is aggravated (in my opinion) by several factors reported in the media (with the usual caveat emptor): Rambold was her teacher and in authority over her, and therefore had professional as well as personal obligations; Rambold used "pre-sexual grooming techniques" (the newly-minted dysphemism for seduction); and according to her mother Auliea Hanlon (yes, your inference is correct), young Cherice's subsequent suicide was related to the affair's fallout and that of its prosecution. This last should reinforce the lesson that sex is appropriately reserved for grown-ups -- preferably married grownups -- who can rationally evaluate and assume the risks of their decisions and their consequences.

Rambold was initially sentenced to "treatment" -- an absurdity to begin with. Judging from the pictures Cherice, Rambold's sexual appetite was entirely normal; the problem was that his appetite was, in the context of the law and social norms, undisciplined. But in any case, Rambold violated the terms of his treatment in some fairly trivial ways and wound up back in front of District Judge G. Todd Baugh.

Judge Baugh put the case in the national news by sentencing to Rambold to 30 days in jail + 10 years suspended. Given the aggravating circumstances cited above, I would tend to agree with, well, every other person on the planet that this sentence was on the light side, and probably not within Montana's sentencing guidelines. However, most of the controversy stems from his reasoning: the affair was consensual, and Cherice bears some responsibility its consequences.

However poorly this fact justifies a mere 30-day sentence, the fact itself is entirely commonsense: that statutory rape (i.e., sex with a minor) is a very different thing than forcible rape, a.k.a, "legitimate rape", a.k.a. "rape-rape". And as a commonsense fact, it cannot be allowed to stand in the mainstream media, which is deeply invested in the politically-correct nonsense that "all rape is rape!" Pursuant to this, they have almost to a man opted simply to lie about the facts of the case.

Take the USA Today article linked above. Nowhere does the term "statutory rape" appear; and indeed, only upon close reading (for I had not heard of this case before following the link from Drudge) did I figure out that that was what the crime was. But it's not just USA Today. Search Google News. As of this writing (Friday), the only news outlets that are up-front about this are the Daily Caller and the Huffington Post. Compare that to the thousands of stories that describe the crime as "rape" without qualifiers.

This casting is more than just stylistic judgement. I caught a snippet of dialog on CNN about the case; a legal analyst was trying to explain (without justifying) the judge's decision by pointing out that it wasn't forcible rape. "'Forcible rape,'" replied the female talking head with an eye-roll, "That's so 1980s!"

Ouch.  That has to be the first use of "1980s" as a synonym for "antediluvian" that I've ever heard.

Again, I am, on balance, in favor of laws prohibiting sex with legal minors. But this is the poison to which liberalism has brought us: because we have established "consent" as the sole metric by which to evaluate sexual relations, we are left with basing our laws on a manifest lie, that minors cannot consent, not just in law, but in fact as well, when clearly they can, and do in great numbers.

Letdown

I had always assumed, without really thinking about it, that the writer of XKCD was a woman, probably because of what I saw as compellingly drawn female characters. I didn't fully understand how attached I had become to that notion until I discovered that, no, he isn't

I'm not sure why that disappoints me so much. It may be that strips like this now look douchey instead of edgy. It may be that the author's manifest atheism was unexpected, and therefore interesting, in a woman, but in a man just comes across as unreflective.

Corporations will do anything for profit (as long as it's bad).

This post by Female Misogynist made me think: the liberal narrative likes to paint corporations as so driven by greed that they will do anything for profit, including (as in, for instance, the movie Avatar) killing large numberrs of sentient beings.

Yet whenever Congress is proposing some new business regulation, they always claim that the regulation makes "good business sense", requiring businesses to do only what they would be doing anyway if they acted in their own interests. Not to mention the complaints that corporations would be able to dominate the market with products that liberals claim they want, i.e. shampoo in non-sexist bottles.

Liberals seem to believe that corporations will only do bad things for money, but will happily ignore profit in favor of some racist/sexist/homophobic agenda.

Attack of the Yalies

OneSTDV turned me on to Tiffany Alvord, whose collaboration with Kurt Hugo Schneider produced an amazingly virtuoso Taylor Swift medley.

OneSTDV thinks that while her talent is impressive, Alvord's commercial potential is limited.  I’m inclined to disagree, and for once feel like I’m getting in on the ground floor, or at least qualifying myself as an early adopter.

