This is a good point.

I am largely atheist (read: I call myself culturally, ethnically Jewish). I believe in evolution, climate change, and the general scientific consensus.

However, I am not a science person at all. My brain is arts and humanities oriented and now I am a newly minted lawyer. There is no consequence to my believing in evolution beyond not being mocked by certain people.

Atypical beard?

To answer your question, probably nothing.

However, your friend was probably trying to cultivate a certain look for his bachelor party and thought your outfit was too casual. To be fair to your friend, I would do the same. Though my reaction is somewhat psychological and in rebellion from what I call the 40 going on 15 culture. There is something strange to me about seeing men who are well into middle age still trying to dress like hipsters or 15 year old skater punks.

Though next time you are in Nashville and need to dress like a gentlemen:

http://www.billyreid.com/

But the issue is that a lot of Republicans want to chuck evolution and replace it with Intelligent Design and/or Creationism. The teaching side-by-side is merely a stop-gap measure so they don't seem as extreme as they really are.

The Republican Party is a whole lot of mess to me. In an ideal world, I would be able to vote for an old liberal Republican like Jacob Javits. But there are no men or women like Jacob Javits in the Republican party anymore. Someone who is socially liberal, does not believe in dismantling the New Deal or Great Society but in keeping them solvent.

This is a very good post.

I agree that we all have our prejudices and these come from all sorts of areas.

My prejudices seem to come from growing up in a very specific geographic and cultural context in the United States.

I grew up in an upper-middle class professional suburb of New York. Half the town was like me and Jewish. Another quarter or so was Asian. The remaining Christians were almost exclusively Roman Catholic. There was no sort of Evangelical group. The majority of our parents had advanced degrees. The majority of my classmates (including myself) internalized that what you do in life is go to school, study hard, get into a good college or university, study hard some more, eventually go to some grad school, and then take your spot in the upper-middle class as a lawyer, doctor, engineer, lower level executive, etc. Most of us also came from typical immigrant success stories: the great-grandparents or grandparents were immigrants, our parents were the first generation to grow up in the suburbs, and we were very successfully integrated third-generation Americans.

So it was kind of a shock to me when I met people at college whose families have been here for hundreds of years (often since pre-Revolutionary days) and they were still the first person in their family to attend college. My immediate thought was "How can your family have lived here for 300 years without sending a soul to college until you?"

Since I have fully absorbed the values of my upbringing and class, I often clash with people who have rejected it and this clash can produce a bigoted thought or swipe. Luckily I have often (but not always) good at suppressing those thoughts and remarks.

One came with a woman who came from deep Southern working class stock. She proudly refered to herself as prole stock. She herself was quite educated, converted to Islam, and I think grew up in more middle class circumstances but she still saw herself as coming from a very hard scrabble Southern rural life. Needlessly to say, we clashed a lot and she saw me as being somewhat to very classist/aristocratic. She mentioned being especially proud of an uncle who was Ivy league educated for undergrad and law school but rejected it all and went to be career military. Sometimes when I got rather angry, there was a part of me that wanted to ask her why she was so proud of being from the American equivalent of a Cossack?
I also resented her swipe against the kind of education I received. My alma mater is not Ivy League but in a very close equivalent and certainly part of that Northeastern old school vanguard.

For all the talk about how everything is becoming bland and identical in the United States thanks to mass culture and the Internet, I still think that there are a lot of regional differences and these geographic breakdowns lead to suspicion and hostility. Like with the Southern woman and myself. She saw herself as being part of a long-tradition of Southern working class folks and I came from something completely different. I have no agricultural relatives. My great-grandparents were poor immigrants but in an urban setting. We have no common language and both assumed the values of our upbringings. She saw Ivy League as a thing to proudly reject. I see it as a thing to proudly embrace. My dad and uncle were Ivy League educated as undergrads. I grew up in a school district that sent a disproportionate amount of students to the Ivy League or equivalents and did so purposefully. It wasn't enough in my hometown to get into college/university because our parents had already done that. You needed to get into one of a certain caliber.

I did not attend for that implication to be there. Nor do I think it will happen soon or possibly at anytime.

The general spirit of bipartisanship that existed during the mid-20th century was probably an exception over a rule. The current strident partisanship is probably a return to old form.

What I should also say is that I love books as an actual object. I love the way they feel in my hands, cover art, ownership (I don't think you really quite own something when it is only in electronic form), the way they fill a room, etc.

I know a few people who have gone completely digital and see me as being an enemy to the environment (semi-seriously). I don't like the idea of future generations not knowing what an actual book is and thinking of bookshelves as unnecessary.

So I am a bit of a luddite this way.

I've wanted to know the same thing. It has been bugging me more than it should since I started posting.

Very good point in your last sentence.

I don't always follow my own advice for the sake of honesty. Sometimes I get angry enough and respond to bait.

My solution during law school was to keep all my work at school and just stay in the library until finished.

