Thursday evening roundup

Richard Cohen nails the VA anti-choice legislation on the head, and comes up with an excellent idea:

... that the governor and like-minded members of the legislature undergo a brain scan before voting on any legislation that affects the health and welfare of women.

So, this dude and I agree on one thing:

According to Chipotle’s Web site, the company uses only “happier” pigs. It doesn’t say how it measures a pig’s happiness, and I can’t help but picture porcine focus groups, response meters designed for the cloven of hoof. We can all agree that production methods should not cause needless suffering, but for all we know, pigs are “happier” in warm, dry buildings than they are outside. And either way, the end result is a plate.

But there's a huge but. Besides, when the hell did pork become "the world’s most essential good"? F'in really? That's about as true as most of the other assertions in the op-ed.

Finally, an article about kids in restaurants that doesn't frame it as parents against non-parents.

I have a friend who's convinced that--and regularly rants about how--women have been sold a bill of goods. That most relationship advice out there feeds them delusions to plump their egos and make it harder for them to find love. She subscribes to the Lori Gottlieb mentality. Now, you know how I feel about anyone who claims that feminism ruined her life. I wonder why--actually, I don't--it never occurred to Ms. Gottlieb that the issue wasn't feminism, but her own cluelessness and self-absorption. I'm a feminist, yet it never occurred to me to break up with someone because of his name, or for similarly petty reasons. But I digress.

I don't know that I agree that relationship advice is biased toward validation and delusion, but I agree it can be pretty f*ing bad, and the other thing I've noticed is that it's often (like some other "journalism") lacking in content. Those of you who saw the room-for-debate over the farm bill might have wondered why I didn't post it; because, nobody there said anything worth drawing attention to. It was just people opinionating, without anything to back it up. I don't turn to HuffPo for relationship advice, but I do turn to it for fluff and occasionally come upon relationship advice... and usually find it so vapid so as to make me angry. Anyway, today I came across something that made me wonder whether online relationship advice was also just designed under the assumption that people are idiots.