But here’s a question for my more pop-culture savvy readers:  is my impression correct that these kids really did come out of middle class backgrounds in Nowheresville, PA to achieve YouTube stardom, completely bypassing the studio system?  Not even Taylor Swift did that! 

(For those of you keeping score at home, I could find no evidence that Schneider is Jewish, while Sam Tsui is part Chinese and Alvord is apparently a Mormon.)

An unrelated question:  what are the copyright implications of recording a song that somebody else wrote?  Commercial performers do this all the time, but I assume they have to buy permission.  Does it matter that the song is released non-commercially?

Hollywood: “Bin Laden’s death is tragic and all, but at least it will help Obama fight the real enemy.”

Or words to that effect.

• Adam Levine:  "I dont know how I feel about 'celebrating' death. But im just glad this happened during a good man's presidency."
• Kim Kardashian:  "Osama Bin Laden is dead!!! I can't wait to hear President Obama's announcement!!!"
• Pete Wetz: "Wow obama 1, 2 punch: lion king video than osama dead. seriously i wanna see who runs in 2012..."
• Jimmy Fallon:  "Got Bin Laden AND interuppted Celebrity Apprentice? Win for Obama all around."

I remarked a few years ago that the MSM covered the war, not from a strategic perspective on American power and security, but solely in terms of its impact on domestic politics.  I see nothing has changed.

This comment is just stoopid  on a couple of levels:

• Lady Gaga:   "an historical moment in the fight against hatred."

Bad spelling notwithstanding, this was the smartest comment:

• Snoop Dogg:  "Rip to everybody who was taken on 911. Let the troops bac home n lower gas prices let's live happily ever after.  Bring the soilders bac home asap! They r missed! We love how they fight for us now let's fight for them!!"

The Abuse of "Disorderly Conduct"

Via Distributed Republic, a post at AntiWar.com about the abuse of police discretion:

One such problem is the ever increasing number of pretexts on which the authorities can interrogate, search, assault, and arrest citizens. The authority figure, equipped with endless excuses to initiate an interaction with the citizen, from an expired tag to a false burglar alarm to an alleged whiff of what might be a controlled substance, uses his or her superior knowledge of legal arcana to find some way to put the citizen behind bars. For instance, what struck me when reading the policeman’s account of the Gates incident was a small detail: the repeated use of the term “tumultuous.” It appears three times in the brief report in descriptions of Gates’ behavior. Why was the cop fixated on this SAT word?

Turns out, it appears in the Massachusetts statute defining disorderly conduct. The cop goaded the agitated Gates into stepping outside of his house (he made sure to give a reason for this in the report – poor acoustics in Gates’ kitchen!) to create the grounds for an arrest. The cop already knew the specific – though vague and debatable – adjective he should use in his report to make the charge sound incontestable to the lawnorder crowd.

This makes me think back to an experience during the Abortion Wars of the 1980s. An Operation Rescue affiliate had become active in the large metropolitan area where I was in college, and while I had no taste for confrontation, let alone trespassing charges, I nonetheless lent my presence in their support.

Both the city and state political structure were monolithically Democrat back then, and the police, to the applause of the local media, had been turned loose on pro-life sit-ins, using choke-holds to drag non-violent protesters off to the wagons. Even when they weren't trespassing, the police refused to separate or otherwise protect pro-lifers from physically aggressive counter-demonstrators. This was the context in which the following occurred.

During one protest, when there was no sit-in or counter-demonstration -- indeed, the clinic hadn't even opened that day -- I got bored listening to the Hail Mary* and wandered around taking pictures. Some distance from the protest, a knot of police officers were having a conversation. From the other side of the street, I took, or started to take, their picture.

"Put that camera away!" barked one of the officers.

Wait a second, I thought. Is it against the law to take your picture? I assume I have some kind of first amendment right to take pictures in public. But I'm not a lawyer, so who knows? And I'm not a member of the press, so even if I do have the right, I don't have lawyers on retainer ready to defend that right. So . . . I did like I was told.

It's a good thing I did. It turns out that neither having the right to take pictures, nor even being a member of the MSM, would have saved me. Police routinely arrest people who attempt to photograph or film their activities. Of course, charges aren't always filed, and the actual charge is never "photographing police", which is not against the law. The charge becomes "disorderly conduct," which in practice means basically whatever behavior the cops don't like.

