Linky Friday #101
Dating:
[D1] Eric Barker explains the scientific method to a great first date.
[D2] Charles Orlando goes undercover to find out why women cheat.
[D3] PEG argues that the Catholic Church needs a new dating script to replace the current sexual and emotional chaos.
[D4] Do Americans have romantic standards that are too high? Ty Tashiro advocates “moneyballing” romance, giving yourself not lower standards, but better ones. Agree or disagree, I think he makes remarkable points about how we are influenced in mate-selection by our culture, and in counter-productive ways.
Marriage:
[M1] Causality is murky, but marrying people your age correlates well with staying married.
[M2] According to a new study, assortive mating actually has increased over time.
[M3] There’s an old saying that when an unfaithful man marries his mistress it creates a job opening. Turns out, it’s true.
[M4] New research into why our men and women of the uniform marry young.
[M5] “We don’t have a marriage crisis in this country because everybody has stopped following the rules. We have a marriage crisis because the rules don’t work.” -Eve Tushnet
Babies:
[B1] Thailand is banning commercial surrogacy.
[B2] China is seeking a baby boom that may not be coming. It seems that governments have much more ability to suppress fertility than to increase it.
[B3] Stephanie Gruner Buckley looks at fertility rates across Europe.
[B4] Eerily, babies may seem to take on traits of the mother’s previous lover. Daily Buchanan says that this is not such a bad thing, though I suspect a lot of men will disagree.
[B5] These diagrams of co-sleeping positions and these captions on these stock photos are hilarious.
[B6] The strong stance by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC backfired. The increased risk was actually minimal, and the resulting behavior of people trying to avoid it was to engage in even riskier behavior.
Tobacco:
[T1] Michael P Foley writes of tobacco and the soul.
[T2] Tom Chiarella decided that he wanted to to, at age forty-six, take up smoking. Not liking it, he nonetheless persisted.
[T3] Big tobacco and “health experts” agree: Those ecigarette things are dangerous. And Big Tobacco wants more than just warning labels.
[T4] News is that e-cigarettes are less addictive than combustibles, Sally Satel argues that anti-smoking groups should endorse Snus and E-Cigarettes. The Snus thing is interesting, because both sides cite it without hesitation as proof on the potential harm and potential benefit of ecigarettes.
[T5] While they are cited as a reason for the reduced smoking rates, further cigarette taxes hikes are unlikely to lead to much improvement.
[T6] Men smoke more than women in almost all of the world. Exceptions: Sweden, Icesland, and… Nauru.
Housing:
[H1] A new study looks at putting numbers the costs added to housing by community opposition, parking requirements, and so on.
[H2] Urban cores are growing, but suburbs are growing more.
[H3] I get the idea behind putting apartment blocks on top of state buildings, but who would want to live above a prison?
[H4] American houses keep growing and growing…
[H5] It’s important to remember that zoning is about increasing livability, and has nothing to do with economic and racial segregation.
America:
[A1] The curious case of Lawrence Franks, who ditched the US Army and joined the French Foreign Legion.
[A2] Adam Ozimek argues that the red states are under no obligation to prop up blue state operational expenses.
[A3] We should be on the metric system by now, but we’re not. Seth Stevenson looks at the history of the battle over metrics.
[A4] The mysterious abandoned island off Queens. Like the author, I’m dumbfounded this place exists. Even after hearing the explanation, I’m dumbfounded.
[A5] The Washington Post released a flawed map of state populations by gender. Randy Olsen fixed it.
D1: I do these on the first date, They might lead to some interesting dates but they haven’t helped much.
D4: I wouldn’t say that Americans have too high standards for dating but I would say that they have too high standards as to what to expect on a first date.Report
Lee,
Congratulations, you’re not a pig.
[I say this without the faintest trace of humor]Report
D1 hasn’t helped much because it’s bullshit. Mentioning beer doesn’t get you laid, it’s just that people who are more likely to have a conversation about beer on the first date are slightly more likely to have sex on the first date. Similar things for the rest of them.
Using this advice is the equivalent of jumping in the water to learn to swim because people who can swim are more likely to jump in the water.
The only good advice there, I think, is to not dominate the conversation and not exit it entirely either. Which is, you know, common sense.Report
I’m with @chris on this. What D1 demonstrates quite well is that, increasingly, how journalists, bloggers and other creatures of the popular culture talk about science and social science is completely alienated from how science and social science is, an ought to be, actually practiced.Report
Not only that, but for fish sake…
Ladies of the OT, back me up here: Even if you had never heard of this study, if you were on a first date and in the middle of it a guys asked you out of the blue, “Do you like the taste of beer?” — that would be somewhere between odd and creepy depending on the dude, right?Report
Tod,
If someone asked me, “What kind of beer do you like?” Well, it’s a question. A get to know you question, sure… not the worst one, and one that you might segue into by talking about the wine/cocktail you’ve just ordered.
jr and Chris,
eh. This approach works REALLY well for some guys. And they REALLY “get rape” a lot.Report
@j-r
That’s certainly true.Report
I was looking at “talk about controversial stuff” and thinking about how this might be looking at the wrong thing.
Let’s make a matrix for likes discussing controversial stuff vs. dislikes
LL LD
DL DD
Out of those things, it looks like you’ve got a 50/50 shot of getting off on the right foot (where “the right foot” is defined by “matching attitudes on controversy”). If you’ve had several DL dates and, finally, you have a LL date? Jeez louise, you’ve got someone that you want to see a second time! As for DD dates, you’re not saying “oh good, someone who understands me!” as much as you’re not saying “ah, crap… it’s another person who wants to argue instead of talk”.Report
Yeah. and it’s good advice for people using dating service.
They aren’t the people who “go with the flow” and “are not awkward” about conversations.
Deliberately putting your foot in your mouth is far better than doing it on something trivial.Report
It’s been my experience, by the way — and this may just be me, who knows? — that if you’re not just looking for sex, and you want a woman to feel like she had a great first date, it’s the doing stuff, not the talking, that she’ll remember and think about later.
