KALIOPE wrote: It seems odd to me that anyone would assume that a father wouldn't have some responsibility in the well being of his children, especially when there were so many warning signs. I wouldn't be surprised if someone who thinks that all culpability should belong to Andrea alone would find a mother who left her children in the care of an abusive husband or boyfriend culpable. I know I would to some degree, and I know the children would when they grew up.

REPLY: What's the point here? That Rusty Yates should have done a better job of figuring out that his wife would hold their five children under water and kill them? Maybe he should have, I don't know. Maybe he's not very smart. Maybe he's not very perceptive. It is easy to condemn others for not acting faster or more cleverly in certain situations. Maybe Rusty Yates just loved his wife and couldn't imagine, whatever her problems, that she would kill their five children.

Whatever the case, Rusty Yates didn't kill his children. He didn't urge anyone else to kill his children. A court had found that Andrea Yates killed her children because she is insane. That ought to end the matter. For people determined to find a murderer here regardless of the available evidence, I suppose Rusty Yates makes an inviting target. Logic be damned, I suppose.

I think I've made all the good points I can make so I'd just conclude with a note of respect for the jurors. This must have been a grueling and agonizing case to hear. And once they'd settled on a verdict they must have known immediately how many people would be dissatisfied with it. It's not easy to be a juror under those circumstances, but they did their job fairly and honestly. If the justice dispensed in this country is the responsibility of all of us [and I think it is], then I'm glad we had those people looking out for us.

If things are so bad in Alaska that women must choose between lung cancer and rape, I think it's time to see if we can sell the damn ice cube back to the Russians. At a healthy profit, of course.

"So to those pornography-lovers out there -- you won! Loosen up already!"

Objections to that part of Catherine McKinnon's work had nothing to do with pornography and everything to do with liberty. If Ms McKinnon had her way more than a few articles published right here at Salon wouldn't have been legal. Casting all who object to her views on that subject as 'pornography-lovers' is the mind of a totalitarian at work.

As for the work in question, I have not read the book, though I did take time to read Ms Nussbaum's review. Such reviews are necessarily incomplete so it is impossible for me to judge what Ms McKinnon has produced. I do echo the critics below about the Chile-Nebraska analogy. It's sloppy and irrelevant. Let's hope the rest of the book isn't like that.

Women. Wives and mothers buy most of the underwear worn by boys and men in this country, according to every stat I've ever seen on that subject. [Admittedly, only a few stats, but they've all been consistent.] Perhaps American Eagle is counting on American wives and mothers to be amused, rather than outraged, by 'male chauvanist' underwear. Maybe they will be amused. Maybe they won't -- in which case American Eagle shouldn't count on moving a lot of that merchandise. Who knows? I don't presume to know what motivates the average American consumer or the average American mom looking for underwear for her son.

To draw conclusions about broad social trends from a pair of underwwear [and, for all we know, a single pair is all that's actually been sold], seems like a serious reach to me.

If the point is that The Daily Mail is a notoriously awful newspaper that isn't taken seriously by a single person in the United Kingdom -- including the people who actually read it -- then I suppose the point is valid, though rather long-winded. If the point is that some half-wit nobody has ever heard of writing at a newspaper nobody takes seriously is supposed to be indicative of broader male attitudes [and I suspect that is precisely the point] then...Well, I'm not sure how to finish that sentence. The English language simply does not contain adjectives to describe how silly that is.

the war against Hamas/Lebanon, whether you or I or anyone else likes it or not. Shouldn't this blog post be entitled "A Few Women You've Never Heard of Demand Peace in the Middle East"?

The article is one man's opinion. He doesn't speak for anyone else and I see no evidence that his opinions are particularly popular with anyone else. Besides, haven't we all learned to take sex/marital advice from members of the clergy with more than a few grains of salt?

"Apparently the Supreme Being invented breasts for the pleasure of grown men..."

Not just grown men, actually. Many of us found breasts to be one of God's greatest creations a few years before we hit the age of consent.

Here's another question: Is breast-feeding only a kind of infidelity when the recipient of all that milk is a boy? What if the sucker is a girl? What is the rabbi suggesting? I'm not sure if I should be creeped out by that part of his thesis or if I'm just reading too much into it.

What's the point of this article, aside from allowing the author to work out his mid-life crisis in public?