* In retrospect, the Abortion Wars were a Godsend for interfaith relations and religious tolerance. Prior to these demonstrations, I "knew" only bad things about Catholics and Catholicism. And yet here we were, evangelical Protestants and Catholics, standing arm in arm for a cause about which we were all passionate, and meanwhile learning each others' liturgy. The Catholics presumably picked up some sweet hymns, and I can still recite the "Hail Mary". (Though, of course, I don't, what with it being idolatrous and all).

Absence of Context

If you missed it, be sure to read Roissy's spirited takedown of Conor Friedersdorf's "musings on game" from a while back.

I've got my own bone to pick with young Conor:

In recent months, I've had several people ask me why it is that I criticize my own team in blog posts . . . . [T]he answer for some people I criticize is that they're just not on my team, and they shouldn't be on yours either.

What follows is a clip of Glenn Beck interviewing former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer. The clip, taken not from the Fox website, but from a YouTube reproduction of a Media Matters post, presents Scheuer saying with almost no context:

"The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States -- because it's gonna take a grassroots, bottom-up pressure -- because these politicians prize their offices, prize the praise of the media, and the Europeans. It's an absurd situation again, only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently and with as much violence as necessary."

A couple of points here. First, I do not count myself among the fans of Glenn Beck, whose on-air persona I find . . . lacking stability. Second, I do not endorse Scheuer's statement. But let's be honest about the context here. Scheuer is arguing that America's political class won't be roused to defend the country short of another terrorist attack.

There's plenty to disagree with here. You never know what you are going to get from a terrorist attack. Osama bin Laden predicted that 9/11 would persuade America to abandon the Middle East and embrace Islam; as it turned out, he was wrong. Meanwhile, I would have predicted that 9/11 would have caused us to curtain our student visa program and begin returning Muslim aliens to their countries of origin. I, too, was wrong. Who, other than their advocates, would have predicted two 8-year-and-counting wars and a new mammoth security bureacracy as our response? So be careful what you predict to be the downstream effects of this or that act of violence that you don't fully control.

But it should be obvious to everyone, including MM and, by extension, Friedersdorf, that Scheuer is not advocating another attack on the U.S. to get his preferred policies implemented. Friedersdorf's implicitly endorsement of that slander shows him to be either incredibly disingenuous, or incredibly stupid.

When Does Faith Matter?

I guess I'm the last living heterosexual to learn who Taylor Swift is. In my defense, I almost exclusively listen to classical music on public radio. But as it happened, they were piping in "Love Story" at the pool where I swim laps, and, well, I guess my musical taste isn't as hi-falutin' as I like to pretend.

Once I figured out that young Swift had a Christian background, I wanted to get a sense of how her faith influences her work and life. That search led me to her erstwhile connection with one of the Jonas Brothers, about whom Beliefnet writer Joanne Brokaw had this to say:

Yes, the guys are Christians, but I'm not talking about the "you have to use your fame to sing songs about Jesus" argument. I'm talking about maintaining a healthy personal spiritual life. Being a solid Christian on a daily basis amidst the music industry fracas is much harder than just warbling Jesus songs from the stage, and I don't have a problem with their chaste puppy love music as long as they live offstage what they say they believe. But the schedule that these guys are on is ridiculous. There are only so many hours in a day, and if most of them are focused on commerce (how many more products can we plaster their faces on?) there's little time left for spiritual growth. And without a strong spiritual foundation, it's just a matter of time before those worldly accolades can lead even the most stable star down a Britney-like path.

Wise counsel. I was also impressed by this trenchant observation:

Admittedly, the guys don't have much (or any) control over what the media writes about them. While most of the articles I've read touch on their faith, I haven't seen anything go into detail. And I haven't seen an article about them recently in any Christian media. They may be more than willing to talk about purity and Jesus, but the media might not be interested in reporting that right now. But if they slip up? Well, then their faith will be fodder for the tabloids.

Or not even slip up. I made a passing reference a while back to a Southpark episode involving the Jonas Brothers about which I intended to say more, and now is as good a time as any. The point of the episode was to call out Disney for using the Jonas Brothers purity rings to evade parental radar while marketing sex to pre-teen girls.