Everyone knows that first date conversations are basically worthless for learning about people from they say about themselves: people lie either by commission or omission almost as a rule on first dates, so it’s better to just figure them out by interacting more spontaneously, and that requires doing something besides sitting across from each other with plates of food in between. My suggestion: put yourself in a slightly uncomfortable position (say, go line dancing when you’re not comfortable dancing, or do karaoke when you’re uncomfortable in front of people), and make yourself vulnerable, because people recognize vulnerability, and they know that vulnerability tends to cause people to say and do things they wouldn’t ordinarily. Mendacity is much more difficult while do-si-doing, when you’re not quite comfortable with your dance moves, and people recognize that implicitly.Report
A4: “Even after hearing the explanation, I’m dumbfounded.” A Brother can’t catch a break in the outer boroughs
But really, it doesn’t surprise me too much that there are no takers. Your neighbor to the north on the mainland is a large rail switching area, industrial park, and fuel storage area, and your other, nearest neighbor is Riker’s Island. Reminds me a bit of the abandoned hospital on Ellis Island, though a good deal of the long term vacancy of that property was a decades long dispute between NJ and NY over who owned what, now resolved.Report
If I were a movie studio, I’d buy the damned island and film every horror and apocalypse movie there from now until the end of time.Report
It may not be worth it from a liability perspective. A cpl ppl were just injured/killed in a collapse on the set of the new Scorcese while they were trying to shore up a dilapidated structure (to make it safe enough for shooting, ironically).Report
Yeah, that’s too cautious. I’m gonna need the Coke-Encrusted Hollywood Exec’s perspective.Report
“They signed the waiver. Quick! Call the copy people! Have them create a trailer that talks about how this movie is so scary that 3 people died while creating it! Make WILL YOU SURVIVE? the tagline! Red letters on a black background! No, wait! Black letters on a red background! No, wait! Onyx letters rising up from a river of blood!”Report
I’m pretty sure there are plenty of post-apocalyptic looking places in the Bronx proper where it’s easier to get a production truck to the site.Report
Y’all are absolutely no fun.Report
A cpl ppl were just injured/killed in a collapse on the set of the new Scorcese while they were trying to shore up a dilapidated structure (to make it safe enough for shooting, ironically).
I hear their car insurance rates are going up, too.Report
related to H1 & H3: A plan to add apartments above a downtown DC library in the works for three years was cancelled recentlyReport
“[H2] Urban cores are growing, but suburbs are growing more.”
Not on a percentage basis.
“The 107 core cities grew to almost 60 million, but still only 28 percent of the metropolitan population, the suburbs to 153 million. The central cities grew by almost 2 million, a 3.4% gain, while suburbs added 4.4 million, for a slower rate of 3.0%”
Just the fact that they are more or less equal (and positive, and single digit percentages) is a dramatic difference from 2nd half 20th century america, where (census to census) double digit percentage growth of suburbs along with declines in central city population were the norm.Report
[D2] I would say that the author has not changed much from his womanizing ways. I do not have sympathy for people who cheat, but he was still manipulating women to get what he wants from them, and deceiving them for his story.Report
D2: Totally believe this. Looking back, it generally fits a lot of my experiences, although it took this article to put it in perspective.
D4: A lot of these aren’t cultural but biological.
B5 Baby, you’re Pawnd “noob”. Loved it.
B6: nice moves dumbasses. This is why I take a lot of “expert” advice with a large grain of salt.
T5: and increase the incidents of smuggling.
H5: Anyone that actually believes that statement about “livability” is an idiot. Of course it’s about exclusion. No one wants to live with “those people!”
A2: Blue states–get your own houses in order. Folks are leaving for a reason. Figure it out. My state could take a lesson. When you’re anti business, business leave. Get a clue.
A3: Nah, I like my old measurement system. Gives history to system. I see no reason why I should convert.Report
Damon,
D2 — can’t learn jack from a biased sample. And Ashley Madison screens.Report
But will I be able to get in? Given the quality of women I’ve been meeting maybe I need to chase married women who want something on the side 🙂Report
[H5] the list of excluded businesses is just plain weird. I mean, yes, it makes sense when one goal is to exclude people who want to live in walkable neighbourhoods because they can’t afford to drive miles for every single errand.
But really – no barbershops? No daycares? The awesomest thing about where I live is there’s a little nexus of businessess nearby – I can walk to a bank, library, grocery store, liquor store, pharmacy, post office, butcher, daycare, barber, salons, headshop, dressmaker, realtor, therapeutic massage, obviously non-therapeutic “massage”, pub, tattooist, accountant, restaurants, eyeglasses place, antique store, florist, bookshop and probably a number of places I’ve missed, in no more than ten minutes.
That said, I’d be happy if the used car lots went somewhere else – they’re a big dead spot on the street, and the bigger one never shovels their walks, presumably because they don’t much care about attracting walk-in business from the immediate area.Report
M1 – I have very mixed feelings about married members of the military. My plan growing up was to finish college in four, do four in the Navy or Coast Guard as an officer and then start a family. After my daughter was born when I was 19 I decided that I couldn’t be away from her and gave up on the original plan.
The military spends millions (billions?) transporting families all over the world to support their troops. Part of me thinks the Roman model is better. No spouses or children.Report
@mike-dwyer
The Roman model does not exactly work in a democratic republic. It might work great in an oligarchy or aristocracy but not so much in a country that depends on a volunteer military and has regular elections.
Also we need officers willing to make a life-long career out of the military to build up expertise and the number of people willing to do this and remain unmarried is probably very very small.Report
I agree that the officer thing (or even career enlisted) is a big obstacle. But man, the cost-savings of no longer providing housing and moving costs…think of all the good they could do with that.Report
…in a country that depends on a volunteer military…
For some reason, and even though it’s accurate, this phrase struck me as peculiar today. I volunteer to give blood; volunteer soldiers, OTOH, are paid and receive generous benefits. I’ve been thinking recently that it might be more accurate to say that the US has a mercenary military — special pay for overseas, special pay if you have to actually fight, etc. We don’t even hire just citizens these days, hiring on to the military can be a fast-track to citizenship.Report
T4 – I did a lot of research on Snus in an effort to get my wife to quit smoking. The science is pretty compelling. Sweden has one of the lowest rates of cancer in the world and they attribute it directly to the popularity of Snus. Speaking from experience with my coworkers, allowing them to discreetly get their nicotine fix at their desk instead of sneaking outside for a quick cigarette also seems like a cost-saver. I would put it in the vending machines in the cafeteria if HR would approve it.Report
Death by snus-snus!Report
Is comparatively rare!Report
Every life prematurely snussed out is a tragedy.Report
t1 ironically reads as though the author was high as helllllllllllllllll.Report
D2 — The lack of ethics as a writer here appalls me. He’s meeting with these women, chatting with them, and never once indicates he came clean, telling them his real agenda, and giving them any opportunity to not be part of his story. This is horribly, abysmally wrong. It’s an ethical violation so gross and horrid that I cannot even begin to say.
