I actually wore a khaffieh (mostly as a neck scarf) for quite a few years in the 70s and 80s. Aside from being a supremely practical, useful, and comfortable item, (and very useful in the desert) it also carried a set of political meanings at the time that I was (and remain) supremely comfortable with. I sort of stopped once it became a fashion accessory, and punkish/anarchist girls started wearing one as sort of a lefty solidarity symbol, without really understanding what it meant. (Yes, red or black or white, printed or woven, tassled and so on, actually means something in the Middle East. And you do not see many women in the Middle East with one.)

I still have a few in my closet, for use when camping/hiking etc, and to reminisce with.

I think that there just might be a consensus here: Salon videos are pointless, discriminatory, and annoying (this one particularly). Perhaps until someone can give us some kind of justification/explanation for the damn things, maybe Salon should just kind of drop them?

Oh, wait, it is what all the cool kids are doing these days, if Salon doesn't produce grainy lagging superficial video platitudes, somehow (I haven't quite figured this bit out yet) it is going to lag? Get all grainy? Become superficial and didactic?

Just a sec, who is the "we" in the article and the letters? Am I part of that "we"? Is it a club I get to join willingly, or one that I just got voted into willynilly?

Well, I'm a straight guy, and belong to a "we" that doesn't much read tabloids and celeb magazines, nor watch Entertainment this or that, so I basically think, any "theory" here isn't mine nor about me, so I don't really get a vote. I'm not sexist in my schadenfreude, because I don't particularly have much for Ms Winehouse, Spears, Hilton, Ritchie, etc. I just wish it would all go away, frankly.

Now me, I got plenty of schadenfreude watching the Brady and the Pats go down in the Super Bowl, but that is completely and in every way different, y'unnerstan', no matter how richly deserved and self-righteous the sight made me feel.

"Mediation" seems kind of appalling, actually. An election that would have tossed out a corrupt and sickening regime was hijacked & stolen by said regime (something, I suppose, that the US is familiar with), which has since whipped up ethnic violence to keep itself in power, much to the harm of the country and its citizens.

But one really doesn't want to mediate with corrupt thugs, one wishes for the rule of law and government for of and by the people. I wish Rice & Annan were perhaps negotiating/threatening to achieve a legal regime change, not just trying to make peace between disputing parties. It reminds me of schools attempting to mediate between two kids in conflict, when it really isn't conflict per se, but cruel and vicious bullying.

I don't think anybody is suggesting compulsory subservience or anything like that. In Canada, Jewish & Catholic courts make decisions with some formal recognition (and so do Sharia & Sikh and so on courts, without formal recognition), but their decisions are always reviewed and approved by secular courts. It goes further than that too:

The Canadian Supreme Court recently intervened pretty directly in a Jewish religious legal process, some guy wouldn't complete the process to let his wife be divorced so she couldn't remarry, dragged it out for years and years. She was divorced by Canadian law, but because she was devout, felt that she could not remarry until she was divorced by Jewish law too. So the Supremes actually ordered the guy and the Jewish courts to finalize it, ie direct interference by a secular court on a religious one. They complied too.

But it doesn't matter if it is a religious court or arbitration or a prenup or whatever, things can get sometimes get coercive. And indeed, legal family courts can get pretty coercive and unfair too, just ask BroadSheet's "enthusiastic" posters.

Somehow I don't think we need to worry about the exportability of the US Religious Right to Europe. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine anything more unlikely.

There is something about ritual humiliation that is like, er, candy to a large chunk (apologies) of the population, so much so that people keep eagerly volunteering to the be the uh, butt of the joke as it were.

But back to the earlier story about women and schadenfreud, the percentage of men watching this will be in single digits (and the percentage of heterosexual men a fraction of that).

(Hilarious post by the way Lynn.)

Well, I've been in this connubial biz for 20+ years now, and I have to admit that sometimes it feels more like a chore than a pleasure. I don't know that being ordered by my rebbe to ramp it up a bit would really be all that welcome a fatwa, but hey, when your celibate (one hopes) priest tells you to, well, you gotta do what you gotta do I guess. Once a day for a month tho, I get this sinking sensation, as it were. What with kids and everything, arranging the logistics for a weekly bump is bad enough.