I got interested in learning Esperanto in my early 20’s … and even though I never needed to speak the language in ordinary life, it was a very positive experience and I would recommend it to anyone as an easy way to limber up the brain for other learning tasks. It’s easy to learn, and success in learning helps to make the next learning experience a bit easier and more enjoyable.
September 6, 2012
September 5, 2012
Nobody is getting to “have it all”
I read Gregg Easterbrook’s NFL column partly for the football content and partly for the very-much-not-football stuff. Here’s an example from this week’s column where he reflects on the “having it all” meme:
Lately The Atlantic has been on the case of après-feminism. Hanna Rosin’s 2010 cover story showed how the double-XX cohort is taking over colleges and offices, positing trends in education and economics are such that “modern postindustrial society is simply better suited to women.” Those sci-fi stories set on worlds ruled by Amazonian females, where males exist solely for women’s amusement? Rosin sees this coming.
Then in 2011, an Atlantic cover had Kate Bolick declaring that men are already so inutile, a woman would be a fool to walk down the aisle. Her ideal evening: a romantic candlelit dinner for one. Bolick praised “the Mosuo people of southwest China, who eschew marriage and visit their lovers under cover of night.” That cheerful article ended by endorsing the Beguines, a Dutch order whose members live in secular chastity, vowing never to touch men.
Then this year came “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” a cover by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton dean and recent State Department official. Slaughter filled 14 magazine pages with angst about how despite a high-paying super-elite job with lifetime tenure, personal connections in the White House and a husband who does the child care, despite writing about herself for the cover of the world’s most important magazine, nevertheless she feels troubled that every moment of her days is not precisely what she wants.
The assertion that women “can’t have it all” was received as earthshaking by the commentariate, a magazine article making the front page of The New York Times. Living a favored life and yet looking for something to complain about is part of the Upper West Side mindset, so perhaps the Slaughter article appealed to the part of the Times demographic that searches desperately for new complaints.
Some of Slaughter’s points were solid, but they were the grievances of the 1 percent — 99 of 100 women would love to have what Slaughter presented as her burdens to bear. Nobody’s ever satisfied. Jacques Brel wrote, “Sons of the thief, sons of the saint/Where is the child without complaint?”
What was vexing was that the article seemed to misunderstand its own topic. The phrase “having it all” meant a woman could pursue a career and also be a good mother. This is something millions of women have now achieved, proving career and motherhood are not mutually exclusive, as men long claimed in order to keep women out of the workplace. But “all” never meant a woman could have everything she wants at every second without ever facing hard choices or bending over to pick up a piece of laundry. Men can’t “have it all” in that sense either. No one has ever “had it all” and no one ever will.
The Atlantic‘s female readers have been told they finally hold the upper hand, but this seems hollow victory if men become motes. They’ve been told marriage is so awful, get thee to a nunnery. And Atlantic‘s female readers have been told if they achieve tremendous career success under ideal conditions while miraculously finding the last desirable man on planet Earth, they will be riven with anxiety anyway. But hey, have a nice day!
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August 27, 2012
Lego is 80 years old
In The Register, Brid-Aine Parnell on the 80th birthday of one of the iconic toys of the 20th century:
Way back in 1932, Ole Kirk Kristiansen, a Danish joiner and carpenter, found he wasn’t making enough money from carpentry anymore and decided to try making and selling wooden toys instead. Although he didn’t know it yet, he was on his way to building the Lego company, which would eventually have some of the most recognisable and long-lasting toys in the world: bricks and yellow minifigurines.
[. . .]
According to that research, girls aren’t into Lego. Poul Schou, senior vice president of product group 2, told The Register that Lego was for boys, not girls, because although both sexes loved the larger preschool bricks of Duplo once the girls hit five, they weren’t interested in construction anymore.
“We have seen that girls seem to be less interested in continuing with our products when they get to four or five years old so we don’t really get them into the Lego system,” he said.
Here at Vulture Central, that seemed really odd. Not only did everyone in the office, regardless of gender, remember playing with and loving Lego throughout their childhood, for the most part, their kids, both boys and girls, love it as well.
