Dead Again is not a zombie movie. It is a crazy sorta film noir, reincarnation romantic melodrama.

I would possibly disagree on the respectable part though I think that it is more universal than related to men.

There seem to be signs of this changing with books and articles coming out on what it means to be single and the joys of living alone/going solo. However, we still feel incredibly odd about people who don't marry unless they look like George Clooney. Look at all the needless speculation about Elena Kagan when she was in the nominee process for the Supreme Court about her unmarried status. I also find that most of the articles are focused on the one percent or close to. One recent article in the Atlantic was called "All the Single Ladies" and the author wrote about how she was borrowing a house from another single lady friend to write the article and why marry if that was her life. How many people can borrow a house in the Hamptons? I suspect being single feels a lot worse if you were 35-38 and living in a tiny studio and temping.

I'm 31, male, and unmarried and feeling weird. Most of my friends (male and female) are married, have kids, are expecting kids, own property, etc and are very much tied down. To be fair, most of them did not spend most of their 20s trying for a career in theatre but went straight to grad school or the corporate world. Part of me feels very far behind and I like I am now just doing stuff that all my friends got out of their systems at 24. The current economic situation does not help much either.

Even though I come from the socio-economic-geographic background where it is perfectly acceptable to get married in your late 30s for the first time, I still think people view me as odd for living alone at 31. And I'm in San Francisco! I have a friend who is slightly older but lives in Vermont. He says that people there view him as downright freakish for not being married at his age.

The problem is possibly because we don't know how to phrase or talk about being single without seeing it as meaning "actively searching for a relationship". There have been times in the past few years when I have done very active dating and times when school and work demands were just too much for me to do anything social.

I also enjoy Emma Thompson. If anything, she introduced Stephen Fry to Hugh Laurie.

Though my favorite Emma Thompson movie is Dead Again. This is possibly the only movie in the "so bad, it's good" camp that I have ever really enjoyed. It helps that the plot is completely insane but everyone goes at it with gusto and the cast is A plus: Emma Thompson, Kenneth Brangnah, Derek Jacobi, Robin Williams (as a defrocked psychologist now working the graveyard shift at a meat locker), and Matt Dillon.

And I originally thought that was a picture of Njinsky until reading further down.

I don't know if there is a clear answer here except that this is one of the many areas that shows the contradictions and hypocrisies of the human condition. The previous sentence was probably a bit too grand.

I know a lot of women who dislike Zooey Deschanel. They seem to dislike her for being too girly and being the current crush d'jour for many men or at least a certain kind of young man. Yet these same women have huge crushes on Ryan Gosling or post pictures on facebook of Ewan MacGregor in nothing but a kilt*.

Yet I have never heard a woman question me for my crush on Maggie Gyllenhaal. And I have a very big crush on her. Most women seem to find my crush on Maggie to be a sign of good taste. I'm guessing that this is because Maggie is seen as a serious actor and very intelligent**. However, as far as I can tell, Maggie Gyllenhaal has done more publicity shots in sexy underwear than Zooey Deschanel. Mary-Louise Parker is another very attractive women in the free from complaint category and I am guessing for similar reasons.

In the end, there is probably no rhyme or reason to this and looking at someone for being aesthetically pleasing is part of our biological programming. I would say that the vast majority of people do oogle someone at one point or another and feel jealousy when someone else gets oogled because it makes them feel undesirable.

*I have never been able to understand why kilts are supposed to be attractive. Perhaps this is because my ancestry is about as far from manly Celt as humanly possible. I come from firm Litvak stock with genetic dispositions towards being short. I would feel damn silly and self-conscious wearing a kilt even if Maggie herself told me to.

**I don't know whether Zooey Deschanel is intelligent or not but she does not seem to be perceived as such in the media. Maggie Gyllenhaal seems to have a reputation for being an independent minded actor who takes roles for usually non-monetary reasons.

One of my favorite Con Law quotes comes from Chief Justice Warren Burger (or his clerks). The quote is "The Constitution can not change social prejudice but neither can it accept it."

The case involved a mother who lost custody of her child after moving in with her black boyfriend in late 1970s or early 1980s.