When you write about people, even anonymously, you owe them honesty in what you’re doing, and the chance to rebut your interpretations of them and their behavior. You owe them the right of off-the-record confidence.
I also do not believe the argument with his wife. Totally feels made up; either he wasn’t being as honest with her as he said he was before (so wasn’t honest with us), or I don’t think it really happened (and so still wasn’t honest with us).
Dudes, his advice about where you put your efforts is good advice, but it’s from a tainted well.Report
I’m doubtful he actually exists.
Who the fuck goes and talks to Ashley Madison’s girls without bothering to talk to the people in charge? You were mentioning just last week that it pays to talk to the people you’re writing about.
He hasn’t learned jack about his topic, because he’s an idiot who doesn’t know a walking lawsuit when he sees one.
You can’t tell a DAMN thing about “what women who want to cheat” are looking for, from going to Ashley Madison.
Because Ashley Madison screens, and screens hard. All the women really looking to “get a new husband”? Out the door sooner than you can say “sister”. And it’s a bitch to screen for them, too.Report
M5 — we get this choice gem:
And not one single word about men’s behavior.
Right. All the women’s fault.Report
That’s not a fair reading at all.
It’d be easy to point out that a man who has a series of monogamous relationships through his twenties is following society’s playbook. It’s more informative to note that a woman who does the same is following the same playbook. Your reading of that paragraph doesn’t fit into the rest of the article, either.Report
My reading of that article is that the rulebook is for women. There isn’t a rulebook for men; men just naturally know the rules.
Boys get lucky, girls get shamed.Report
In what world is it that men do not face the imposition of societal rules and threat of being shamed for transgressing those rules? That in no way describes the real world that I inhabit, but if that place does exist I might like to go there.Report
This strikes me as more akin to “33 and unmarried” shaming than sex-shaming, though.
Or, worse, “not achieving goals” shaming.
A guy who hits 33 and is unmarried (and is, presumably, A-OK with this) doesn’t need advice on what he should have done differently. Hell, same for a woman.
A woman who hits 33 and is unmarried but wants to find a nice guy and start a family? You’ll be okay with saying “men are jerks!” and you’re veering into dangerous territory when you say “sometimes life just doesn’t work out the way we planned” but Atheist God help you if you say “instead of doing this, you should have done that”.
When it comes to men’s behavior, we’re not really dealing with a glut of men who are saying stuff like “man, I really want to get married and start a family!” but cannot, for whatever reason, achieve that. I mean, if we were, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to anybody to write an article like that one.
We’d have articles about how stupid those wedding DJ commercials on television are.Report
The author lists some of the rules:
Don’t marry before you’re “economically stable” (an endlessly-retreating horizon), don’t wait until you’re married to have sex, don’t wait until you’re married to live together, don’t move back in with your parents. And, for the upper classes, don’t have kids too early and don’t have too many.
Which of those are strictly for women?Report
men just naturally know the rules.
Womansplainin!Report
Show me where in that piece the writer laid out the man who was ‘living by the rules; there’s a lot of words explaining the woman achieving, getting an education, a career, and having her mom encourage her go get that abortion. And not one single word dedicated to the other side of that coin. Total tone is of ‘these are the new rules for women,” and we need to rewrite that rule book; all those things you think mean slutty behavior are the new rules.
Marriage is a partnership. The rules of marriage aren’t just about getting into marriage, they’re about maintaining marriage over the long haul. Where’s the man, vacuuming and doing laundry and taking time off to care for a sick kid? Where’s the man putting the emotional effort into his wife instead of his sexy co-worker (maybe because his wife’s too exhausted to put effort into him because she’s carrying the burden of both working and home)?Report
I figured that Tushnet talked about women more because that’s where she has the most exposure.
I do think it would be better for conservative critics of the current sexual anarchy to have more to say the role men have in their preferred model. (Just not sure if Tushnet is the person for that.)Report
@will-truman in the long tradition of rules of public life, those rules focus on women’s behavior. Now I’m not saying that there weren’t a lot of rules about men’s behavior, but it’s pretty common to have them be like that linky sample of community rules.
So while she might not have been the person to articulate those rules (I keep saying that lowering the incidence of rape is something men have to do, right? I can’t make them their rules, I can only tell them the problem of some men’s behavior;) but she sure as hell had, given a weight of tradition, to balance that paragraph with some notion that there are rules for men, and their inappropriate behavior, too. Rules that apply to marriage.
Just sayin’ it’s buyin’ into the patriarchy, and I really hate saying that. But that’s what it is. Yes, I 100% agree, it would be a very good thing if conservative critics of the current sexual anarchy [had] more to say the role [of] men [and the rules for men] in their preferred model.Report
The article specifically decried the current standards for male behavior.Report
In what world is it that men do not face the imposition of societal rules and threat of being shamed for transgressing those rules?
Did you just write that? You don’t think that men and women have a different set of societal rules when it comes to sex and get different responses if they break those rules?
Or are you speaking more broadly; that men face the imposition of societal rules and the threat of being shamed for transgressing those rules… in which case, yes, but so what? That doesn’t say anything about whether or not the rules in question are a problem, or if they’re imposed differently based upon sex, which I kinda think was zic’s point there.Report
What is the best way to get people who are content with the status quo to change?
It seems to me that changing the status quo is the best way to do that.
The argument that it shouldn’t be on the people who are dissatisfied with the status quo to be the agents of change is emotionally resonant, but it’s not likely to get people who are content with the status quo to change the status quo.Report
This is totally covered in the Lysistrata.Report
Yes.
You tell me. You did read what I wrote, right?
Or are you speaking more broadly; that men face the imposition of societal rules and the threat of being shamed for transgressing those rules…
Maybe you actually did read what I wrote.
“So what?” about anything that anyone writes here. It’s a blog. Are we only supposed to raise points that support a preferred narrative?
In general, I don’t respond to what I kinda think people’s points might be. I respond to what they write. You ought to try it sometime.Report
I am going to split the difference here and say that @zic is being a little bit uncharitable in how she is parsing Tushnet’s chosen example, but also has a very good point about the fact that Tushnet chose to use a woman to make that example. The fact that large parts of the social conservative world view place an inordinate moral burden on women. There is a reason that Jesus was born of a virgin or why women wear the hijab. That stuff ain’t accidental or even a la carte; it’s part of the recipe.
