Bravo to you, sirs (assuming you are sirs), for saving me the time and energy of writing out a lengthy letter by writing exactly what I was thinking and doing it better than I ever could have. Unfortunately, I fear that it will fall on deaf ears, as using words like "moral" and "noble" will makes you "some fundamentalist Christian who wants to oppress women" in the eyes of people who have long had no concern for such concepts.

Oblio's commodity argument pretty much nailed it. If you read the article with the question "what exactly was so wrong with (pre-marital) relationships?" you get the answer that they were too "time-consuming". That basically tells you all you need to know - that human interaction is now a market, with everyone seeing how much they can get with as little investment as possible. And this is somehow supposed to make you a better adult.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why you would want to let someone into your bedroom (or go alone into theirs), completely expose yourself to them, and let them into your most private regions without either knowing or liking them reasonably well. Conversely, I cannot understand why, if those criteria are met, you would not want to spend more time with that person and get to know them better and see if it would work out in the long run (it's okay if it doesn't!) But no, such thinking is quaint and old-fashioned, apparently.

No doubt she speaks from experience. From the interview you posted earlier, I gather that getting fucked in the ass while half-passed out in some loft is a regular night out for most of these girls, but don't worry, it's all liberating, and it's not date rape because the guy is from Williamsburg and is in a band.

I agree that there are parallels to the attack on Kerry, but I think this is a deeper sign of the insanity and pathetic state of the GOP: having tried and exhausted every other attack line on Obama, they are now trying to demonize him for being popular. Let that sink in for a second. In an election that is decided by people voting for the candidate they like, Obama is being attacked for being too well-liked.

Of course, the McCain camp might say that people like him for his personality and not his policies. But wait - isn't that implying that the sacred "American People" are somehow shallow, superficial, or easily led astray, that they don't know what's good for them and need a grandpa McCain to give them some tough love? Someone should point this out and start a meme of "McCain hates the American people," post-haste.

Ultimately though, I can see what McCain is banking on. He wants the old people, the disgruntled blue collar workers, the conservative forum-dwellers, in short, the people who feel left behind by culture as a whole to come out in droves because they're angry angry about all those young people these days with their messy hair and fancy shoes and their newfangled "eye-pogs," and who's this Obama fellow they're all talking about? I don't like it, not one bit. By painting Obama as the captain of the football team, they're hoping that these others will take on the role of the freaks and nerds who try to sabotage the prom just to "show them."

Also, three cheers for quoting Mat Taibbi (you misspelled the name though). He was my favorite writer at the eXile, and I devoured his work voraciously. His piece on Bob Kerrey and our nation's perception of Vietnam is still the most penetrating insight into how Americans think about politics and the world that I've ever read.

"What does it say about you if you don't even blink when the society you live in tells you that murder is bravery and deceit is candor? There isn't much room for this stuff to get weirder."

http://www.swans.com/library/art7/zig065.html

This will be hilarious to anyone who has read my other posts here: I got 28% male, 72% female. I looked at what sites could have been responsible for this gender confusion, and the results were somewhat surprising. Apparently, buying plane tickets (Southwest, Continental), having social networking pages (Facebook, MySpace), abbreviating URLs for forum posts (tinyurl), playing web games (arcadetown, miniclip), and going to college (NYU homepage) were all strikes against my masculinity. Even something as simple as having an email account (gmail, hotmail) is apparently skewed towards the womenfolk. And a bonus fact for those who have been 'concerned' about Obama's supposed difficulty in winning over female voters: apparently the male-female ratio of barackobama.com is 0.68, which is probably what did me in.

One obvious drawback is that it only factors in what individual sites you've visited rather than the number of visits - in my defense, I spend far more time at gamefaqs and ign than I do at Obama's site, to which I was just directed once by a link from a news story I was reading. What I'd like to know is how quantcast (the source of the site's data) gets their demographic numbers.

This is probably the most hilarious campaign tactic I've seen. After attacking him on just about everything else and failing, McCain is now going after Obama for...being popular? How exactly does he think elections are decided?