First thing, I'm a nerd, so I don't make friends easily to begin with, because I'm bad at interpreting social signals.

It's terrible to be a girl nerd who also has big boobs and a pretty face. You'd think it would be the best of both worlds, but it's the worst of both worlds instead.

First problem -- when you're pretty and sexy, people don't even ASK you have to social skills. People pursue you, they attach to you, they project their OWN social skills on you because you're attractive.

It feels very easy and privileged -- in the beginning. But that's not how it ends.

They imagine that you have social skills just because you have looks, but then when they finally discover that you're actually deficient in that area, they flip out completely and start a big thing about how evil and self-centered and bitchy you are -- etc etc etc.

If you're attractive and a nerd, then you're sitting duck for predatory men. Those are the kind of men who don't care if you have social skills, all they care about is your looks, and they're ready to take advantage of all of your social deficiencies.

People only think pretty is a privilege. That's why they're all ready to glom on to pretty people and project all kinds of shit on them that the pretty people might not even be able to understand, let alone support.

They also don't BELIEVE that an attractive person can be a complete and total nerd.

They don't allow you to inhabit nerd space, to claim the forgiveness that nerds are allowed to claim because they're awkward.

I theorize that there are a lot of beautiful people out there who are actually socially deficient nerds, but society refuses to allow them into that category at all, and forces them into another box where they are judged by much harsher standards.

Why did I never get contacts? Why do I cling to my glasses, even though the parallax problem often leaves me bruised?

If I didn't wear glasses, then no way in hell would anyone out there believe I am a nerd and allow me my proper nerd space.

They would just project all their beauty issues on me without any letup at all.

And that would be hell.

Hef throws a huge benefit for the medical marijuana movement at the Playboy Mansion every year.

Meanwhile Salon joins the rest of the mainstream media in refusing to cover the science because it's too politically incorrect.

That's what's holding up federal approval -- this refusal of the mainstream media to cover marijuana science with anything remotely resembling objectivity.

It's cruel to dick sick people around like that.

I'm not going to turn on a loyal ally like Hef for the sake of people who dick the sick.

to treat drug addiction, then we might have more resources for dealing with violent criminals. Either for treating them, for watching them better when they're paroled, or for keeping them longer when neither of the other two options will work.

We might win more easily in Afghanistan, too, if we stopped artificially inflating drug profits through prohibition, thereby enriching the Taliban at American taxpayer expense.

The War on Drugs is excess baggage that we need to let go of, because it's holding us back in so many ways.

Afghanistan was a peaceful, stable country back during the hippie era.

What it is now -- we helped create.

We bragged about beating the Soviets, and we left Afghanistan a miserable hellhole fit only for warlords and terrorists.

Afghanistan did not become what it is today on its own power.

Go back to the New York Times archive from 1989 and try to find even one foreign relations "expert" who was warning us that we were leaving Afghanistan wide open for terrorists and we'd only end up going back there in 2001.

Leaving Afghanistan prematurely is a mistake that we've already paid very dearly for once.

We put people in jail:

1. To protect potential future victims.

2. To provide justice for the current victim.

3. To soothe the public angst

It's reason 3 that's turned this country from a beacon of freedom into the most incarcerated country in the world.

Let's stop voting for reason 3, please.

Afghanistan in the sixties was a place where hippies felt safe enough to travel away from Kabul into the country.

But American and Soviet operatives (and Chinese, too) were stirring the pot in Afghanistan all throughout the seventies.

Afghans who were able to co-exist in the sixties found themselves unable to coexist by the mid-seventies.

The Marxists tried to rule the south with a dictatorship, and the CIA let the Pushtuns grow opium to finance their resistance.

The Soviet invasion didn't happen in a vacuum.

Andropov knew damned well, as did every Marxist theorist OUTSIDE of Kabul, that you can't have a worker's revolution in a country without workers.

The Soviet invasion had nothing to do with building socialism in Afghanistan.

What tipped Andropov over the balance when it came to the invasion was the understanding that the mujahedin were already in 1978 serving as American proxies.

He ordered that invasion because he wanted to fight us.

We destroyed that country together, and shame on us if we can't repair what we helped break.

Supposedly feminists are about empowering rape victims. But here in this feminist blog, the rape victim has been so disempowered that her opinion isn't even regarded as relevant to the discourse.

There must be some kind of deconstructionist theorem about this, right?

The LA Times has not silenced the victim. They don't talk about her rape as if it happened to some generic abstract child who can never grow up and therefore can never speak up for herself.

The headline itself reinforces the idea that the victim is a nameless object with no real feelings of her own who belongs to the public and not to herself.