This is largely my view. I don't think it is possible to create laws that say "Don't be racist", "Don't be anti-Semitic", "Don't be homophobic". What is possible is creating laws that do not allow bigots and racists to act on their prejudiced tendicies and these laws are required by the 14th Amendment in my opinion and based on my observations, they seem to work more often than not. There will probably never be a world that is bigot or prejudice free sadly but the we do seem to be rapidbly decreasing it. The Gay Rights movement made legislative gains in a much shorter time period than the civil rights movement. They still have far to go.

I have a very expansive view of free speech and do believe that people have the right to express their views no matter how horrible. I basically like the idea of the First Amendment working as a "Please feel free to shoot yourself in the foot" act. I disagree with my European and Canadian friends on hate speech clauses enough that they do look at me as a weirdo American*

As a Jewish-American, I can tell you that I grew up in a much less anti-Semitic United States than my grandparents and possibly my parents. My grandfather got into Columbia because his last name began with B and this saved him from the quota system. I did not have to worry that my last name ever prevented me from getting in anywhere. Nor have I ever seen a sign on a public pool or other facility that said something like "No Blacks. No Jews" and these signs were not too uncommon as little as 50-60 years ago.

The South was bad on civil rights. In my opinion, they are still very bad and are the creators of my view that State's Rights is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Some places in the South choose to close down their public schools instead of desegregating. I don't see how a democratic society can function and allow such recalitrance. As far as I can tell, the South will probably need dragging on gay marriage as well.

Are we better off with gun-fights in the street?

I don't really care what is in LBJ's heart or not though I am slogging through the 4th volume of the Caro biography. He was far from a saint but I don't really care about sainthood. He did give us some damn good legislation.

The road to justice is long, slow, painful, and possibly an impossible human endevour. That doesn't mean we should not try. "Ever tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better"-Samuel Beckett.

Arbitration is good when done between parties with equal bargaining power. It is not good when done between parties with uneven bargaining power like the employee-employeer relationship or in the most recent Supreme Court case between A Telecommunications Corporation and a customer. It is generally the right-wing of the court that votes to expand the scope of binding arbitration.

There are always going to be cases like you described. They happened before I was born and will sadly happen after I die most likely. There are also plenty of cases when justice is done right and injured parties to get redress for their wrongs whether for injury, domestic violence (an injunction), employment discrimination, a violation of property-rights (easements). Most cases are not easy. There are plenty of cases where someone could have a colorable claim for say age discrimination but the defendant-employer could also have a colorable reason for terminating the employment of the plaintiff. How do we decide the hard cases is a tricky issue of jurisprudence but it is one I think society is better and less violent for leaving to the courts?

If you honestly believe what you said above, I have no idea about how to find a middle ground with you. You are not presenting a picture of anyworld that I want to live in and are being plain silly with your Canadian example.

What do we mean by work?

I don't think that my liberal policies will result in a perfect utopia where no one misbehaves whether intentionally or negligently. Human nature is not perfect and we all have our contradictions and faults. However, I think my policies will provide redress when injury occurs.

This is sort of a philosophical exercise for me as a lawyer. I can't go into full details because of confidentiality rules and ethics but I see a lot of e-mails by very smart people who should know better, they are basically breaking the law and do not care. I've seen it in product liability cases, antitrust cases involving the few clear violations like Horizontal Price Fixing and Territorial Divisions, Employment Discrimination cases, etc.

The perfect would be a society where these things do not happen but this perfect world does not exist. The good is having laws that say employment discrimination is illegal and provides a remedy for when it happens and enforces said remedies through courts of law. Same with antitrust.

Conservatives seen to think this is a zero-sum game. You have 100 percent success or you have nothing. The world does not work that way. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act did not bring perfect racial harmony but they have corrected a lot of injustices and prevented others. This is good enough for me to validate their passing and continued existence. We can work more on the remaining injustices.

There is allegedly someone on the web called the Cowboy Libertarian. He allegedly had a post (I only saw this via hearsay) that went along the line of "Do you remember a time when all that was needed to seal a deal was a handshake and no one used a lawyer?" Call me biased but I don't think this time ever existed, people have been using lawyers and suing each other for hundreds if not thousands of years. A someone born in 1980, I notice this a lot from conservatives who are Boomerish age or older, they seem to confuse Leave it to Beaver with reality.

