Thursday, September 19, 2002
Over on the Harvard Federalist Society blog Ex Parte, Bill Korner makes a bizarre claim that women in the workforce are predetermined to cheat on their husbands (WTF?) Forget free will, we are all destined --the momement we enter the office -- to degenerate into immoral sex-driven animals. Goodness Bill, how do you ever get any work done with all that sex you're having from 9 to 5?
The big (but unspoken) problem is not how to deal with maternal leave. Rather it is the fact that woman still cannot advance effectively without cheating on their husbands ... the work environment (if you enjoy it) is highly charged sexually, so woman (like men) naturally find themselves inclined to have love affairs with the co-workers with whom they have otherwise intriguing and co-operatively satisfying relationships. I'm not saying that women don't appreciate the tough spot that men are in biologically and try to do right by us. They do. But work relationships put stress on marital ones and women (again like men) feel and rebel against the confining nature of their social setting.
I was discussing something similar to this with a friend of mine the other day. He alleges women will never be treated fairly in the workforce so long as they use their relative attractiveness as a bargaining chip. Let's face the facts; there are no 200 lb female CEOs. There could be several factors influencing this; the main one being that attractive women tend to have much more confidence, another reason is that attractive women will be more immediatly recognized as intelligent and capable.
Thursday, September 19, 2002
Why must we be classified? I see all these quiz results on every blog I go to and wonder just what is the appeal. Is it we want a confirmation that we are as individual and special as we think? Is it that we just all like the guy throwing a copy of the New Yorker and a John Fahey record on his desk when a date comes over, because being ecclectic and have a wide variety of interests and talents makes worldiness apparent to others? People have a weird kind of desire to be typified and immediatly grouped with people of their kind. Nothing against those who agree with me, but more satisfying conversations tend to come from those with different perspectives. America's no longer a melting pot, but a salad bowl
Thursday, September 19, 2002
Part of the reason I chose to major in economics is, because it has the aspects of a science. I had enough of open-ended questions, and class discussions where it didn't matter what you argue but how you argue it. Economics is not difficult to learn, unless you are stupid. But I hear all the time, "oh, economics. Isn't it tough?" from people who ten seconds later are telling me why we should raise the minimum wage.
The nature of political debate is, it's all the way you shape your "evidence." You can't prove anything, but can speculate. The victor is not the one with the correct answer, but the one with the most sophisticated rhetoric.
Thursday, September 19, 2002
Bukowski has a quote about how the smartest guys he knows never needed to travel any farther than outside their hometown. Bukowski was a fool. Contentment is killing Americans. We have come to view our country as some VIP in a Members Only jacket spreading our brilliant American culture (like our movies and Christianity) in an appropriatly imperialistic fashion, because the great majority of us haven't been abroad besides some package week-long jaunts through Paris/Amesterdam/London.
In no other country have people such an icsolated view of the world. I question the intellect of people who have no desire to travel or live aborad. It isn't a matter of whether you are interested in international affairs -- but whether you tick. How can one live unsettled by the existance of world so distinctly different from his own, with out a restless spirit to see it all? There are those of us who collect knowledge for bragging rights, like notches on a bedpost. Then there are those of us, who are maddened by the existance of information we do not know. Maybe insert that well-worn Keroac quote about burning candles, but it is not neccessarily passion I speak of. It doesn't take good fortune to land a job through AIESEC or Berlitz; just brains and ballls
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
Some of the best (and most concise) reviewers are humble (and often anonymous) Amazon critics:
I've read three works of Auster (the NY trilogy, Leviathan and this) and I've gotta say: he really knows how to re-cycle his leitmotifs (namely chance/coincidence). Almost to the point where repetition wipes out effectiveness. I'm surprised though that in his "Book of Illusions," Auster has not even bothered to examine the validity of some of the non-original philosophical ideas he uses.
Only several pages into Super-Cannes, and I'm a new fan of J. G. Ballard. I bought the book almost entirely because of the haunting cover photograph of an empty, impeccably clean hallway. It's one of those paperbacks with very soft pages that give me a rush flipping thorugh. The story is about a crippeled aviator and his wife, working as a psychiatrist at a high-tech industrial park in France after another doctor went on a suicidal massacre of several executives. It could be a Don DeLillo hock-fest, but Ballrd's descriptive writing style is top-notch:
At heart she was the subversive schoolgirl, the awkward recruiter with a primed grenade in her locker, who saw through the stuffy conventions of boarding school and teaching hospital but was always kind enough to rescue a flustered housekeeper or ward orderly.
