- Post-Feminst Swill Redux, a good Susan Douglas take-down of a fairly mediocre New York Times Magazine article.
- Harry Brighouse in Crooked Timber has a useful discussion of daycare and stay-at-home care; “useful” because he lays out some of the issues very neatly. I do disagree with some particulars, and might post more on this later.
- Philip Rosenbloom considers the question of bias in reporting about Israel and Palestine, and concludes that no reporting could ever be seen as unbiased on all sides. More generally, this is a symptom of the way neither side seems capable of recognizing the other side’s realities.
- A University of Virginia employee is being criticized for using the word “nigger” in a context that no one present found racist or offensive (the statement was, “I can’t believe in this day and age that there’s a sports team in our nation’s capital named the Redskins. That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to blacks.”) In response, the “Staff Union” is organizing a protest, and Julian Bond calls for the employee to be given sensitivity training.
There is no lack of real racism to protest and fight in America today; over-the-top responses to acts of non-racism, like this one, trivialize race problems and wastes everybody’s time.
- “Hate and Hypocrisy,” a really interesting and intelligent article from the Southern Poverty Law Center examining anti-Semitic Jews. (Real anti-Semitism, that is, not just criticizing Israel).
- An interesting Foreign Policy article discusses the problems of women in Japan, where women’s understandable refusal to take on repressive homemaker roles – and the larger Japanese society’s refusal to make other roles available for mothers – has led to an enormous decline in the Japanese birthrate. (Via Family Scholars Blog).
Japanese women have three choices, says Haruka: have no career and get married; abandon a career and get married; or plan a life without men. Japan, she says, has perfected the exploitation of women by combining patriarchy with the country’s odd breed of capitalism. For a career woman, emancipated by feminist thought, the only way to true happiness is to stay single—if she can learn to disregard insults from men and rebukes from other women for her status.
- TalkLeft collects a number of links reporting on brutal police attacks on anti-FTAA protestors in Miami last week.
- Blueheron quotes (indirectly) these stats, from the Economist, showing the ratio of take-home pay between top executives and factory workers in different countries:
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I gave a woman asking for money $1 today and she did not immediately get up chuckling and move to…
Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them. Peter Ustinov (1921 – 2004)