[. . .]
Schou said that the company got “a lot of feedback from boys and girls”. The kids are encouraged to go online to talk about the products they buy and what age they are, and the boxes often include incentives to answer Lego survey questions as well.
Of course if girls aren’t buying Lego stuff, they won’t be answering any questions, which would be a kind of answer in itself (although whether the answer would be “Girls don’t like Lego” or “Girls don’t like surveys” would be hard to figure out).
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August 11, 2012
Kidnapping children to “save them” from gay parents
Words sometimes fail me, as when I first heard of this notion some religious nutbars are pushing to set up a 21st century underground railroad to “rescue” children from gay and lesbian parents:
As has been widely reported, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association asserted in a tweet Wednesday that “we need an Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households.” Lest anyone imagine he was speaking merely in metaphor, a second tweet from him linked to a Chicago Tribune story about the impending trial of a Mennonite clergyman “charged with aiding and abetting the kidnapping of Isabella Miller-Jenkins, now 10,” who was spirited out of the country so as to evade court orders mandating visitation with Janet Jenkins, who had helped raise Isabella as part of a same-sex couple. Fischer’s summary: “Head of Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households goes on trial.”
Fischer and his American Family Association, it should be noted, are clownish figures whose extremism is a turn-off even to many true believers on the social right. (It can nonetheless be interesting to observe who deems them respectable enough to associate with; for example, the Values Voter Summit, which draws major political figures like Eric Cantor, Jim DeMint, and Ted Cruz, considers Fischer a suitable speaker and AFA a suitable prominent sponsor.) Anyway, Fischer thrives on outraged publicity from his adversaries, so enough about him. What’s worth rather more attention (and provides some insight into the mounting campaign against gay parenting from some quarters) are the two articles he tweeted.
If you’re not familiar with the epic Miller-Jenkins custody-kidnapping case, it’s worth catching up by way of The New York Times‘ account the other day. (Jenkins’ lawyers at GLAD have posted many of the documents, and I’ve been covering it off and on for years at my Overlawyered blog.) While nothing short of tragic for the individuals involved (the little girl is now growing up in a strange country and for many years has not seen Janet Jenkins, who helped raise her), I concluded a few years ago that its greatest significance as a social turning point was in revealing the new willingness of many in organized religious conservatism, “even the lawyers among them, to applaud and defend the defiance of court orders.” Since then, important sections of the social right have evolved further toward a position on lawbreaking more often historically associated with those well to their left.
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July 19, 2012
Walter Olson: more red flags in the Regnerus study
Some studies provide results that challenge common beliefs and understandings. Others reinforce them. But some studies are designed from the desired results backwards. The Regnerus study on gay parents’ influence on their children appears to be one of the latter. Walter Olson points out that even in its own terms, the study shows something different from what it is intended to:
By now almost everyone has had a whack at the recent Mark Regnerus (University of Texas) study claiming that young adults who report having a gay parent score worse on a range of life-success indicators than children from intact biological families. According to the study, these kids as young adults have lower educational attainment, are arrested more often, and have more trouble in their own relationships, among other problems. Critics have pointed out that the story is mostly one of collapsed heterosexual families, not “same-sex parenting”: The great majority of the kids were born to male-female couples, most of the presumedly gay dads and many of the moms didn’t get custody of their kids after their relationships dissolved, and few of the kids were actually raised through long periods by gay couples. LGBT advocates point out that sociologist Mark Regnerus accepted $695,000 from the anti-gay Witherspoon Institute to carry out the study.
But many critics have missed one of Regnerus’ most unexpected findings, one that may illuminate his study’s shortcomings. Specifically, and feeding into pretty much all the other problems, the study diagnoses children of gay parents as having a huge problem with poverty. Here’s Regnerus:
Sixty-nine (69) percent of LMs [respondents with lesbian mothers] and 57% of GFs [those with gay fathers] reported that their family received public assistance at some point while growing up, compared with 17% of IBFs [those with intact two-parent biological families]; 38% of LMs said they are currently receiving some form of public assistance, compared with 10% of IBFs. Just under half of all IBFs reported being employed full-time at present, compared with 26% of LMs.
