A window into Dante's Hell.

The Jersey Conservative mines the narrative of the gay bullying case, where a Rutgers student committed suicide shortly after his roommate broadcast his dorm room trysts to the world, for some interesting insights into the complexity of being a "millenial."

Update:

Well, except that apparently there was no broadcasting:

Ravi and Clementi agreed to become roommates their freshman year after finding one another online. Ravi quickly discovered that Clementi was gay, since his prospective roommate was posting on a gay website. (Clementi came out to his parents shortly before leaving for school.) Ravi and a friend engaged in juvenile banter, making fun of Clementi for being gay, “poor,” and uncool. It’s painful to read, but no different than what high-school students say about one another all the time.

Clementi and Ravi barely talked when they lived together. One night, Clementi asked Ravi to leave him alone with a nonstudent in his mid-20s for what turned out to be an assignation. From a friend’s room across the hall, Ravi briefly turned on his webcam and saw the two in an embrace. He derisively tweeted that he saw his roommate “making out with a dude.”

Clementi later saw Ravi’s tweet and agonized about what to do. In the meantime, he asked for the room again for another tryst, and this time Ravi tweeted that people should tap into his webcam for a show. But Clementi turned off Ravi’s computer, and the viewing never happened. Clementi requested a change of roommates. With that, and disciplinary action against Ravi, it should have ended.

Well, that's not the version of the story I heard two years ago.

Further update:

Then, there's this:

What did Dharun Ravi do? Well, he was a freshman roommate at Rutgers University with a chap named Tyler Clementi. Clementi was homosexual, and not a closeted one — he didn’t make much of a secret of it. Why would he? Our young people are taught from kindergarten on that “gay is just as good as straight,” that Heather has two mommies, that homosexuals should be “proud,” and so on. My local high school has a club for homosexual students. Anyone who’s embarrassed or ashamed about being homosexual hasn’t been paying attention for about thirty years. And in fact, Clementi wasn’t ashamed: in those first three weeks of his freshman year, he attended at least one meeting of the Rutgers students Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance.

Well, a year last September, Dharun Ravi and another freshman, Molly Wei, used a webcam to secretly watch Clementi kissing a young man Clementi had picked up. After watching the video, Ravi gossiped about it on Twitter, quote: “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

Three days after that, Clementi committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge. Whether this had any connection at all to the webcam incident, is not known. That Dharun Ravi thought his prank might drive Clementi to suicide is preposterous; that he intended that result is preposterosity squared.

So, he wasn't even "outed"?

What the...hey?!?!??!?

Maybe they should teach sex education to Yale law students and see if that works, before they start in on impressionable teen-agers.

CNN legal news analyst, Harvard grad and married guy Jeffry Toobin is squaring off against Yale Law School graduate Casey Greenfield - the daughter of columnist Jeff Greenfield - over a paternity suit invovling their child.  Things are chilly.  She won't let him see the child. He's not paying legal support.  His wife is nowhere to be heard from.  Her father won't return calls.

Isn't sex education supposed to be the answer for our 14 year olds?

Didn't these people get sex education before they went to Ivy League law schools?

Also, it's interesting how poorly watched CNN must be inasumuch as this is the best kept scandal in media history.

 

Love and Economics

Steve Sailer engages in some thinking outside the box. His speculation is whether the heavy credit card debt of some women of a certain age who are still seeking marriage might deter their marriage prospects as a kind of "reverse dowry."

The question is: when she finally meets a suitable guy, does her debt tend to discourage the fellow from popping the question? I mean, if a couple has gotten pretty serious, but then he finds out she has $40,000 in credit card debt, which she's paying $5500 per year of interest on, does the idea of a joint checking account start sounding kind of expensive? Especially, if they're thinking about having kids and he knows she's going to have to de-emphasize her career for awhile. If she can't pay off her credit cards now while she's working full time, she's not going to pay them off either when she downshifts her career to raise kids. So, marriage is going to cost him $40,000 right off the bat that he hadn't thought about before.

That can kind of put the damper on romantic impulsivity.

And:

In contrast, this emerging system in which two thirtysomethings are interested in getting married, but the potential bride is heavily in debt, so her would-be husband is likely to end up on the hook for it, is more like the African "bride price" system in which the groom pays the bride's father (or maternal uncle in some societies) fifteen head of cattle (or whatever) for the woman. The groom pays in Africa because he's going to get a lifetime of hard work hoeing the fields out of his wife. (According to Borat, in Kazakhstan, the going price for a bride is 15 gallons of insecticide.)

But, certainly, the African system is less conducive to monogamy, paternal investment in children, and other socially beneficial things than the European dowry system.

So, maybe this explains some of the ever-increasing illegitimacy rate in America.

Who knows? And what a nice bit about insecticide.

It's funny, but we are willing to accept the idea that small changes in costs can have large effects on human actions, but when we get to marriage everyone is an autonomous, self-creating individual.