I will, however, say that this part is a bit out there for me:
I cannot conceive of how that sentence is any different than someone saying, “I keep saying that lowering the incidence of inner-city crime is something black people/poor people have to do, right?”Report
@will-truman
“I do think it would be better for conservative critics of the current sexual anarchy to have more to say the role men have in their preferred model. (Just not sure if Tushnet is the person for that.”
If social conservatives rebel so much against the current sexual anarchy, why do they exhibit so much loathing at the secular-liberal bourgeois model of “Pre-marital sex is okay. Having some serious but not long-lasting relationships is okay. Finding a mate semi-late in life is okay and waiting until you are in your career before having kids is okay.”
The stability produced by this system is seemingly pretty conservative to me.Report
“So what?” about anything that anyone writes here. It’s a blog. Are we only supposed to raise points that support a preferred narrative?
No, you are not supposed to raise points (or not) that only support a preferred narrative.
But, generally speaking, if someone is talking about something and your default response is “they’re engaged in a ‘preferred narrative'” rather than “They have an authentic response that I think is wrong”… so “I’ll throw a monkey wrench in there in the name of higher discourse” is your response… you’re probably not engaging in higher discourse, you’re probably just playing Culture Warrior. And that actually is against the mission statement of the blog.
If you want to respond to zic, respond to what she wrote, not why you think she wrote it. Or point over at the shiny blinky light over there.
You tell me. You did read what I wrote, right?
Yep, sure did. You wrote:
In what world is it that men do not face the imposition of societal rules and threat of being shamed for transgressing those rules? That in no way describes the real world that I inhabit, but if that place does exist I might like to go there.
Which – as a response to zic – is a bullshit response. “Somebody is pointing out a problem, and my response is to point out that there are lots of other problems” is not a substantive response, JR. It’s a bait-and-switch. “Let’s not discuss whether or not you are correct that there is a problem here. Let’s not discuss whether or not this problem is bigger or smaller than some other problem. Let’s talk about this other thing instead.”
Are you really that uncomfortable talking about whether or not zic has a point?
That doesn’t say anything about whether or not the rules in question are a problem, or if they’re imposed differently based upon sex, which I kinda think was zic’s point there.
In general, I don’t respond to what I kinda think people’s points might be. I respond to what they write. You ought to try it sometime.
This is seriously the funniest bit of non-self aware irony I’ve read on the blog in a while.Report
You know what @patrick, if you have such a hard time with my comments, if you think that I am consistently acting in bad faith and making poor arguments, then maybe we’d be both better off in ignoring each other.
That’s about the simplest solution that I can think of.Report
@malarche Womansplainin!
I prefer “femsplaining.” Partly for prosodic reasons, and partly to emphasize the fact that it’s primarily a feminist vice.Report
If you think that I am consistently acting in bad faith and making poor arguments, then maybe we’d be both better off in ignoring each other.
Problem here is that you put too many eggs in that basket.
I don’t see you consistently acting in bad faith. You did here. I don’t see you consistently making poor arguments, either. Your actual argument here wasn’t bad once you got around to it. The comment I was responding to wasn’t an argument, though.Report
Right, but it was bad enough that you felt that you had to jump in and play white knight.
Thanks for appointing yourself the arbiter of good and bad arguments, by the way.Report
As a member of the blog, some measure of policing the comments is actually partially my responsibility, yes. That doesn’t make me “white knighting” (interesting that you make that a pejorative). If you don’t like it, tough patootie.
If you want to defend your original comment as a “good argument”, you go right ahead. Submit a guest post, even.Report
Upvoting “femsplainin’ “Report
I cannot conceive of how that sentence is any different than someone saying, “I keep saying that lowering the incidence of inner-city crime is something black people/poor people have to do, right?”
I dunno about bad faith, but that is one poor, poor argument.Report
df,
it has to do with sex segregation of spaces. Going to a frat house? Yup, it’s their fucking responsibility that they don’t let people screw unconscious girls at their house.
Guys often know which people are “being dicks” (otherwise known as quite legally raping people).
I mean, sure, we could teach girls what to watch out for — what spells “sexual predator”. But I really don’t think most people want to do that. And it is easier to get the guys to stop befriending and supporting assholes, anyway. More likely to work, too.Report
@dragonfrog
I cannot conceive of how that sentence is any different than someone saying, “I keep saying that lowering the incidence of inner-city crime is something black people/poor people have to do, right?”
Big diff.
Group Rape has group A (rapists, mostly men) and Group B, rape victims, mostly women; though there is some overlap of groups.
Group Inner City Violence has one huge group.
So while your analogy seems apt, it really doesn’t work all that well. Might work for man-on-man rape amongst the incarcerated, however.Report
Oh jeez – that obviously wasn’t clear! I was quoting @j-r from 12:48. The only part of my post there that are my own words was saying that what j r said is was a poor argument – again in reference to j r’s post of 1:31.Report
@dragonfrog
It is such a “poor, poor argument” that you don’t even have to bother to refute. You can just assert that its wrong. That is very convenient.
@zic
The big difference that you are citing just is not there. In both cases, there is a group of people being held collectively responsible for the actions of some of its members. The only reason that the analogy doesn’t work for you is that you approve of the former instance of collective guilt, but don’t approve of the latter.Report
In both cases, there is a group of people being held collectively responsible for the actions of some of its members.
Right.
So let’s go back to what pissed me off in the first place, shall we?
A woman who has sex with multiple partners (maybe hooking up a lot if she’s at a more elite college), contracepting throughout and having at least one abortion, then cohabits, then marries in her early 30s if at all, might be a hedonist or a relativist. In my experience she’s much more likely to be trying to do everything right, finish her education and start climbing the economic ladder and make good rather than hasty choices in her men. Her mother usually supports or even pressures her in her decision to abort, and many of the decisions I’ve described are made not in the service of personal sexual liberation but as a means to preserve her relationships. A lot of the time it doesn’t work–the marriage or cohabitation she really hoped would be “the one” still breaks up–but she sees all the alternative choices as even riskier, and therefore irresponsible.
This single paragraph, without an equally representative paragraph of how a male might live within the rules of marriage (remember, that’s the topic here) is doing exactly what you say I’m doing; collectively holding women to blame for (???) fill in the question mark with whatever you think’s gone wrong with marriage, but I’d say the opening sentences of this paragraph clearly prime the pump with what you’re supposed to use to fill in here — sexually liberated women who get educated, have careers, and abortions. Those are the rules under discussion, no?