Those are big gaps. And of course they’re much at odds with the affluent image of gay families presented in both pro- and anti-gay-parenting literature as well as Modern Family-style popular entertainment. What do they signify?
Probably the biggest single reason is the one cited at the outset: This is mostly a survey of what happens when heterosexual families crack up. (Interestingly, if a married couple stayed together, they were counted as an “IBF,” no matter whether one or both partners pursued same-sex liaisons.) Decades of data indicate that children of family breakup do worse than children whose parents stay together, on many variables related to adult success. One reason, though not the only reason, is that they grow up significantly poorer.
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July 17, 2012
How the Nanny State undermines family life for parents and children
Jennie Bristow at sp!ked:
… Bailey’s diagnosis of the dangers inherent in eroding parental authority was absolutely spot on. By attempting to ‘nationalise’ childrearing, whether by providing classes to instruct parents in officially approved childrearing methods or by using schools to inculcate children in a heightened awareness of the failings of their mothers and fathers, in recent decades, government parenting policy has stripped parents of their directly authoritative role.
Instead of being the boss of their own homes, parents are situated as mediators in the relationship between the child and the state, and told that their primary responsibility is not to do right by their child but to show that they are doing the right thing according to the current parenting orthodoxy. The effect of this, as Bailey suggested last year, is to disorient both parents and children, as both question the basis for parental authority.
Was this what caused the riots last summer? Not on its own. The behaviour of those young people engaged in the mayhem was profoundly shocking – but so, too, was the response of the adult population, from the middle classes cowering in their living rooms and boasting about that in the press, to the failure of the police to intervene decisively. What underpinned the chaos was the open collapse of adult authority, and this should have provided a wake-up call to our society about the need to grow up and take responsibility for the younger generations.
But the problem of parental authority forms an important part of the generalised crisis of adulthood, and it is worth reflecting on the relationship between the two.
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July 14, 2012
Ontario’s latest headache in the education ministry
Mark Schatzker explains the new disaster unfolding in the Ontario government’s education file:
According to reports, a number of large unions, including CUPE, IATSE and the United Steelworkers, are already courting prominent Toronto-area student leaders. It is expected that any negotiation will include a list of long-standing student grievances. Top among them is the issue of merit based marking.
“Someone has to do something about all these losers who hog all the best marks,” said Stu, a grade 11 student at Central Etobicoke High School who did “brutal” in Functions and Applications this year.
His friend and co-organizer Luke says a union will be able to push for a “marks tax” on the top one per cent of students. “You have these total nerds who get, like 98 in Bio,” Luke explained. “We think they should give five or ten per cent of those marks to the students who get 45.”
“We have to stop rewarding greed,” Stu said.
Over at Parkside Elementary School in Scarborough, Isabelle, who is in grade seven, is also taking up the fight to make Toronto schools a closed shop. At the top of her grievance list: “geographism.”
“The way it works right now,” Isabelle explained, “is that you have to go to whatever school is closest to your house. But what if your best friend from music camp goes to a different school? How is that, like, fair?”
Sources in the Ministry of Education say the province is already close to signing a deal with elementary students with a benefits package that includes: cupcake Fridays, a ban on quinoa, and a 5.7 per cent increase in recess every year for the next four years, raising it to 20.9 minutes by 2017. (It is presently 15 minutes.)
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June 27, 2012
June 21, 2012
Light to moderate drinking during pregnancy has no measurable health risks
As Radley Balko pointed out on Twitter, “Prediction: The activist public health crowd will go absolutely nuts over this study.” Jacob Sullum on a recent European health study:
Despite the familiar surgeon general’s warning advising women to abstain completely from alcoholic beverages during pregnancy “because of the risk of birth defects,” there has never been any solid evidence that light to moderate consumption harms the fetus (as Stanton Peele pointed out in Reason more than two decades ago). New research from Denmark, funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, indicates once again that heavy drinking is the real hazard. In a study of more than 1,600 women (“nearly a third of all Danish women who were pregnant between 1997 and 2003,” Maia Szalavitz notes in Time), children of women who consumed nine or more drinks per week during pregnancy had shorter attention spans and were five times as likely to have low IQs at age 5 than children of abstainers. But no such effects were apparent in the children of women whose alcohol consumption during pregnancy was light (one to four drinks per week) or moderate (five to eight drinks per week). “Our findings show that low to moderate drinking is not associated with adverse effects on the children aged 5,” the researchers said.
