First, check out AlterNet’s Reproductive Justice and Gender section. I’ve got lots of good stuff going up this week, including stories about anti-choice terrorism, the candidates on choice, and male domestic violence survivors. My favorite article up today is about pro-life Christians panicking about Muslims “out-breeding” us. It illustrates how the anti-choice movement isn’t about life or babies at all; it’s about social control, and requiring all people to live life in a particular way — and it’s about racism.
Erica Jong writes about Hillary and the Patriarchy. I have mixed feelings about Jong (to put it mildly), but at least this piece is interesting.
Malalai Joya on how her country is using Islam to erode women’s rights.
Are Americans hostile to knowledge? I’m gonna go with “yes.”
Bob Herbert on how we need a paradigm shift in how we deal with under-age girls forced or coerced into prostitution. He argues that we should look at prostituted girls as victims, and we should offer them help instead of arrest; obviously I’m inclined to agree. But I wonder how this paradigm shift carries over once the girls turn 18. Herbert, as I understand it, does support criminalizing sex work; does a young women stop being a victim and start being a criminal once she turns 18? And can’t there be something in between “criminal” and “victim”? Herbert is right, though, that the people who exploit girls and women need to be branded as criminals and, where applicable, pedophiles.
A French sex exhibit for children is causing some controversy — but it sounds pretty interesting and positive to me.
Enjoy.
Excellent article from Jong — thanks for passing it along.
Threatening a young girl with prison, even as a form of “tough love,” does seem very cruel. You’d think prosecutors would have enough sense and compassion to do that only as a last resort, if ever. I think the problem is, too many of them have a win-at-all-costs mentality.
As for the French sex exhibit, can you imaging the screaming from our domestic wingnut contingent if anything like that was shown in the U.S.?
I think it’s less hostility to knowledge and more an over-abundance of self-affirmation. For example, a solid 70% of what my in-laws whip out in political conversations is complete nonsense of the “Obama = Muslim!” variety, which would lead one to say that their thirst of knowledge is pretty non-existent. But that’s not true in their mind, as they spend hours and hours a day reading blogs, the newspaper, Scientific American, e-mails, etc., and spend additional time cramming in hours of local talk radio. It’s led them to garbage conclusions, of course, but the actual thirst for *something* is still there. In an awfully twisted way, I can respect that. In a more normal way, I question whether or not they’re doing this country any more good than, say, someone who actually DOESN’T care about knowledge (your XBox burnout, for example) does.
Jacoby’s Gore fandom is worth noting, as I’ve heard/read many an interview from Gore about the press that has left the former VP seeming fairly ignorant of American media history.
since started working in a photocenter the idea that we could ever ‘run out of babies’ anywhere seems pretty darn laughable considering the number of times a day I print out an order of baby pictures. Australia has had it’s own baby panics giving baby bonuses to try and get more ‘Australians’ to have children.
on an unrelated note I also found this comic this morning.
(There’s a small typo in the 3rd paragraph. It’s Joya, not Joy.)
I find it odd that in the NYT article, all the cited ignorance of Americans (aside from the “Pearl Harbor” conversation) was essentially geographical – this is often a favorite topic area of articles that bemoan the state of the US educational system.
I’ll also note that geographical knowledge is something you continue to acquire as you get older, as opposed to other topics. (e.g. Many people of my parents’ generation know much more about the geography of SE Asia now than they did when they graduated high school) This leads me to always being very suspicious when some “can’t find X on a map” figure is sighted – I don’t doubt that it’s troubling at some level, but I also know that that topic area is deliberately chosen to push the buttons of people significantly older than those being studied.
Yes, America has an anti-intellectualism problem. However, I am deeply suspicious of someone who says that it is worse now than, say, the 1950s. (When my father was told by a very angry adult that his elementary school was “un-American” for having a gifted education program) Ever read the story The Marching Morons? That’s a reaction to that era. For a later critique (written in the mid-1970s from a European perspective), see On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides.
Now, maybe the NYT article is selling Ms. Jacoby’s book short, and it does have something new to say. However, the article itself is just the same old “kids these days don’t know nothin’” article we’ve seen again and again.
I’m not generally concerned regarding the cultural affects of declining birthrates; however, I don’t think one can ignore that changes in birthrate can have an impact (sometimes adverse) to the economic production, standard of living and social safety net in a country. Generally, swings in the level of the birth rate and population will affect the ability to transfer funds between generations.