The piece is totally void anything remotely akin to fair and balanced, even by Fox’s woebegone standards. I completely fails to present a man failing the marriage test by following the new, Liberal rules of marriage. It’s all about guilting women for not getting married young enough, for sleeping around, for abortion, for cohabiting, for single parenting, for encouraging their daughters to get abortions; equating these things, the new rules, to the failure of marriage; you play by the rules, you lose. The implication here isn’t that the rules should change because the conservative rules are failing; it’s that the liberal rules have failed, and those girls are gettin’ up to no end of trouble. Not a single word about husbands, boyfriends, fathers, let alone the paragraph that should have been brother to the quoted graf’s sister.Report
@dragonfrog thanks.
If we want to continue this conversation, it needs to be taken down below.
Me, I don’t really think there’s anything else to say; but if anyone thinks what I wrote is all male-bashy, and you can explain why the lack of a male stereotype to (hopefully) be married to the female stereotype so carefully presented is not all about the guilting, I’d be most obliged, because right now, I think that’s total bs.
The only logical conclusion I can draw from reading this piece is that her proposed solution to the problem of marriage failure rate (not marrying, divorce both) is to return to the days of women’s chastity — that’s what the writer’s all about, no? Gay woman who’s celebate ’cause sin?Report
@zic
I already agreed with you above that Tushnet’s decision to use a woman in that example is indicative of a social conservative world view that unfairly places certain burdens on women.
The only part that I was objecting to was that sentence about men being responsible for lowering the incidence of rape. It sounds like you’re affirming a case of collective responsibility. If that’s not what you meant, I apologize for misreading.Report
@zic “without an equally representative paragraph of how a male might live within the rules of marriage”
No matter how many times you complain about that, the fact is that she did specifically condemn the modern standards for male behavior.
“We need to offer a broader array of vocations, rather than capitulating to a culture which upholds marriage and motherhood as the only two paths to adulthood. (Motherhood, not fatherhood–a man can stay a boy as long as he wants, and often much, much longer than that.)”
You can complain that that was a few sentences shorter than her section on women, but seriously, do you want to go through life doing that?Report
@j-r thank you, at least, on understanding the strawmanning Tushnet’s doing.
I haven’t the heart for it now, but on rape, there’s a strong impulse in me to say that my position is libertarian. If men commit the bulk of rapes, and they do, then it’s a problem men have to talk about, hold stay silent ’cause unmentionables. Ladystuff. Periods and menopause and undergarments that aren’t sexy.Report
@pinky
In the case of women, we’ve got this particular set of bad actions by a single woman, made in the name of being right. In those few sentences on men; there’s not enough support; not enough choice of vocation (and this doesn’t effect women?), and no call to end childhood. There’s no he with an English Lit. major, living in his parents basement playing video games, is there?Report
What we need to do is institute a series of social norms that are able to prevent people who probably shouldn’t be having sex from doing so… or, at least, get them to consider more of the downsides of bad action than the upsides of gratification in the short term.Report
Traditional morality and shock collars are the only two things that stand a chance.Report
We already have a series of social norms that are able to prevent people from having sex. Some people manage to violate those social norms and still be successful (think of the bad boy or the rebellious chick who do quite well with their preferred sex), while others break the rules and take the hit.
We could reassert more norms, but the nature of the sexual marketplace is such that we would just be begging the question. Evolution is an ongoing arms race. It is vexing at times, but it’s also the force that brought us into being.Report
Social norms to prevent people from having sex only work if there is a significant price to be paid for breaking them. Men traditionally could break the social norms much easier than women because they always had a lower price to pay in the majority of situations, both economically and socially.
These days, most of the prices for breaking the social norms regarding sex have disappeared. The chances of getting pregnant or an STD are much lower now than they were in the past thanks to various devices. Even if pregnancy occurs, the price of being a single-mother is lower. Most STDs are curable or at least manageable. For the most part, this should be better from a liberal or libertarian perspective. People are more free to act as they want without coercive social controls smashing them hard for not following the rules. I say this as a person whose love life is nowhere near want he wants it to be.Report
Oh, if you’re not happy with the way the system is stacked against you, you should know that I’ve got a *TON* of advice for what you should have done instead.Report
I think Mr. Bird is being ironic.Report
jr,
We already have a set of norms that are sufficient to convince you that we are preventing kids having sex. CDC results say otherwise, but what are facts when you’ve got an opinion?Report
Eve Tushnet is a self described lesbian who practices abstinence because a relationship would conflict with her conservative Roman Catholic views on sin. She’s the suiest of the sui generis.
(or at least she was, this is first time I’ve come across any link to her from my daily reading in probably 8-10 years).Report
We travel in different circles.Report
I rarely go into the conservative blog-o-rama these days on my own, just Hot Air to catch the latest memes & talking points. (which I also get from talk radio at least once or twice a week riding around in the car)Report
A2: I’d like to see real numbers on this migration, especially historical trends. For instance, I’m aware of why Texas is — I’m sorry was growing, and that was “expensive oil”. And by “was” I mean “Everyone I know, and that’s a lot of people, working the oil, gas, and chemical industries here in Houston are talking layoffs. Big ones”.
I can’t speak for Florida or other red states, of course.
Second, I’d love to see that migration taking into context the difference in federal taxes — many Red States (Texas has JUST left that list, again that’s the extent of my local knowledge) take in far more federal cash than they pay out — so talking about “propping up operational expenses” is pretty hilarious.
Mostly, that article just lacks data. What’s the net migrations? Which states are growing and shrinking? Over what time frame? What’s the federal tax burden — and federal tax income? Handwaving “Red States and Blue States” is pretty pointless — I’m aware of Texas booming (well, until now when we’re starting to stumble) and Kansas collapsing — both red states. I suspect New York is doing dandy, but not sure about Maine. I’d be a bit shocked if California hadn’t grown respectably over any timeframe, although that drought is probably hurting….Report
By the metrics most often used, Texas has been on the donor list pretty consistently since the Tax Foundation made the list a thing (here’s 2006). You’re right that red states tend to get more than they pay in federal taxes, but that’s not what Richard Florida (and by extension Ozimek) is referring to. Richard Florida seems irritated that red states get to be cheaper, which is an area where taxes are only a part of the picture (this is something conservatives get wrong more frequently than liberals).