Szalavitz cautions that a “drink” as defined in this study contained 12 grams of pure ethanol, compared to the American standard of 14 grams, one-sixth more. Given the relatively wide consumption ranges, that difference probably does not matter much. Szalavitz also notes that, unlike earlier studies, this one asked women about their drinking while they were still pregnant, so the responses are less likely to be skewed by inaccurate recall. Still, self-reported drinking, especially by pregnant women, probably underestimates actual consumption, meaning that the amounts associated with no neurological impairment are apt to be bigger than those indicated by the study.
One of the issues with studies of this sort is the very need for self-reporting: most people, after a lifetime of public health warnings, will under-report their drinking (whether consciously or not). In this case, that’s a useful thing to provide some level of comfort in the findings: if most women in the study under-reported their actual intake of alcohol while pregnant, yet the children show no negative effects developmentally, we can concentrate on those few who really do over-indulge and whose children do suffer as a result.
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June 15, 2012
Perhaps “Dad” is not superfluous after all
In the National Post, Misty Harris reports that — contrary to certain assertions from the gender war front — fathers actually do have a positive role to play in the lives of their children:
Though the prevailing Father’s Day question is what to get Dad, a new study suggests the more pressing issue is what dads can give in return.
In a long-term analysis of 36 international studies of nearly 11,000 parents and children, researchers have found that a father’s love contributes as much — and sometimes more — to a child’s development as that of a mother, while perceived rejection creates a larger ripple on personality than any other type of experience.
The power of paternal rejection or acceptance is especially strong in cases where the father is seen by his child as having heightened prestige in the family, as this tends to boost his influence.
“In our half-century of international research, we’ve not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent an effect on personality as does the experience of rejection — especially by parents in childhood,” says co-author Ronald Rohner, whose study appears in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.
My relationship with my father was less than positive, and I don’t think I’m mischaracterizing it by calling it “rejection”. However, he did provide me with a useful parenting template: I could usually figure out what to do as a parent by remembering what my own father did … then not doing that.
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June 7, 2012
Yet another scare “study” about teens and video gaming
Martin Robbins in the Guardian on another “study” linking teenagers who play video games to negative results:
Not that the ‘research’ cited says anything about violent video games to begin with. BAAM conducted a survey of 204 parents of children aged nine to eighteen, asking about their use of computer games: anything from Tetris to GTA IV via SimCity. This produced the following results:
“Forty-six per cent said their sons or daughters had become ‘less co-operative’ since they started playing video games. Forty-four per cent said they were more ‘rude or intolerant towards others’, 40 per cent said they were more impatient, 36 per cent reported an increase in ‘aggressive behaviour’, 29 per cent cited more mood swings and 26 per cent said their offspring had become more reclusive.”
26% of parents thought their teen offspring had become more reclusive in the years since they started playing video games. No doubt pedantic nay-sayers will whine on about the other SEVENTY-BLOODY-FOUR PER CENT of kids who either didn’t become more reclusive or became less reclusive, or ask how ‘reclusive’ is even defined or measured in the first place; but if that incredible correlation doesn’t persuade you, well then by golly-gosh I don’t know what will.
Even the most ‘persuasive’ of those figures stands at just 46%. That, astonishingly, is the proportion of parents who think their teenaged children are becoming less cooperative with time. This is put down to video games, rather than something silly, like… oh I don’t know, maybe the fact that they’re teenagers?! 46% is a shocking figure only in the sense that I’m shocked it’s only 46%. Perhaps video games actually make kids more cooperative? We have no way of knowing, because there doesn’t seem to have been any effort made to survey kids who don’t play video games as a control group.
