A letter:

Come on Ramesh, I count you as one of the most intelligent people I know. You can do a lot better than your article on Knee. Anybody can criticize (and your criticism hardly went beyond Knee’s preemption), but it takes a truly brilliant mind to create.

Yes the proposal was insufficient, but there’s a huge opportunity here. This is an issue on which conservatives and feminists can unite to eliminate a great evil.

I know it’s tempting to insult the Times and prove, yet again, that you are smarter than they are, but wouldn’t it be more intelligent yet to use this move to our advantage? Let’s try something novel and use them when it suits us. Build on his idea and we all win.

For example, with the cartoon problem, couldn’t we just add a word to include reproductions, depictions, or whatever the appropriate legal term would be? And as far as the offshore problem goes, well the last time I checked you still work for the National Review. We don’t sit around complaining that gays can get married in other countries, do we? Lots of things are happening offshore that affect the US. We do what we can with what we’ve got. . . .

Ramesh, you’re a brilliant political commentator. You’re right even when I wish you weren’t. Go use your powers for something proactive.

My response: I think that it is foolish (as well as cliched) to criticize someone for criticizing rather than creating. Criticizing bad ideas, or even bad arguments for good ones, is part of the way political cultures develop better ideas and better arguments.

Nor is this in any way an adequate answer to the question of whether the regulation would move porn offshore: the point is not that pornography would continue to be produced elsewhere, but that it could be produced there and consumed here, thus defeating the purpose of the ban (if its purpose is to end the consumption of pornography). The same-sex marriage analogy is inapposite, unless we’re talking about the discrete issue of American governments’ recognition of same-sex marriages contracted abroad. As for extending the proposed law to cover cartoons: Of course you could broaden the law in that fashion. But it would no longer, on the author’s own argument, be constitutionally permissible. The whole point of his proposal was to use the ban on prostitution as a way to get at pornography. That justification won’t work for cartoon characters.