“Widely used and accepted” needs some citation behind it. Raping a slave was legal in Rome, for example, but only because slaves had no legal personhood. I’m not denying such things took place. I’m firmly denying it was normative. You’re talking largely about the modern era, which has a firmly different set of ideas…

Uh, you got a source on that? There’s a thorough debate on Neolithic levels of violence, the evidence is mixed, but you’ve shot way past that. This is that “dark past” myth I’m talking about.

Off the top of my head? In both Norse law and Early Irish law. Early Irish law includes having sex with a drunk woman as rape, though there’s some exceptions that are complex and related to status that I’d need a small paper to explain. 

Probably not. Abortion was a lot more common in the past than he thinks. Far more likely most of us have an illegitimate ancestor somewhere, if you’re from a part of the world that used that social structure.

You really can’t dis-aggregate misogyny from racism and other bigotries. They go hand-in-hand the vast majority of the time.

The failures after doesn’t change that the intervention stopped Gaddafi from mass murder. It’s not the US fueling Haftar, or that propped up so many militias (many formed after the intervention ended). It is the fault of the US that there wasn’t a better international diplomatic push to help build institutions in…

Couple of things. One, you think people would have been happier being murdered by Gaddafi? There’s no sign doing nothing would have led to less death. Could’ve led to a lot more.

This comment really brought out the rabid supposed “anti-imperialists” who love to screech the word “regime change” but don’t have the analytic depth to actually support their ideological position. It’s easy to justify your position if you don’t study any of the cases in detail.

He absolutely has indirect influence. But there’s a massive gap between that and directing or killing a story. In gossip-happy DC, that’d get out. It seems far more likely to me there’s individual bias working there. I mean, we’re on an article about Tanden, who is still fighting pointless battles as a “Clinton…

They hire the same set of insiders most big papers do, particularly for editorial stuff and on domestic politics. Their op-ed page has some awful folks. It seems to me like their recent swing leftward has had a lot of people forget they’ve always been an insider institution largely supported by wealthy elite class…

You know who else supported the NATO-led intervention in Libya? Most Libyans. It’s weird how that’s become a litmus test. You can’t revise history that many people lived through and watched as it happened. 

Tanden is awful, and Kessler is awful, but Sanders’ criticism strikes me too far into the conspiratorial to be particularly defensible. Kessler is awful in a lot of ways, but it’s far more likely it’s his biases and not Bezos. Sanders could argue he doesn’t get treated completely fairly by a lot of media because of…

But noted racists can still write op-eds pushing nakedly dishonest theses under your masthead. The rot goes a lot farther than one idiot misbehaving in Twitter. Why does Bari Weiss’s long history of harassing Arab and Muslim, particularly Palestinian, activists and academics not count?

Oh Gods, the Examiner is so bad. They make the Washington Times look halfway decent, because while the Times has a solid right bend they do more actual neutral stories on local issues. The Examiner is a stable of incredibly incompetent and often creepy men. That’s the paper with the creep who took covert photos of…

Already did. The greys are particularly troll infested today. 

Apropos of nothing, but I can’t get over his name meaning “chicken farmer” in Maltese, which was an evolution from “abu dajjaj” in Arabic.

“Barton Swaim” is the kind of name that manages to imply family wealth and insufferable politics from the get-go. I’m truly impressed. He looks like one of those earnest and bigoted conservative teens who carried briefcases in college and argued with professors on topics they barely understood.

You shouldn’t even be able to call that a poll. You lead them to the result you wanted through bad faith manipulation! You’re not polling their opinions. Politico needs to be better than to run garbage like this. It’s unethical. This poll has no scientific validity. Even as a way to test talking points it’s mostly…

Yeah, I completely forgot that. Brains don’t work so well when you’ve barely slept in three days.

This would seem to be a relatively simple free expression issue. I’m not a lawyer though, but this isn’t “person ignores HOA rules and does outrageous thing that could affect the property value of neighbors”. This is a simple bit of speech that has no real negative impact.