Now I suppose that, fifty years ago, the on-stage presence of such as the Jonas Brothers would indeed have elicited much harrumphing from arch-conservatives like yours truly. (I don't actually know this, having neither been around then nor ever seen a Jonas performance.) But we're stuck with the culture we've got, and if the Jonas Brothers performances themselves don't raise any flags with an intelligent observer like Joannne Brokaw, then it becomes hard to take the Southpark critique in good faith. I can't help thinking that the only reason the show's writers thought the Jonas aura might be age-inappropriate is because of the brothers' outspoken Christianity.

Coda on Prejean

This story is disappointing, obviously. While the erstwhile Miss California should not have been persecuted for her honest answer to a question about gay marriage, she had every obligation to make the public appearances on behalf of the Miss America organization that her contract required and for which there is no conceivable conscience exemption.

But this bit of "reporting" was ridiculous:

Last month, Trump decided that Prejean would be allowed to keep her crown despite racy photos of the 22-year-old surfacing on the Internet.

[snip]

In addition to the semi-nude photo scandal, Prejean's reign as Miss California also created headlines at the Miss USA pageant in April after she answered a question from Perez Hilton regarding her stance on gay marriage. She said she believed marriage "should be between a man and a woman."

Gotta love the way photos "surface on the internet." It's not like there was any agency involved, like for instance by a photographer who took pictures in which the nudity was entirely inadvertent.

But what's this "in addition" business? Nobody was interested in the photos until the "gay marriage" question. That's what the controversy was about. Only after the press decided to punish her did they seize at the pictures.

Toby Young on Meritocracy

From How to Lose Friends and Alienate People:

I remember one occasion, not long after I arrived [at Vanity Fair] when [coworker] Aimee Bell showed me a "hilarious" spoof that purported to be the diary of a grubbing freelance hack named "Josh Freelantzovitz." Did I think it would make a good column in the "Vanities" section? I read it through and told her I didn't think it would. It was unseemly, I argued, to poke fun at people who were struggling to obtain the professional status that Vanity Fair's contributors had achieved. Satire was supposed to be a weapon with which the disenfranchised attacked the Establishment, not the other way round. The author of this piece, I said, holding up the offending article, is a snob, wanting to kick away the ladder that he himself has climbed so no one else can follow.

After I'd delivered this little sermon, Aimee patiently explained that Josh Freelantzovitz was in fact her husband, David Kamp, a staff writer on GQ. Needless to say, "The Diary of Josh Freelantzovitz" soon became a regular column in "Vanities".

. . . .

The various setbacks I suffered at the end of 1997 brought home to me the extent to which New Yorkers judge you according to how well or badly you're doing. When I'd first arrived and people had asked me what I did at parties, a noticeable change would come over them when I said I worked at Vanity Fair. They'd stop looking over my shoulder for a second and give me the once over. Occasionally, they'd even talk to me. Evidently, I was someone worth knowing. However, after I was taken off the masthead I vanished from the radar screen. Being neither rich, successful, good looking, nor well connected, I wasn't worth bothering with. No sooner had the words "I'm just a freelance hack" come out of my mouth than the person I was talking to was hastily backing away, wondering how they could politely ask for their business card back. It was a sobering experience. I'd assumed that people liked me for who I was, not what I did, but in Manhattan you are what you do.

Why do New Yorkers attach such importance to the state of your career? To a certain extent, they define each other according to the usual demographic categories -- gender, ethnic origin, religious background, etc. -- but these things pale into insignificance beside the jobs they do. It's as if there are no alternative sources of identity. In particular, they don't define people according to what class they belong to. New Yorkers are more interested in where you're going that where you're from. They make no bones about this. If you're in a position to help them, they're more than happy to help you, inviting you to parties, introducing you to their friends, plugging you into their networks. But if you have nothing to offer in exchange you might as well not exist.

For Tocqueville, the absence of class distinctions was one of the chief differences between Britain and America and while he generally approved of this he worried that it could lead to excessive significance being attached to things like professional status:

In democracies, where citizens never differ much from one another and naturally find themselves so close that at each instant all can come to be intermingled in a common mass, a multitude of artificial and arbitrary classifications are created, with the aid of which each seeks to set himself apart, out of fear of being carried away into the crowd despite himself.