I don't think the past is all bad. There was a lot of excellent and amazing art produced in the past and excellent people but I would not want to live in the 1960s even though I happen to think the French New Wave is the height of cinema and I'm tired of the megablockbusters filled with spectacle and no Aristotle today. The past was still decidely more racist, more sexist, more homophobic, more anti-Semitic, etc.

Here is a hopeful primer on how I see the difference between liberals and leftist:

I live in the San Francisco-Bay Area. As everyone knows, San Francisco has a large population of homeless people and pandhandlers. There was just an article on the Chronicle webpage about the constant stench at the 16th Mission St Bart Station Plaza because many homeless people use it as a open-air restroom despite the public restroom booth right on the plaza.

A few years ago, there was a proposition ballot for a law called sit-lie which would allow police to move along loiterers more easily and issue civil fines.

I am very sympathetic to the plight of the homeless and believe in FDR's economic bill of rights. However, I still voted for sit/lie because that sometimes the pandhandler problem gets to be too much. You can pass four or five pandhandlers in a block or two. I have many friends who said they don't like going to certain areas of the city because of the likelihood of being harassed by panhandlers. Most other San Franciscans felt the same way.

However a lot of people screamed bloody murder at sit/lie and how it is all fascism. To me, the people who screamed bloody murder at sit/lie are leftists and simply not interested in any pragmatic solution. I support the welfare state and human dignity but not the right to harass people on the street for money.

I believe in ordered liberty and equality.

I read that post.

While I think good policy is important, I am not fan of the Ygelias wonk school that much either. Though as others have pointed out, he is much more of a neo-liberal on economic issues. I disagree with his general assessment of tech-utopia, the end of retail, and growth growth growth. Also when it comes to antitrust law, he has no idea what he is talking about. FWIW, I am a new antitrust lawyer and am still learning but have at least studied and have some real world experience in the field.

FWIW, I do have a problem that many liberals seem to shy away from moral arguments and rhetoric but I do not think Elizabeth Warren is one of them. She might be a wonk but she can get down a meet people and do retail politics. I think a lot of liberals have an adverse reaction to the kind of populism as done by Sarah Palin and company for valid and invalid reasons. But for counter examples: FDR, LBJ, The Kennedy Brothers, pre-2004 John Kerry, Paul Wellstone, Gary Ackerman, Mario Cuomo, and Al Franken are or were very good at talking about liberalism as moralism. Based on my friends, I think you will start seeing a reemergence of a non-wonk left.

He has some good points but there are non-economic considerations that are equally important like how retail helps form a community and does not allow us to completely to become pod people.

Who are most? I often hear leftist as an insult from the Talk Radio set and they generally seem to mean people who still secretly wish the Weather Underground was more successful.

Maybe this is just me personally but to me a leftist is a Jacobin-type. I see politics as more of a circle than a line and there are lots of overlaps (especially in anti-democratic tendencies) among the farthest reaches of the left and the right. Perhaps I am thinking of the old debates between the Fabian socialists and the more radicals who wanted revolution. There are some reforms that I want that can be described as socialist but I would only achieve them through the democratic process and ballot box.

All of this is going to come with varying degree of confirmation bias. In my mind, liberalism is not a utopian-based worldview but to many conservatives it is. Many conservatives seem to pride themselves on being realistic about human nature while liberals are children and idealists. Though utopianists exists on all sides. My most basic worldview is that utopianism is a myth. There is not one happy solution that will turn everything into rainbows. This does not make regulation bad though. Just because a law does not get 100 percent perfect results, does not make unnecessary.

"Leftists v. conservatives"

I'm going to take beef with this. A liberal (by which I mean a New Deal-Great Society type, not classical) is not necessarily a leftist. I am not Trotsky or Lenin or Mao trying to overthrow a government. My political heroes are people like Hubert Humphrey, Paul Wellstone, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Nye Bevan, Michael Foot, and Eugene Victor Debs. You can disagree with these people and some might be more left than others but they all worked under the rules of Democratic order and rule of law. They did not commit acts of terrorism nor did they claim elections in which they lost were invalid. Eugene Victor Debs very principally went to jail over his dissent on WWI.

By using leftist, you call everyone to the left of center out as being a secret supporter of a Robspierre styled reign of terror while not similarly calling out the far right for their rhetorical excess. As someone else said above, there are large elements of the American Right-wing who simply seem to view support for any kind of center-left politics as being anti-American and we are still aliens. This is simply wrong.