Over at the Standard I’ve got a long-ish piece about patent trolls which, of course, isn’t really about patent trolls.

Guys who build an app designed to help men to get to frictionless, anonymous, sex with girls are jerks who objectivize women.

That said, there is an interesting philosophical question at the heart of this piece. So the guys who built Tinder employed (or “co-founded”) with a gal who was their head of marketing. Her signal contribution, according this story, was going to a bunch of sororities and convincing the girls to download the app–and then going to their affiliated sororities and showing the boys all the hot girls that were waiting for them out there on Tinder. This marketing gal then quit the company after one of her co-workers called her a “whore.”

Big news today: OGS Vic Matus’s long-awaited book on the history of vodka is out: Vodka: How a colorless, odorless, flavorless spirit conquered America.

It’s a really beautiful book, full of gorgeous, full-color reproductions of great vodka ads and pictures of the trade. And tons of great history and reportage, too. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

This entire piece is beyond parody–I kept looking for a tip-off that it was being done tongue in cheek. But my favorite part comes from Wash U. prof who dismisses the liberal bona fides of his racial studies students:

The complaint I receive often, while teaching at a private, elite institution, where many students think they are highly liberal: “I am so tired of thinking, talking, writing about race.” Some go so far as to say they’re experiencing “race fatigue.”

Often my response is flippant: “Imagine how tiring it is being tired of the racist bigotry, prejudice, and unjust treatment within and outside the classroom.”

This is also my opportunity to have my largely white classroom deal with its privilege . . .

Galley Friend A.W. sends along a note about the latest Will Leitch World Cup Fever! column:

 Leitch’s latest soccer column is just as ridiculous as his first:

It is rather clear at this point that this is becoming the American Summer of Soccer … Even those who have avoided the game out of general principle — minus a few elderly, doltish exceptions — have given themselves over to it …

Leitch actually does everyone a favor by comparing soccer to HBO’s True Detective:

The HBO program True Detective came out of nowhere this spring. … For about four weeks there, it was all anyone could talk about. If you didn’t have HBO or weren’t currently watching the show but planned to, you had to avoid all media, social and otherwise. It was the centerpiece of every conversation. We all did it as one.

For the record, the season finale drew 3.5 million live viewers — or, a little less than one-third of the 8.5 million live viewers that CBS’s The Amazing Race drew. Even if you take at face value the suggestion that 11 million viewers were watching the show across all platforms, that’s still basically an episode of 60 minutes.

I don’t doubt that everyone Leitch knows is watching the soccer games. But almost everyone else isn’t.

When I talk about Hillary Clinton imploding I am very pointedly not talking about Clinton vis a vis a Republican challenger for 2016, as Allahpundit seems to think. I thought I was pretty clear about that, but maybe I wasn’t clear enough.

What I’m talking about the Democratic field. Nobody was a bigger Hillary booster than I was in 2008, so it’s not that I don’t appreciate her strengths. However, I think her position today in the Democratic primary field is much weaker than it appears. Further, I suspect that her weaknesses will only become more apparent if a quality challenger is lured into the field.

And my point is that when Clinton has weeks like this, it can only embolden both potential Democratic candidates and Democratic voters. As the old saw goes, weakness is a provocation.

I have a larger thesis about the Democratic party heading toward the same kind of split the Republicans now have, with a populist-leaning base divided against a corporatist elite. In that view, Clinton is the obvious candidate of the establishment, but rank-and-file Dems in a post-Obama world may be yearning for something more populist and progressive. But that’s for another day.

Santino has a nicely subversive defense of U.S. soccer that’s worth reading.

The quadrennial push always reminds of the piece I wrote back in 2002 about “The Ritual Attack of the Soccer Scolds.” I think it holds up reasonably well.

I have a feeling this is going to be a regular series. Here’s the New Republic on Rick Perry likening homosexuality to alcoholism:

I’m not saying that Perry is right. I’m saying that it’s time for the LGBT community to start moving beyond genetic predisposition as a tool for gaining mainstream acceptance of gay rights.

For decades now, it’s been the most powerful argument in the LGBT arsenal: that we were “born this way.” Certainly there’s evidence that the argument has played an important role in the shifting of attitudes towards the LGBT community. . . .

Still, as compelling as these arguments are, they may have outgrown their usefulness. With most Americans now in favor of gay marriage, it’s time for the argument to shift to one where genetics don’t matter.

Oh, so all these arguments were just “tools” to be used to “gain mainstream acceptance”–not, you know, good-faith assessments about the nature of reality. And now they have “outlived their usefulness” so it’s time to shift to other arguments.

Makes you wonder what other parts of the gay-marriage argument were just “tools.”