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
The peanut gallery can continue on with this one, but the more I think about it, the more circumcision enrages me. The history behind it is Abraham cut of his foreskin (he must have been drunk or something.) Then God sayeth unto him "good work pal!" Abraham asks God to protect his people the Hebrews and they make a pact that as long as little babies have their foreskins removed, there will be Hebrews. I'm sorry, but how the hell am I supposed to believe this any more than that Athena sprung from the skull of Zeus? Science is agnostic. God is intuitional. I grant you as much leeway to follow your God with this brutal ritual of mutilating babies, in as much as you can also follow your intuiton to listen to the Dave Matthews Band and watch Road Rules
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
This morning I read an excellent article from an old Vanity Fair on female war correspondents like Christiane Amanpour and Marie Colvin. It makes several important points. Women willing to enter this line of work are rare birds, and like it or not, their reporting stands out. This is not because of their femaleness, but because women are treated very differently abroad. Anecdotes in the article include dictators falling in love with them and Northen Alliance guards calling Jacky Rowland, "Mr. Jack." Rowland creates an indelible image with this quote:
I was incapable of having an ordinary conversation with people about ordinary things. The experiences of being in a war and being bombarded, and being on the run, and being chased by authorities, it just makes it difficult to come down and talk mortgages and the latest fashions at Top Shop
The reason I've abstained from making this almost exclusively a warblog (as articles on foreign affairs make up 90% of my daily reading material,) is because I'm unqualified. I've never seen the front line. I can't pretend to know what's going on. I'm not going to risk coming of as a snivling little bitch, too comfortable in my suburban dwelling to appreciate what one life means -- let alone hundreds of thousands. You know, maybe Afghanistan is where I should be right now. I can't not cringe every time someone wants to talk about efficient mosturizers or the new blockbusters, and dating seems useless unless I can find, like Marguerite Higgins said, "a man who's as exciting as war." I'm going through this slow, but sure process right now estranging myself from people to whom I cannot relate to beyond a default mode conversation. You want to talk about Britney Spears? Fine. You're out of my life.
Tuesday, September 17, 2002 Jeremy Lott emailed me today, with the subject "re: offensively jaded." Oh snap! But he wins points for a Huxley quote in his signature. Check out his blog
Monday, September 16, 2002
Blogging about blogs is annoying, but bloggers are annoying and someone has to call them on it. So I have started up a little yahoo group called "Bloggers Anonymous,"
enjoy.
Monday, September 16, 2002
It's a beautiful day and I should be outside, yeah, yeah. Still, if I don't post this now I'll forget about it and the printer has died:
Controlling Robots with the Mind
People with nerve or limb injuries may one day be able to command wheelchairs, prosthetics and even paralyzed arms and legs by "thinking them through" the motions
Monday, September 16, 2002 Wired includes a sober, investigative report on child pornography busts. The article reminds me of Minority Report in the way that catch someone in the "Candyman" yahoo group expecting him a molestor-to-be. But think of all the people who've watched the Bud Dwyer and Daniel Pearl videos on Ogrish. I can't stomach that sort of thing, but I understand curiosity is human nature.
These numbers call into question one of the core tenets behind law enforcement actions against child-porn surfers — that those who are "just looking" are on the road to molestation. In the wake of the Candyman arrests, Westchester County DA Jeanine Pirro told CNN, "The truth is that 20 to 40 to 50 percent of those who possess child pornography have actually admitted to molesting children. So there is a correlation." Outside of law enforcement press releases, however, the notion that viewing porn is a gateway to molestation — as marijuana was once considered a gateway to heroin — is very difficult to prove.
Sunday, September 15, 2002
Christian Science Monitor is often the most cool-headed of major newspapers. Its coverage of the Middle East, including this essay about the increase in Israeli sympathy toward killed Palestineans, an article on Eastern Europeans selling firearms to Iraq on the black market, and this essay on the Syria Accountablity Act (sanctions, of course) are just a few examples of their excellence in writing and research.
Sunday, September 15, 2002
I got this from the American Atheist listserv:
The Bush administration and federal Department of Education are
backing an effort to organize school children for a national
recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
The event, dubbed "Pledge Across America" is scheduled for Tuesday,
September 17, 2002 at 2 PM EDT. It comes a week after the one-year
anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attacks on targets in Washington,
DC and New York City, and in the midst of a national debate over
whether the words "under God" should be included in the pledge.
Sunday, September 15, 2002
Again, I encourage you to have a look at Spiked. A recent article on Boston's Big Dig, comes with the caption, "Americans sure know how to build roads."
I like to think about the project as the most expensive example of public art in history. Honestly, I can accept the added congenstion on Rt 95, so long as they leave the Mad Max-like futuristic set of crains and fences that interrupt the city skyline
Sunday, September 15, 2002 Alina has a new post up on Slavenka Drakulic's novel S. It is a difficult book to read, but extremely important. The war in Kosovo is out of the headlines, but the atrocities committed -- just as brutal as the Holocaust -- should not be forgotten
Sunday, September 15, 2002
Per request, I officially declare male circumcision a human rights violation. The procedure is a disgusting practice continued in the United States (and no other country besides Israel) only to sustain the status quo. Please visit The Circumcision Information and Resource Pages. I can't understand why simple-minded conservative thinkers cry over fetuses, but accept the butchering (usually without anesthesia) of infant human beings, destining their sons to a lives of deceased sexual pleasure eighteen years down the road. Our country is no less puritanic than when H. L. Mencken rolled his eyes in Smart Set. It is precicely this puritanicism that perpetuates this Human Rights Violation.
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