This kept my apartment as a largely school-work free zone.

I will add that my apartment was a very easy walk to school.

My friend solved this problem by always doing pleasure reading with a beer near by

:)

I read the league on and off for a while before deciding to start posting.

One of the things I learned in my observation is to reply to TVD as a little as possible.

I have a lot of disagreements with James but he is intelligent, polite, civil, and intellectually honest. He is fun to debate with. TVD simply goes for jeering extremism and partisanship. Luckily I think that there are more people like James on the League than like TVD.

There was an interesting essay I read about young, white people in their 20s on food stamps because of the Great Recession.

The author was a writer and part-time waitress in New York. Most of her friends were also well-educated but sparsely employed creative/artist types. The essay was about how people guilt tripped her for being white, young, educated, and on food stamps. The attackers seem to think the author of the essay should be able to get an office job easily because of her education and race.

http://thebillfold.com/2012/05/young-privileged-and-applying-for-food-stamps/

I think in terms of McArdle it is a mixture of upbringing and sexism matched together.

Basically reducing her to being a spoiled, precocious rich girl.

I am not a fan of all three either but they don't send me into the same kind of rage as Michelle Malkin or Glenn Beck. Or TVD but he is of no power or consequence.

They do probably get a lot of hate because they are women though. However, John Chait seems pretty good about debunking Veronique de Rugy* without being sexist. Is he sarcastic? Yes but not dismissive of her simply because she is a woman.

The unrepentant Freudian in me thinks that humans brains have not completely evolved yet and in our unconscious, we still resort to the easiest and most brutal attacks against our opponents because it is less work than an attack on the merits of the argument. Also reducing an ideological opponent to being a point of mockery reduces them as a threat. Not that Chait or De Rugy have much direct readership. I only read about De Rugy's arguments via Chait. My exposure to Althouse is via Sullivan.

*If I ever heard her in person, I'd probably just melt at the French accent though. I think French accents are absolutely charming and she is pretty easy on the eyes. What can I say? We all have our weaknesses.

I still have not made the plunge into experimenting with an e-reader. I am one of those defiant souls who is either too hipster, too ludditte, or both who likes reading on binded paper.

When it comes to law-stuff, I usually end up printing a lot of stuff because it is easier for me to make notes and understand with a physical copy.

This is sort of off-topic but I am always surprised by people who do not read for pleasure during the academic year. The best piece of advice I ever received was from my undergrad adviser and that was to do at least 45 minutes of pleasure reading a day. I was given this piece of advice during my junior year (in 2000-2001) and have largely kept with it since. It improved my grades in undergrad and I also think kept me sane during grad school and law school and kept my grades good in those degrees as well. And I had the same problem of too much academic reading as well.

A lot of my fellow classmates especially in law school told me that they felt "guilty" about during pleasure reading during the semester. They would say that "If I can read a book, I should be reading for class". And yet they found time to keep up with TV. I really never understood why TV was acceptable recreation but reading a non-school related book was guilt inducing.

Nob,

I think a lot of Clinton nostalgia comes from these reasons:

1. The economy was very good during the Clinton years . I think a lot of people were economically anxious even during the height of the Bush II housing bubble.

2. In hindisght, the culture wars seemed much calmer.

3. Politics seemed less gridlocked and hyperpartisan despite the 1994 Congressional Elections, the government shutdown, and the Impeachment farce.

Mainly I think it is nostalgia for the Clinton era economy

Brunch is the most New York meal ever.

So says the New Yorker. I still think the ideal Sunday is Brunch with a copy of the Sunday edition of the Gray Lady.

I saw this somewhere else on the net.

Sadly, I am not so sure your headline is true. I have seen equally wingnutty stuff from people not in Texas. Like the Republican Senate candidate from Colorado who talked about how bike-sharing was part of a UN conspiracy to take over the state.

Any study of the post-WWII American right-wing shows that these kind of wingnut theories have only been present. However, now we can finally say that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Dear People,

The Onion is not a user's manual to life.

That is all.

Sincerely,

NewDealer

If Jonah Goldberg is an alpha male, I'm Adonis.

Adonis after drinking one too many craft beers.

That depends on how you act after the water breaks.

Have you ever seen the guys at the National Review?

They hardly count as alpha males. Most of them seem like the nerds in high school who worshiped the alpha males.

People seem not to get the boycott and change part about free speech and association.

Agreed

This is one issue in the culture wars that always seemed strange to me. I will come off with two biases:

1. I dislike golf and don't understand the appeal.

2. I was brought up by parents who despise country clubs (for being elitist) and this belief rubbed off on me. For anyone who thinks this is sour grapes, I grew up very comfortably in the upper-middle class

So I don't see this as a great victory for equality. You still need a lot of dough to gain membership to Augusta, now rich women of the 1 percent can join on their own instead of simply being guests. Let me cheer with a sarcastic Yea!