Do you wonder if they’d be so hot to give those kids back to the polygamists in Texas if it’d been little boys getting fucked by a bunch of old fundamentalists? I’m no expert, but I wonder about stuff like that. I’m not saying that the Texas Supreme Court actively encourages the fucking of little girls by old men, just that, you know- they understand. Hey, it could be worse, right? At least it was all done under the auspices of marriage. But man, you take a look at the little girl in that picture and you do not see in her eyes someone who is happy to be home after the evil Federal Government yanked her away from a loving family. And I know that’s unfair- I mean, what about all the other pictures they probably took where she wasn’t dreading getting raped over and over again by her cousins?

It’s a strange world we live in. Polygamists in the UK get extra welfare benefits per wife, thanks to lobbying from a bizarre coalition of Mormon offshoot groups and the Muslim parliament of Britain. How often do you think they sat down for tea together to work out their agenda? It’s funny the things that bring people together. Even people on the farthest ideological and geopolitical poles can sometimes find common ground, especially if it involves treating women like property.

I know us real liberal dudes are supposed to be all moral-relativist about other cultures, and understand that different societies have different ways of working, but there are things that stick with you sometimes. Like last month when we went to the London Zoo and a family of four was enjoying their time by the carousel on a hot day. The mother and the elder daughter stood watching and waving each time the father and the little boy came ’round while riding a plaster horse. But they were covered head to toe in heavy black fabric, and he was wearing a white t-shirt and denim shorts. Doesn’t that seem just a little fucked up?

Yeah, that’s about all I got for you- no real insight into the world’s problems, just a bunch of isn’t that fucked up. But what the hell? Hillary Clinton is widely expected to suspend her campaign tonight and endorse Barack Obama, while keeping her fingers crossed that, I dunno, Obama and Jeremiah Wright get videotaped jerking each other off into an American flag. And while I’ve written obituaries for the Clinton campaign before, and I’ve learned that it’s foolish to claim defeat on behalf of that woman before she’s done it herself, I think it’s interesting still to note how many people on the Obama side feel the need to validate their victory by denying the existence of sexism toward Clinton. it’s not sexism, they’ll claim roundly tomorrow, after Obama declares victory, and then go on about the failures of that retard Mark Penn and the smear campaign that Clinton waged from March on that drove even her ardent supporters away. As if acknowledging that sexism exists and that Obama benefited from it somehow means that they’re guilty of being some sort of -ist, a misogyn- or a sex- and no dude progressive enough to be all about Obama power can stomach the thought of himself that way. But fortunately, there’s another way- as we all know, baldly telling women that they’re interpreting their own experiences incorrectly, with unflinching stubbornness, actually makes you right. Worried about feeling like you might be sexist? Just tell any woman who brings up the subject that she’s being irrational, and you’re absolved.

So it is a fucked-up world, and that’s all I got about it. But I gotta say, I don’t think it changes my experiences any to acknowledge that maybe for 51% of the people in it, it’s a little more fucked up.