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June 5, 2012
Signs of hope in Mozambique
An article in the Guardian has some good news about the struggle against malnutrition, but it’s wrapped in misleading language:
All the women belong to the Wapsala Association, a 33-strong agricultural collective created to boost local smallholders, ensure a steady, year-round, supply of high-nutrition foodstuffs in an area prone to chronic shortages, and help end the curse of malnutrition that affects about 44% of all Mozambican children under five.
The Wapsala project is seen by some Mozambican nutrition experts as a paradigm to be emulated in similarly disadvantaged areas of the country and other parts of southern Africa.
The collective’s approach, rooted in public and international funding, contrasts sharply with the prioritisation of private-sector investment, as proposed at the recent G8 summit.
Instead of perpetuating the western focus on food security, the farmers of Wapsala provide a working alternative — what Graciela Romero, the international programmes director of War on Want, calls food sovereignty: a move to promote agrarian reform that favours small producers and the landless, and emphasises local markets and self-sufficiency.
As Tim Worstall points out, the way this initiative is being described is rather at odds with its actual goals:
OK, so we’ve got all the buzz words. Cooperatives, self sufficiency, food sovereignty, local markets and it’s very much anti private-sector investment.
And what is it that they actually want to do?
“We would like to process other people’s cassava but we have no capacity,” he said. “The South Africans want dried cassava and cassava leaves. Market demand is high but we cannot supply it. We are also expanding our nursery business with trees and other plants — they expand our fruit production. But we are limited due to lack of water. It costs a lot to dig a borehole. The nearest is two kilometres away.”
They, err, want investment so they can export. You know, undermine someone else’s food sovereignty?
So, leaving aside the cant what they’re actually doing it trying to create a community of yeomen farmers who trade in local and regional markets. Not a bad idea at all but entirely different from that cant being spouted.
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June 4, 2012
The “sex traffic” meme is this decade’s version of the “Satanic panic” of the late 1980s
An interesting post at The Honest Courtesan on the strong similarities between the media freak-out about Satanic ritualists kidnapping children back in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the current media meme about sex trafficking rings:
How well do you remember the “Satanic Panic” of the ‘80s and ‘90s? Do you remember when you first heard about it, and what your reactions were? Do you remember how widespread and exaggerated the claims were, and how seriously everyone took them? The reactions from believers when skeptics pointed out the tremendous absurdities? The decline and fall of the hysteria? I sure do, and if you do as well you’ve probably noticed the strong resemblance of “trafficking” hysteria to its older sibling. Both revolve around gigantic international conspiracies which supposedly abduct children into a netherworld of sexual abuse; both are conflated with adult sex work, especially prostitution and porn; both make fantastic claims of vast numbers which are not remotely substantiated by anything like actual figures from “law enforcement” agencies or any other investigative body; both rely on circular logic, claiming the lack of evidence as “proof” of the size of the conspiracy and the lengths to which its participants will go to “hide” their nefarious doings; both encourage paranoia and foment distrust of strangers, especially male strangers; etc, etc, etc.
[. . .]
Once one is able to examine the hysteria from an historical and sociological perspective, it becomes rather fascinating (though none the less frightening for those of us whose profession is being targeted by the witch hunters). For example, one can see how events that would have been interpreted one way 15 years ago are now seen through the lens of “human trafficking”; this recent trial in which members of a Somali gang were convicted for forcing young female members into prostitution would have been reported as a “gang-related violence” story in the late ‘90s, but is now labeled a “sex trafficking case”. In the ‘80s, every city in America imagined itself overrun with Satanic cultists; now it’s “human traffickers”, and there’s a creepy competition for the title of “leading hub for sex trafficking”, generally on the basis of how many interstate highways pass through or near the city (since none of them have any actual statistics to support their claims). In the past year I’ve heard New York, Dallas, Miami, Portland, Atlanta and Sacramento vying for this dubious distinction, and now Tulsa, Oklahoma is as well.
H/T to Jesse Walker for the link.
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