Blueflash and trudy b: the reasoning here, if you can call it that, is that the shame of homosexuality for a man is in playing "the woman's role." The penetrator is being "the man," regardless of which orifice he's sticking it in; the penetrated is being "the woman," regardless of biological gender. This is a fairly common motif in hyper-macho societies. I'm not defending it, you understand, just pointing out that it's a somewhat different attitude than the "it's all disgusting" type of homophobia that seems to be more common in middle-class America.

Whether you like it or not, men fighting wars has been the basis of an awful lot of claims of male superiority. In American history, this was most starkly illustrated by how "Rosie the Riveter" was sent back home when men came home after WW2, whether she wanted to go or not. There are a lot of men (and, for that matter, women) who see serving in combat as the ultimate test of a person's worth. If half the population is excluded from this test, it makes it a lot easier to justify condescension by the other half.

Also? Women have always been killed and maimed in war. Bullets and bombs are no respecters of sex. It's just that until recently, they weren't allowed to fight back.

As a medic, I served in Desert Storm with plenty of female personnel. They took the same risks I did and performed just as well. And you'd better believe that after the war, if they were dealing with some macho twit (in or out of uniform) who hadn't been there, they had a way to shut down his bullshit and were happy to use it. That may be a rough-and-ready kind of feminism, but it's just as real as the more genteel kind.

Somehow, I suspect the folks on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan know a lot more about how female troops perform in battle than does a macho chickenhawk like you.

... can possibly come close to how bad Mamet's actual version will be.

Actually, that's true of parodying Mamet on anything.

I didn't answer Scorpio69er because I don't bother to respond to people whose arguments consist mainly of insults.

You seem to have misunderstood my argument. I don't consider combat to be the only test, or the greatest test, of a person's worth, by any means. But to pretend that this attitude doesn't exist is absurd. It is equally absurd to pretend that people do not gain power through violence, and that when one-half the population considers the use of force to be its exclusive property, it will not use this to gain and keep power over the other half.

I'm no warmonger. I loathe war, not least because I've seen what it does. But I loathe inequality more.

Also, your view of the history of women and war is a bit, well, naive. You write, "I frankly liked women better when they were were less prone to acquire a taste for blood, when they could be credited with providing a civilizing influence on men, rather than contributing to their greater obscenities." When was this golden age of women's better natures, exactly? When Spartan mothers told their sons to return from battle with their shields or on them? When Elizabeth and Victoria proved they were just as fit to hold the throne as any man by being equally eager to send their subjects off to die? When, as they have throughout history, young women mocked young men who did not go to war as cowards, while offering themselves up as rewards for those who did? Or was it perhaps when, again throughout history, women found themselves just as able as men to suffer and die when battles rolled across their homes?

In principle, I agree with you: if the law says you can go armed, you can go armed. But in practice, what do you think would have happened to a protester who showed up armed at a Bush event, regardless of what local laws said?

You know, I was going to write a detailed line-by-line response to your rantings, but I decided not to bother. I will simply note that calling your opponents liars and making loud proclamations of intellectual superiority do not actually make a coherent argument. (Ironically and sadly in this context, these are tactics most often used by the likes of Limbaugh and Coulter; perhaps it's naive of me, but I'd like to think that most of my fellow liberals are better than that.) Any time you want to have an actual debate on the subject, I'll be happy to oblige, but I'm not holding my breath.

The more someone shouts about how factual and logical their argument is, the less likely it is that they're using any actual facts or logic. You and walter_map have provided a fine example of this.

If you really think people are paying "two or three times as much" for Apple products compared to comparable Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. products, then you're right: you don't understand ... much of anything.

Apple isn't selling to the low end, because the profit margins are smaller there. It's that simple. At the high end, Macs cost about the same as comparable Windows PCs. And for many people, myself included, they're the best choice for getting our work done.

Thoughtful, politically moderate Catholics like Frances Kissling no doubt find this difficult to accept, but the answer to the question asked in the title of this article is clear. The Catholic Church has been taken over by its own extreme right wing, and whatever commitment it once had to social justice is utterly gone. The proud history of Catholic hospitals, schools, and advocacy for the poor and powerless is just that: history. To the degree that this tradition is still around, it's a dying relic, a kind of spastic twitching of the limbs after the brain is gone.