Of course, in the eyes of most New Yorkers this is a small price to pay for living in a classless society. In contemporary America, according to the journalist and author Nicholas Lemann, meritocracy occupies the status of a "sacred first principle" and Manhattan is frequently held up as a shining example of it. Indeed, this accounts for why New Yorkers judge people according to how well or badly they're doing. Unlike in Britain, where the class system impedes social mobility, there's nothing to prevent the hardworking from rising to the top or the indolent from falling to the bottom. This belief is particularly strongly held by Manhattan's most successful residents since it implies that they've got where they are purely on their own merits. They even refer to themselves as meritocrats." In their eyes, just as those who are doing well deserve to be praised, those who are doing badly only have themselves to blame.

I've always been rather ambivalent about meritocracy -- and not just because I'm a beneficiary of England's class system. During my spell in New York I enjoyed shocking people by telling them that the word "meritocracy" had originally been coined for the purposes of damnation rather than praise. They would always dispute this until I played my trump card: my father, Michael Young, invented it.

He coined it to describe a nightmarish society of the future in his 1958 bestseller The Rise of the Meritocracy. In my father's view, equality of opportunity is a snare and a delusion since it makes it less likely that equality of outcome, the"hard" form of equality he believed in, will ever come about. If everyone starts out on a level playing field then the resulting distribution of wealth, however unequal, will be regarded as legitimate. According to him, a meritocratic society is no better than an aristocratic one since it is just as hierarchical. Indeed, it is considerably worse since the richest segment of the population don't suffer from any feelings of guilt. Unlike those who have inherited their wealth, they think their good fortune is thoroughly deserved. In my father's book, a work of fiction that purports to be a Ph.D. thesis written by a sociology student in 2030, the absence of noblesse oblige in the meritocratic society of the future eventually results in a bloody revolution in which the workers overthrow their new masters.

In contemporary America, those who've reached the top are every bit as pleased with themselves as the doomed ruling class in The Rise of the Meritocracy. Their self-satisfaction is exhibited in all sorts of ways. For instance, the residents of New York, Washington and Los Angeles refer to the rest of the country as "the fly-over states" and describe themselves as belonging to John Adams's "natural aristocracy." They believe they've made it because they've been blessed with an abundance of talent and think of those poor creatures who live outside the trifecta as belonging to an inferior species. At Vanity Fair, my colleagues frequently made fun of those who live in the fly-over states, claiming that they age faster, become balder sooner and are more likely to succumb to cancer.

One sure sign that America's plutocrats don't suffer from any feelings of guilt about their wealth is that they're completely shameless about flaunting it. You only have to visit the Hamptons to witness bourgeois triumphalism at is most naked. As you watch a succession of millionaires glide past in their Porche 911 convertibles, each chariot containing a more beautiful blonde than the last, you get the impression that it's only a matter of time before these Masters of the Universe tattoo their net worths on their foreheads. According to Tom Wolfe, the Hamptons exists primarily to provide New Yorkers with an opportunity for this kind of display. "The first great advantage of summering in the Hamptons," he confided to a journalist from The Sunday Telegraph, "is simply to tell everyone else in the office that you will be there and not here."

Before moving to Manhattan I'd always been rather suspicious of the tendency of Britain's top dogs to play down their privileged status. Why should modesty and understatement by synonymous with good taste? My view -- not particularly original -- was that this utilitarian style had originally been developed by the British aristocracy as a way of minimizing the resentment caused by their prosperity. At a time when power was restricted to members of the lucky sperm club, the aristocracy had prudently adopted a set of manners that prohibited the flaunting of their good fortune. It was one of several cunning ploys they came up with to avoid the fate that had met their cousins across the Channel. Of course, the British aristocracy's power has long since dwindled, but their social code has proved remarkably resilient, influencing the behavior of their bourgeois successors.

However, now that I'd seen the alternative -- a ruling class that regarded its wealth as completely legitimate -- I began to think again. Whatever its historical origins, wasn't self-effacement more attractive that self-advertisement? It certainly seemed that way to me at the end of 1997.

Douthat Disappointing

Three columns in, and I'm beginning to regret that Ross Douthat, late of The Atlantic, has moved to the New York Times. It's not that I don't agree with what he's written. It's rather that his columns are thus far merely dumbed-down versions of what's he's already written. At The Atlantic, Ross posted almost every day, almost all of his posts were longer than his NYT columns, and a hefty percentage of these postively crackled with insight. On a typical day, I stood a decent chance of coming away from his blog smarter than I was when I arrived.

