talk amonst yaselves...

...I'm veklemt after reading Aaron's review of my article.

thanks, Aaron. sorry I was so mean about your BA proposal. really, it does sound interesting, but believe me when I say, a year is a really long time.

and, an apology is indeed in order, as I did notice (even before Phoebe commented on it!) that I had indeed misspelled Mr. Cohen's name. what can I say, I'm pumped up for this debate...but more on that later.

(ps - mr. cohen, while I agree with your argument re: anti-semitism, it is dangerous in that I don't see much space there for a non-"anti-semitic" detest for the state of israel. one can not like israel for any number of very good reasons, and it would be dangerous to equate the two. I'm just making room for that condition of possibility, as it were.)

finally, what I really wanted to blog about:

yesterday was an interesting day for me, actually.

in the morning I volunteered at a function called "Policy Perspectives 2004" which was co-sponsored by the Libertarian thinktank, the Cato Institute, and The Economist magazine. Speakers included Cato muckitymucks, The Economist's Washington Correspondent, and Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve. Overall, an interesting event, esp. in that it seemed to be targeted to a doubting conservative audience. One talk was about how the war in Iraq was something we need to extricate ourselves from, while both the Washington Correspondent and Murray championed conservatism, with the latter talking about how "institutions such as marriage are under attack." I tried not to visibly react, but I think people saw.

I then lounged around downtown for an hour or two before attending a function of the Log Cabin Republicans. Their head honcho, Patrick Guerriero, was in town. It was an interesting event, both politically and anthropologically. No one at the event really is at all in touch with gender studies discourses, and it's dangerous for them, since, being so vulnerable to such discourses, they're really ill-equipped to handle attacks from the likes of Michael Warner and those who believe queers need inherently be leftist. There were a fair number of younger people at the event, which I thought was good for the future of the organization, and it really seems that they want to start raising their profile. Still, the LCR's occupy a difficult place in the debate...it'll be interesting to see how effective they're able to be (GQ says, for what it's worth, that they'll not be effective at all).

so, that was my day amongst the political and intellectual elite of the country, and I was snazzily dressed, to boot! I brought home lots of literature from Cato that might spawn discussion in the coming days, so stay tuned.

back to more pressing matters, however. it's been said that the person who opens a debate gets to set its tone. so I'll give Mr. Cohen (as the challengee) a first strike opportunity, as it were, to set the tone of this debate. bush-voter (in 2004), defend thyself!