What better way to kill time waiting for a UPS package than reading blogs? (God, that's sad!-- ed.) For example:

Lawrence Solum on email hard disk space and unpriced goods. Like Solum, I constantly push the boundaries of my allowed space (125 MB) on the Chicago server. And I'd happily pay for more.

The Curmudgeonly Clerk's fruitless crusade against Libertarianism continues, and Sandefur responds yet again. This time the topic is foie gras. Despite thinking that Natural Rights is complete bunk, I agree with all of Sandefur's substantive conclusions (and strangely enough, almost all of his reasoning).

Mike Rappaport attempts to take on Crooked Timber, but I think Kieran Healy gets the better of him.

Steve Dunn rounds up the blogosphere's thoughts on Drudge (via the Kerry Kerfuffle)-- the rumor-monger we love. Or hate. Or link to, but insult.

Ampersand has an interesting post on what he sees as the three factors contributing to "our" rape culture. He writes:

If we want to discover how to reduce rape, we have to be willing to figure out what the hell is wrong with men, and how to change it...when I say "what the hell is wrong with men," I do mean all men in our culture - even men as "enlightened" as the more feminist men on this board. But I don't mean that all men rape, or even that all men are potential rapists. Rather, I'd say the things in our culture which screw up men so much that rape becomes a widespread problem affect all men to some degree - even those who never rape.

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So what does cause rape? Or, put another way, if we can agree that we live in a "rape culture" (defined as "a culture in which rape is prevalent and is maintained through fundamental attitudes and beliefs about gender, sexuality, and violence"), then what are those fundamental attitudes about gender, sexuality, and violence?

I'd identify three interrelated candidates: the myth of masculinity, cultural disdain for women, and our society's conception of sexuality as something possessed exclusively by women. If we want "24 hours in which there is no rape," then we have to destroy these three warped cultural ideas.

Now, I'm not disputing that these three attitudes are major culprits in creating a culture of rape, nor that they aren't part of "our" culture in the sense that everyone living in the United States will encounter them at one point or another. But I think Ampersand is doing a great disservice to his cause in failing to recognize that the United States does not possess one monolithic culture, expecially in an area in as much flux as relations between the sexes, and that while some of these subcultures provide fairly functional ideas of gender and sexuality, others are truly broken and should, quite frankly, just be scrapped.

For instance, in the social circles where I spend my time (intellectual, socially liberal, generally coastal) I'm not entirely positive I've ever heard the phrase "Be a man" or one of its varients used unironically. Entitlement is out, empathy is de rigeur, and any man who even implies that women are inferior is liable to find himself criticized as strongly by his fellow men as by any women who may be present. If anything, the pendulum has perhaps swung too far away from misogyny here--while men often take grief for holding fairly innocuous stereotypes, women can get away with fairly egregious attacks on men as a whole without fear of social disapproval.

However, when it came to the sort of men I encountered on the streets (of the South Side of Chicago, at least), all of the attitudes Ampersand described were alive and well. While some of them expressed it crudely, and others expressed it suavely, I would certainly agree that majority of men who struck up a conversation on a street corner or yelled and honked from a passing car were looking essentially for a validation of their masculinity, and that it was of no particular interest to them whether or not I appreciated their rather dubious compliments.

Granted, hip-hop and the intelligentsia are about as far apart, culturally, as one can get in this country, and most men's attitudes fall somewhere in the middle between these two extremes, failing to recognize that culture is not monolithic has serious consequences. First, it obscures the fact that a few influences are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the problems in our culture. Ampersand mentions this in passing when he writes:

Statistically, environments which tend to have the most rape – middle and high school, frat houses, prisons – are also the environments which most emphasize masculinity, and where boys and men have the most reason to fear losing masculinity. If we could change the culture of such environments, we’d go a long way towards reducing rape.

But this should be mentioned more than in passing. If we are to solve the problem of a "rape culture" we need to concentrate our efforts in the areas where that culture is strongest, and furthermore, we need to take as examples those areas of our culture that are relatively healthy. If we say that the whole culture is broken, then where are we to look for solutions to the problem? Academic theories? Not to knock academics, most of them would rather advance an elegant than a practical solution.

Furthermore, this failure to distinguish runs the risk of trivializing the problem among the men who are best placed to deal with the problem--those whose attitudes towards women are by and large healthy. A man whose greatest crime against women is a failure to split the housework and child-rearing labor equally with his wife is reinforcing the cultural norm that specifies women are responsible for these less well regarded tasks. But this doesn't mean that his contribution to a rape culture is anywhere near on par with that of a college frat boy who sees women as nothing more than notches on his belt. If we fail to articulate and emphisize these distinctions, we convey the impression that the entire problem is only as serious as the most prevalent problems. Not only does this needlessly insult men who do work on developing positive attitudes towards men, it also fails to drive home to men with seriously unhealthy views that these are neither mainstream nor acceptable.

While I agree with the Biblical injunction against complaining about the speck in one's neighbor's eye before one has dealt with the log in one's own, I do not think that when one has a speck in one's own eye, one is therefore required to condemn it with the same passion as one condemns the log in one's neighbor's eye. And when it comes to rape culture, I think it is safe to say that Ampersand (and the vast majority of his readers) are dealing with a speck, not a log. He shouldn't be afraid to say so.

I feel like I'm in the middle of some sort of psychological test to see how I handle frustration and situations I'm powerless to change.

I received an email from the employer I want to work for, saying that my invitation to join was in the mail. I called up to ask what it said. "Oh no," the placement officer told me, "we can't tell you that. It's our policy to let people find out all the information at once about the job they'll be doing and the location they'll be working in. You'll have to wait for the mail to come."

"FedEx?" (like some of the other things they've sent me).

"No, U.S. Postal Service. It shouldn't take longer than ten days to get there."

"Ten days? What kind of package is this that it takes ten days to get from Washington, DC to Chicago?"

"It's the mail. Ever since that anthrax scare, they've just been really slow about everything that comes from federal buildings. Have patience. Maybe it will only take a week."

I thanked her and hung up thinking the Pony Express would be faster, FedEx would really be faster... oh, wait -- what's the point of having family members who live outside the district if you can't send them inside to run your errands, FedEx you your mail overnight, maybe even open it and read it to you over the phone? Unfortunately, when I called the placement officer back to ask if this were acceptable, she told me that the invitation had already gone out in the morning's mail. And so I'm back to waiting, which is what I've been doing since July.

Good stuff at Reason-- with a colloquium by Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett and David Friedman, how could you go wrong?