The migration thing (asserted originally by Florida here, not Ozimek) isn’t particularly controversial, and indeed I’ve never seen it seriously challenged (except that, as you point out, red states and blue states are overly broad categories). It comes up with the decennial when red states pick up congresscritters and electoral votes. Some of that is (international) immigration and reproduction, but not all of it. The politically neutral explanation (and I think the correct one) is that it’s a matter of expandability. Blue states are more crowded, red states less so, and migration occurs on that basis.
I believe that California’s, like New York’s, domestic migration change is in the negative.Report
What’s the net migrations?
That’s an excellent question. Texas politicians have enjoyed bragging about how many Californians move to Texas. But nearly as many Texans move to California. IIRC, in the last year for which I have data, the net migration was just about 10K from California to Texas — an insignificant number relative to the almost 67M people who live in those two.
For what it might be worth, far more Californians moved to the combination of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington (their populations total about 26 million) than moved to Texas (population about 27 million). And lots of people from those states moved to California. The Great Plains seems to be one of the dividing lines that break the country up into regions based on interstate migration.Report
It’s certainly true that the net migration from California to Texas is exaggerated. There is limited utility in looking between two specific states. Californians move elsewhere (including other blue states like Washington and Oregon) , and people from elsewhere move to Texas (including red states like Louisiana). As far as I know, though, the general pattern holds.Report
State-level numbers don’t paint the entire picture either. I’ve started looking at county-level migration, and… it’s complicated, with multiple overlapping patterns. There’s “border” migration, where people move back and forth between counties in different states that sit on the border. Eg, back and forth between rural east Texas and rural Louisiana along the border. Then there’s “metro area” migration, where people move between the major metro areas of different states. Eg, between Houston and Denver. Also odd divisions between parts of states. Eg, based on migration, El Paso is more New Mexico than it is Texas.
I tease acquaintances in Texas that they should warn their politicians to be careful what they wish for. Texas has a state Water Bank now that is clearly going to be used to fund diversions and storage for their metro areas at the expense of rural ones. If the metro areas continue to sprawl, even today’s cleaner cars aren’t going to be enough to keep the air quality reasonable. Texas’ population is about the same as California’s circa 1985. If Texas continues to grow, my prediction is that they’ll follow the same path as California on regulation and taxes.Report
A3 – I had a professor who would tell us, time & time again, how easy it was to convert english units, once you memorized all the conversions.
He was completely serious, too.Report
Well, compared to analyzing processes with non-linear behavior, it is simple.Report
25.4 unites half the world.Report
unfortunately 40 and 7.62 divide itReport
Dating, Marriage, Babies, Tobacco – now there’s an old-school script!Report
The NYC subway biome. Half the genetic material found is unknown.
Fascinating.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/nyregion/among-the-new-york-city-subways-millions-of-riders-a-study-finds-many-mystery-microbes.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0Report
The article points out that the large percentage of “unknown” was expected, as only a small fraction of known species’ genomes have been sequenced. The Genomes OnLine Database lists ~60K organisms, but the very large majority of those are only partial sequences.Report
Yeah, um, we discovered a new lifeform when we moved into our current house and started cleaning out the washing machine. Dark Grayish clumps started falling out of it, so we just sent it up to Penn State. Apparently it’s a bacterium that only fed on olive oil (previous owner was Italian chef). [Later substantiated all over the place in Italy.]
Biofilms is a new area of study.Report
The NYC subway will bring on the next stage of evolution!!!
This could also be a good plot point for a really cheesy horror movie.Report
Not, the next superhero movie? “Go, Go, Justice Mass Transit”Report
Nah, consistency required for evolution. at least consistency of environment.Report
D4: Interestingly, the “dating moneyball” guy plays into all of the same fallacies that the people that he kind of criticizes do: Assuming that finding happiness is tied to treating people like commodities, and having the inward and outward status of simply having a relationship trump all of the actual important stuff.Report
I think that’s part of his point. Moneyball is still focused on winning the game, not on developing a mature attitude toward competition.Report
The idea that the Moneyball-approach (which he, thankfully, does get right) can be applied to dating is ridiculous even from a theoretical standpoint. Moneyball was about winning the World Series, something only one team could do. And it didn’t matter what path you took to get there; if you win, you get to raise the pennant. So whether you had a bunch of cheap OBP machines or a team of overpaid but still valuable power-speed threats, if you won, you won.
Dating doesn’t work that way. Saying people should focus on an “undervalued trait” is stupid if that trait isn’t of interest to the person. You’re not simply trying to get married. You’re trying to find happiness. And while understanding how different relationship factors and personality traits can contribute to happiness is important, telling someone he/she should simply look for different things — things they don’t want — because they might be more attainable is dumb.Report
It seems to me that the argument is that in the long run these things will make you happier than you think they will, and those other things will make you less happy than you think they will.Report
The analogy I’m thinking of is to neoconservatism. It was never an ideological movement; it put its stock in empiricism. Its empirical solutions just happened to coincide with a more traditional moral code. (Practitioners of that code would argue that it was more than just a coincidence.) Likewise, this article is not telling people to be nice and value the positive traits in others because you should; it’s billing those actions as a good strategy.Report
If you want someone who fits in the following boxes: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) and so on up through (x) and you don’t want to date someone who isn’t in at least 95% of those boxes and (1), (2), and (3) are non-negotiable, well then, I look forward to hearing yet another g-darned speech about how all of the good ones are taken.
Especially if (1), (2), and/or (3) is a physical trait.
And double-especially if we’re talking about someone who is unlikely to meet 95% of the boxes of the person most likely to met spec.Report
I guess California can learn from Mississippi.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/04/opinion/sutter-vaccine-mississippi-california/Report
H6: (if I may be presumption). This piece by Rick Perlman (of Nixonland fame) has been making the rounds on the liberal blogosphere. (I first saw it on Balloon Juice).
There’s debatable points on the pitfalls and perils of privatization of public policy and the public purse, but the ur-example he uses are public housing projects. Sure, nothing is going to be perfect, and I’m not going to defend any post-conversion mistakes, but the urban public housing policies and execution from the 40s to the early 90s are the very model of an iterative cycle of complete and utter failure. Nobody with any experience and legitimate care about the issue defends the way things were done back then. And nobody does it that way now, everyone’s trying to convert legacy public housing authority property to mixed used (and esp mixed income).Report
Our current urban planning is an utter and complete failure. We don’t HAVE to have slumlords, you know.Report
That’s not an urban planning issue. That’s a political machine corruption, bad governance, qui bono issue.Report
Kolohe,
None of the above, actually. it is not cost effective to BUILD NEW HOMES for the poor.
