Amanda Hess interviews Jaclyn Friedman who says:

I’m e-mailing a guy right now I really want to meet who used the word “heteronormativity” in his profile . . . aside from that, which almost never happens, more what I look for is. . . you know the Bechdel Test for films? It states that any good film has to have two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a guy. Well, this is my test: When I look at personal ads, I look at their lists of favorite books, movies, and music, and they have to list women in all of those categories. They don’t have to have a majority of women, but they have to know that women exist in the culture and be fans of some of them. It’s a pretty low bar—or it should be. I used to look for guys who don’t list Fight Club in their favorites, but I’ve had to relax that rule, because all dudes evidently love Fight Club.

A couple of points on this. One is that Fight Club is sort of awesome.

Second, and perhaps more to the point, though I would hardly call Fight Club a “feminist” movie (barely any women in it), it’s definitely a critique of a patriarchal values. The basic idea is to describe the existence of people who attempt to actually perform the kind of masculinity that’s nominally valorized in our culture and portray that performance as a form of mental illness. I think it’s true that not every Fight Club fan necessarily understands it that way, but that’s what it’s about.

Edmund Andrews writes:

I am tempted to think that the revulsion expressed Crittenden is part of a bigger ferment among Republicans. I’d like to think that there is a group of young Turks or moderates who agree with Frum that the GOP health-care rejectionism will turn out to be the party’s Waterloo. I’d like to think that there is a new generation GOP that is ready to take a chance on constructive engagement.

But my good friend Bruce Bartlett is skeptical. Republican leaders think their strategy since the 2008 election has been a great success. If they win back House and Senate seats this fall — as they almost certainly will — they’ll argue that their strategy has been vindicated. And the truth is, the Young Turks are among the most fervent of the hard-liners — the Jeb Hensarlings, Paul Ryans. The moderates are disappearing faster than ever, and the ones who stay are disdained.

I think that to understand what’s wrong with the conservative movement today, you need to think about Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Presidential campaign. In ’64, the GOP establishment felt that Goldwater was too radical. They said that nominating a hard-rightist like Goldwater would be counterproductive. But conservative activists worked hard, and they did it. Goldwater got the nod. And, just as the establishment predicted, Goldwater got crushed. And just as the established predicted, it proved to be counterproductive. The 1964 landslide led directly to Medicare, Medicaid, Title I education spending, and the “war on poverty.” In the 45 years since that fateful campaign, the conservative movement managed to gain total control over the Republican Party and to sporadically govern the country. But it’s only very partially rolled back one aspect of the Johnson administration’s domestic policy.

Which is just to say that the conservative movement from 1964-2009 was a giant failure. By nominating Goldwater, it invited a massive progressive win that all the subsequent conservative wins were unable to undue. But the orthodox conservative tradition of ’64 is that it was a great success that laid the groundwork for the triumphs to come.

Which is to say that it’s not just a movement incapable of thinking seriously about the interests of the country, it can’t think rigorously about its own goals. 2009-2010 has already seen the greatest flowering of progressive policy since 1965-66. No matter how well Republicans do in the 2010 midterms, the right will never fully roll back what the 111th Congress has done. And yet, as Andrews suggests, if they win seats in 2010, conservatives will consider their behavior during 2009-10 to have been very successful.

I’m fundamentally an optimist about what we’re going to see unfold in the world over the remaining decades of my life. As Brad DeLong explains:

If all goes well in China and India in the next generation—and if nothing goes catastrophically wrong in the rich post-industrial North Atlantic core of the global economy—then the next generation will see a real milestone. For the first time ever more than half of the world will have enough food not to be hungry and worry about famine, enough shelter not to be wet and worried about trenchfoot, enough clothing not to be cold and worried about hypothermia, and enough medical care not to be worried that they and the majority of their children will die of microparisites well short of their biblical three-score-and-ten years. The big problems of the bulk of humanity will then be those of finding enough conceptual puzzles and diversions in their work and play lives so as not to be bored, enough relative status not to be green with envy of their fellows—and, of course, avoiding and quickly disposing of the thugs who used to have spears and will have cruise missiles and H-bombs who have functioned as macroparasites infecting humanity ever since the first farmers realized that now that they had crops running away into the forest was no longer an option.

What’s more, if—as seems perfectly plausible—by 2040 per capita income in China and India manages to quadruple that should open up enormous opportunities for people living in other, poorer countries. They’ll get their chance to be the low-wage exporters of the world, except looking at a much larger market of potential importers.

What Ryan Avent said:

The lack of imagination on this issue among politicians has become extremely frustrating to me. Metro is currently faced with all sorts of difficult funding decisions. It’s cutting services and facing costly delays thanks to a backlog of capital investments, due to funding shortfalls. Meanwhile, downtown Washington during rush hour is a mess. The region’s major highways are, at almost any time, a mess. Congestion is perpetual. Tolling of central business areas and major highways could meaningfully reduce congestion while generating enough money to significantly increase and improve transit service. Politicians struggling to figure out how to fund Metro should just walk down to 14th Street near the Potomac at 5 on a Friday, or to I-270 in Maryland at basically any time. The money is sitting right there, in the form of red brake lights as far as the eye can see.

Advocation for congestion pricing instantly generates complaints about regressivity. I find this argument to be extremely short-sighted. No one would benefit more from congestion-priced streets and highways than bus riders. Bus service could be increased immediately upon adoption of a tolling regime, and trips would become much faster, much more comfortable, and much more predictable in a world with congestion pricing. With increased demand for bus services, you might even be able to reduce bus fares — perfectly justifiable given the reduction in congestion produced by a shift from driving to bus-riding.

There’s going to be a point in time at which congestion pricing is universal and has been in place for decades, and people are going to find it hard to believe that it was once considered a controversial and politically infeasible notion.

Mike Konczal notes that if we’d had the Dodd Bill structure in place in 2005, and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency had tried to take action against mortgage abuses it would have found itself overruled by the Financial Stability Oversight Council.

But of course this isn’t just a problem for the CFPA, it goes to the heard of whether the FSOC will really work. I have my doubts. It seems to me that the common thread running between the more stable banking systems in history (Canada today, the US before the mid-eighties, etc.) is that they’re pretty cozy cartels. Regulated cartels, yes, but that’s how cartels work—strict rules and guaranteed profits. But I don’t see any real indication that any policymakers in the United States want to try to create a banking cartel.