The NYT columns, in contrast, are short, only once weekly, and appear to be written at a high school sophmore level (no doubt an NYT policy). Thus, they say less, and say it less compellingly. Honestly, if I were a liberal, I doubt I would find him especially persuasive, and if I weren't already a fan, I would probably not cross the internet to read him.

Nonetheless, I wish him well. I hope the NYT makes him obscenely rich so he can retire to The Atlantic in comfort.

Media Blackout

Here's the story as reported by local news:

Bailey said he thought it was the end of his life and the lives of the 10 people inside his apartment for a birthday party after two masked men with guns burst in through a patio door.

“They just came in and separated the men from the women and said, ‘Give me your wallets and cell phones,’” said George Williams of the College Park Police Department.

Bailey said the gunmen started counting bullets. “The other guy asked how many (bullets) he had. He said he had enough,” said Bailey.

That’s when one student grabbed a gun out of a backpack and shot at the invader who was watching the men. The gunman ran out of the apartment.The student then ran to the room where the second gunman, identified by police as 23-year-old Calvin Lavant, was holding the women.

“Apparently the guy was getting ready to rape his girlfriend. So he told the girls to get down and he started shooting. The guy jumped out of the window,” said Bailey.

A neighbor heard the shots and heard someone running nearby. “And I heard someone say, ‘Someone help me. Call the police. Somebody call the police,’” said a neighbor.

The neighbor said she believes it was Lavant, who was found dead near his apartment, only one building away.

Bailey said he is just thankful one student risked his life to keep others alive.“I think all of us are really cognizant of the fact that we could have all been killed,” said Bailey.

Here is a list of all the national media outlets that are rushing to cover the story:

[Crickets chirping. chirp . . . chirp . . . chirp . . .]

Chuck

On Monday's episode of NBC's new spy-comedy Chuck, the title character, in a flashback sequence, remembers his first meeting Bryce Larkin, his fellow Standford undergrad and eventual arch-nemisis. Upon learning that Chuck, portrayed as the uber-geek (with sporadic levels of plausibility) by Zachary Levi, is programming his own version of an old video game, Bryce offers to introduce him to a girl he knows with a similiar interest in the same game, an offer Chuck enthusiastically accepts.

Even though my back was to her, my wife remarked that she could feel me getting pissed.

The desperate fantasy of geeks everywhere (and I include myself in this category): if only I could meet a girl with the same interest in my essentially geeky-male hobby, she'd be the girl for me.

Even if enough such women existed to go around (they do not), it is unlikely that they will be interested in geeks. "Shared interest," in an of itself, is an exceedingly weak basis on which to attract a woman. At best, a woman's knowledge of your particular field of interest might help her appreciate your status within that field, assuming you have status. But don't kid yourself: it is the status itself that attracts women, not the fact that she "shares your interests."

And I would issue the further caveat that the field of interest in question must have some intersection with the real world. Even a prodigious talet for reverse-engineering out-of-circulation video games, in an of itself, is not going to be much help.

So returning to the show: it is all to plausible that Chuck might share this fantasy. I had the fantasy myself until well into my twenties. But I guarantee that Bryce Larkin, portrayed as the alpha BMOC by Matthew Bomer, would know better. And that was the implausibility to which I reacted.

More broadly, the writers of Chuck try to portray his present lack of success with women entirely as a function of a low self-image resulting from his expulsion from Stanford. Geeks everywhere love to be told this, even when we don't believe it. It is entirely plausible that his sister would encourage him in this way; that's what concerned female relatives do (or at least, that's what my own did). But in several ways, the writers show that they want the audience to think this really is the reason! (As opposed to, say, the stink of underachievement that permeates his existence.)

So, okay, low self-esteem is a real turn-off all by itself. Point conceded. But this almost never exists in a vaccuum.

Bionic Woman

I watched episode 5 of the new Bionic Woman. The Berkut (sp?)group is keeping an Arab Muslim under surveillance: suspicion of terrorism. The reasons seem pretty flimsy to me, but lo and behold, the guy actually turns out to be a terrorist! Imagine that, and Arab Muslim terrorist actually makes T.V.!

This only partially makes up for episode 2, when a bunch of white guys in fatigues nerve gas an entire small town for no apparent reason.

Overall, the show is pretty lame.