After reading some of your critiques, I took a closer look at Kristof’s columns. What a smarmy hack. I remember being pretty impressed with some of his columns in 2007 or so, but some of what he has written recently is truly disgraceful. I recently came across a January 2010 column on my Facebook feed, “Our Basic Human Pleasures–Food, Sex and Giving,” in which he praised a semifictionalized Miami man who escaped the rat race for a few weeks by vacationing in Tahiti, writing an elegy for the victims of the Haiti earthquake, and reading “Half the Sky.” Kristof actually plugged his own book in a column on the selfish case for altruism. From what I’ve heard, “Half the Sky” is a decent book, but the manner in which he touted it was unctuous.

It worries me that Kristof has such a following on the left and that his supporters seem unwilling to concede that he has been unethical. When I reposted the altruism column along with a mocking commentary about the White Man’s Burden, the friend who initially posted it accused me of being cynical, as if that were a bad thing. As I see it, the only healthy reaction to such insipid writing in the national newspaper of record is cynicism and scorn. There would be less of that rubbish in our papers if those who wrote it weren’t lavished with praise.

But if that’s the case, and I’m not trying to sound like Helen Lovejoy here, what is the best course of action to assist the Jill Brenneman’s of the world, the rare case where a woman actually is living in threat of violence and is unable to help herself?

I guess that goes back to your arguments for decriminalization, so that clients who are smart enough to recognize signs of possible violence can take appropriate steps.

If the woman in your analogy who is forcing her husband to take so much overtime was doing violence to him in order to make him do so, would you not say that is a case for intervention? Not heavy-handed intervention, mind you, but something?

I get the feeling that I’m not quite stating this well enough, but I did want to respond.