Cut the problem at the root, and the slumlords have no leverage.Report
D2: Charles Orlando seems like a bit of a dick in this article especially with what he did to Lisa. I guess it is one thing to go undercover but he should have made clearer boundaries for himself. Though I suppose this is not unsurprising in the end.
D4: I think a big problem with on-line dating (especially in large urban markets) is that it provides evidence or an illusion of evidence that there are a lot of fish out there. So maybe a date is a B plus but why settle on B plus when A plus could be around the corner. Another issue is hyper-specific dating sites giving the illusion that there is such a thing as a perfect match.
M4: When I lived in Japan, I ended up getting into a conversation with an American military member on a train. He showed me pictures of his wife. Both were in their early 20s like me. The guy said one of the main (and possibly the main) reason he got married was to get bumped into a higher pay grade because the military pays you shit as a single guy or gal apparently.
M5: I have no idea what this article was about. I will say that I have a very complicated relationship with The American Conservative. They have a lot of articles which I start off seeing as having and interesting point but then it quickly ends up with me thinking “NO NO NO. You are wrong.” I noticed Eve Tushnet’s strange loathing of being bourgeois even though she needs to admit that couples who marry later, when they are more economically stable, etc are more likely to last longer. I can almost see her feeling dirty at maybe needing to admit that San Francisco and Brooklyn upper-middle class professionals might be on to something. It seems very strange that a magazine called The American Conservative would have an extreme loathing and anatagonism of anything that can be called bourgeois or upper-middle class. Unless they imagine themselves as upper-class aristocrats who are above simple morality. Does this go back to Shaw’s “Morals are for the middle class. The rich don’t need them and the poor can’t afford them”?Report
It seems very strange that a magazine called The American Conservative would have an extreme loathing and anatagonism of anything that can be called bourgeois or upper-middle class.
Dude, have you never met a single conservative Evangelical or Catholic? If so, that might explain why what the article is saying flew right over your head.Report
I don’t exactly come from a geographic location known for a high Evangelical population. I know people who had Evangelical upbringings and they are all rather bitter about them now and the most ardent atheists I know. Protestants in the Northeast tend to be mainline. The African-American churches are more evagelicalish but also heavily Democratic.
I do know a lot of Catholics including practicing Catholics. They tend to be social justice (lots of them were educated by Jesuits and love the Jesuits) types and not very big on the no sex until marriage thing.Report
Yeah, like I said, it’s clear now why it goes right over your head. She’s contrasting bourgeois mores not with upper class or working class norms, but with more traditional Christian mores. That is, bourgeois in this context means something like mainstream middle class secular lifestyles, which is precisely the sort of thing that you’d expect religious conservatives to loath.Report
D2: I’d say more than a bit of a dick. At least he had the good graces to reflect upon his dickishness, although the entire concept of sub rosa investigation of extramarital dating is infused with dickishness down to the molecular level.Report
Very true counselor.Report
@burt-likko “At least he had the good graces to reflect upon his dickishness…”
… and then sell that salacious story for money.Report
He did the same thing as most cheating guys do — got caught up in “do i still got it”.
Just because he didn’t fuck her doesn’t mean he wasn’t cheating on his wife.Report
I don’t get the impression (having only read that section of the article) that he was cheating on his wife – they agreed in advance what the rules were, and he followed them. They were stupid rules, a terrible idea, disrespectful of his wife, his dates, himself, his readers, and probably a bunch of other people, non-human animals, and features of the landscape.
He was cheating on Lisa, for sure.Report
@dragonfrog
I don’t think he was cheating on Lisa. I don’t think she should have let it go that far with any of his dates.Report
I can almost see her feeling dirty at maybe needing to admit that San Francisco and Brooklyn upper-middle class professionals might be on to something.
The quotation from TVD that comes to mind is “Why don’t these people preach what they practice???”Report
After my grandmother died, my dad found a box of letters between her and his father, which revealed that they had never been married – my grandfather had had a wife who for some reason didn’t want anything to do with him, but refused to divorce him either.
This suddenly explained a number of things, including the financial straits the family was in – they didn’t have had access to cheap housing in married officers’ quarters, but instead lived in open-market rental accommodations on the salaries of a single officer and a single teacher.Report
There are a lot of reasons to wonder about The American Conservative’s name, but yeah, in this case I think Chris is on the money.Report
D2: “I Went Undercover on Ashley Madison to Discover Why Women Cheat.”
Yeah, right. You just keep telling people that.Report
I should add that I have a female friend that has tried online dating on sites that are more geared toward, um, adult activities, and she’s mentioned before how many guys try to get her to go out with them using the “I’m only on here doing research for a book/story/study” line.Report
I hope she replied, “Me too! Well, now that we know that we’re not going to have sex with each other, this should go much more smoothly. Let’s compare notes.”Report
That thought also went through my head.Report
He doesn’t even recognize that he’s the ABSOLUTE SAME THING as the guy who slips his ring in his pocket. “Am I still good enough to seduce someone” “Do I still got it” is a LOT of the reason guys cheat in the first place.Report
Also I totally want to go to Icesland. I love Italian Ices!Report
M5: I find it bizarre that Tushnet lists the advent of “you don’t wait till you’re married to have sex,” “you don’t have to marry someone inside of a certain income bracket,” “you don’t have to have kids right away (or at all),” etc. as an implementation of “strict rules” rather than a relaxing of them.
Conservatives really do live on a different planet than I do.Report
Well, I’m pretty sure that we’d look at a 30-year old virgin with something like sympathy and pity and, behind his or her back, think “man, this is something that should have been fixed back in high school! Whomever picks that flower is going to have to deal with some serious ish!”
As for the income bracket thing, maybe we’re willing to move more than one bracket away from ourselves (using the whole lower/middle/upper lower/middle/upper nine-bracket paradigm) but I don’t know that we’re willing to move two.
If anything, there are more professionals marrying professionals now than bosses marrying secretaries, doctors marrying nurses, etc.
As for the kids thing, the norms have changed a lot since when I was a kid. I was born at the beginning of “Catholics have three kids, Protestants have two kids” and that’s come along so far that a co-worker with four kids who gleefully announced his wife’s fifth pregnancy got ribbed publicly about whether he understood how this kept happening to him (and privately asked if he was Mormon or Catholic or something).
When I first got in the biz and had conversations with co-workers on this subject, I heard stories from my elders like “I’m the fourth of five kids and we were one of the smallest families on the block.” (The answer to the question that I asked was “Protestant.”)
These seem more indicative of norms more than rules… but I could see how someone might use the terms somewhat interchangeably.Report
Yeah.
I say again: Conservatives really do live on a different planet than I do.Report
@jaybird
I am with Tod on this one.
My maternal grandfather was one of four but both sets of my grandparents only had two kids.
“If anything, there are more professionals marrying professionals now than bosses marrying secretaries, doctors marrying nurses, etc.”
Argh, argh, argh. I’ve said this before and will say it again. Just because there is less bosses marrying their secretaries and doctors marrying their nurses does not mean that there is less assortative mating. I don’t think Philip Smith III (Exeter, Yale, Harvard Law) was marrying Rosie from the Bronx when he married his secretary. I bet he was marrying Madeline Winslow (Nightingale-Bamford, Smith) but Madeline Winslow only had so many employment options before 1965 let’s say…Report
@saul-degraw
I think that you may be mischaracterizing the dynamics behind assortative mating. Yes, the men from Yale were always marrying the women from the Seven Sisters. What’s changed now, however, is that the men from Yale don’t all come from the same community of Northeastern elites. The kids coming to Yale and the other Ivies and the Seven Sisters are the highest achieving kids, plucked from communities all over the country.
The difference now is that Bob, the smart kid from Kansas goes to Yale or Stamford instead of KU and ends up working in NY or San Francisco instead of Kansas City and marrying Jane, who is also a smart kid who ends up in NY or SF instead of her home town or nearest regional big city.Report
JR, the Ivies and other elite schools always had national and international appeal. Sure, most of their students were North East residents in the past but this is also true today. Most students at the Ivies come from the BosWash area I think. Even in the early 20th century, the smartest kid in Kansas went to an Ivy if he could. The smarest kid from Kansas would be attractive to elite schools back than because chances are the kid would return to Kansas and make good with his Ivy degree because of the small number of people holding them from where they came from.Report
Assertive mating has always existed, but it is more prevalent. I thought I had a link on that above, but it must have missed the cut.Report
It’s in there.Report
Jaybird,
I always felt that the big break in family size came more from modern medicine. Big families were common back when “dying in infancy” was, you know, fairly common. Medicine changed that rather fast in the early to mid 1900s. Infant mortality started dropping rather fast.
So you pretty much had to have a generation or so of adjustment — the large family that survived, rather than loosing a third in childbirth and early adolescence, and then their kids who found 6 siblings to be the ‘normal’.
My parents and in-laws both came from huge families. That’s ’cause all their kids survived. My parents parents, on the other hand — they had a lot of siblings. The number that made it to adulthood was much, much smaller.Report
What morat said, I think. I recall reading a study somewhere that said most couples globally that want kids want ~2 kids to survive to adulthood. And that once enough modern stuff (sanitary sewers, medicines, etc) is in place to knock down infant mortality rates, it takes about two generations for everyone to figure out that it no longer takes eight babies to grow two adults.Report
Well, there was a period of about 3 decades between huge medical advances/the end of WWII and pretty much universal social acceptance of The Pill (and I’m using Eisenstadt v. Baird as the marker for that).
That generation and a half ended, golly, in 1972. I want to say that that was really recent but then I remember that I’m old.Report
Assertive mating has always existed,
“Bess, you is my woman now.”Report
I recall a conversation in Rod Dreher’s comment section where a Catholic woman said that she had only three kids, and thus was accused by a fellow parishioner of using birth control, which is basically the same thing as being a whore. Some people said she was making that up, others agreed that they’d been similarly accused. I was flabbergasted that such things still went on these days.Report
Things you don’t want to find in your tuna can:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11392825/Mystery-tuna-creature-is-tongue-eating-parasite-says-expert.htmlReport
Where’s Upton when you need him?Report
The Socialists have moved on to commissioning propaganda in more target-rich environments.Report
D3,
Person is ignorant of how world works. Relationships != Sex and never have. Medieval cultures had scripts for both. There’s a reason primogeniture worked better than it had any right to.Report
Rising real estate prices and other factors make it economically really hard for restaurants to do interesting desserts.Report
http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/bestbites/food-trends/why-dc-restaurants-no-longer-care-about-dessert.phpReport
Hey, Zic, down here.
I guess what I’m mostly wondering is what does it mean to “work”?
Here’s the part I’m looking at: many of the decisions I’ve described are made not in the service of personal sexual liberation but as a means to preserve her relationships. A lot of the time it doesn’t work–the marriage or cohabitation she really hoped would be “the one” still breaks up–but she sees all the alternative choices as even riskier, and therefore irresponsible.
It seems to me that “it” is talking about “preserving her relationships”.
So when we’re talking about the rules and whatnot, we’re talking about preservation of relationships (which, in this case, I think means “marriage”).
I’m not seeing shaming in here at all.Report
@jaybird
What did he hope for?Report
If the relationship that she hoped was “the one” broke up, I’m guessing “greener pastures”.Report
[H3] is full of very silly suggestions.
If there is not enough space in London, and there are prisons in London, might I suggest *relocating* those prisons elsewhere? You don’t actually near prisons to be nearby. Sheesh, it’s not rocket science.
As for the rest of the government buildings…the correct take away isn’t ‘Let’s build things on top of each other’, it’s ‘Let’s stop building so much horizontally and build vertically a bit’. Of course, in a normal universe, when you build vertically, you actually make a *single building* taller and less wide, not put multiple unrelated buildings on top of each other!
I am aware that has, *very rarely*, been done, but usually it’s because the building below *couldn’t* be removed. It’s either too important or historical landmark or has something weird about it.
And, incidentally, all Beekman Tower isn’t that. It’s is just a normal building with a school in the lower floors. As is the Primsoll building. Those examples are stupid.(1)
And that, of course, is a much saner solution. Just build a damn normal building and lease/sale the lowest floors to the the government!
1) I’m not quite sure about The Shard, but as that building is a very tall building made of concrete, I’m suspecting it’s *not* suspended over the rail station below it, but that the rail station is instead part of the building. (And maybe entirely underground.) Or alternately someone is just really confused, because looking at pictures of London Bridge station on wikipedia, it is clearly a small train station looking for all the world like any other outside train station, some tracks with a long curved roof to keep off the rain, and it clearly *does not* have a giant skyscraper over it.Report
Personally, I’d just advocate moving the seat of government to Nebraska… err, I mean, outside of Derby.Report