Author: Aaron Weber

A Price Above Oil

Fray Luis De Leon’s sixteenth-century pedagogical work La Perfecta Casada (The perfect wife) is a manual for household management in all aspects. Of course, it demands pretty severe submission and subjugation of women.

The group Ladies Against Feminism would love to bring it all back. They’re not alone– plenty of people out there are all about the modest swimwear and head coverings. Oh, sure, there’s plenty of Christians showing skin and even hip religious-themed clothing (Christians for Cannabis, anyone?), which is all well and good– none of this is mandatory.

Still, the religious right, via Ashcroft and his crew, are running the show in a lot of ways, and I’m wondering how much freedom I’ve already lost. I want to know how close we’re getting to The Handmaid’s Tale here. Even Margaret Atwood wants to know. It’s not just religious extremism I fear, although I know that non-Christians are more targeted by the current rash of extrajudicial detentions in the US. The jingoist hounds are baying that I’m a traitor because I think this is an unjust war, that Bush has the wrong motives at heart, that we’re bathing in blood and pumping it at the Shell station.

Everyone who’s studied World War II and the holocaust remembers this:

They came for the Communists, and I didn’t object – For I wasn’t a Communist;
They came for the Socialists, and I didn’t object – For I wasn’t a Socialist;
They came for the labor leaders, and I didn’t object – For I wasn’t a labor leader;
They came for the Jews, and I didn’t object – For I wasn’t a Jew;
Then they came for me – And there was no one left to object.
– Martin Niemoller, German Protestant Pastor, 1892-1984

Well, they have come to detain and register Arab men. They have come for the homosexuals in the middle of the night.

I mean, how much is too much to take? How late is too late to get out?

Sick?

You know how when you were sick as a child, you got to eat ice cream or whatever? I’ve been stuck in bed with a back injury for days and my diet today has consisted of m&m’s, bourbon, and french fries. It makes the pain go away.

6 4 7 Don’t Eat

I’m pointed to Robert’s Random Thoughts by Semi-Daily Journal. There’s a long post today about psychology, economics, and short term memory:

One of the great bits of evidence from the psych literature is that overweight people can resist nibbling if they are remembering a 3 digit number but not if they are remembering a 7 digit number (see the magic number 7). They had to remember for 5 minutes or so. They weren’t warned that they would be tempted with food.
The guess is in the heads of the 3 digit non-nibblers is “6, 4, 7, don’t eat, 6, 4, 7, don’t eat, 6, 4, 7, don’t eat, 6, 4, 7, don’t eat, 6, 4, 7, don’t eat” while in the heads of the the 7 digit nibblers was “6, 4, 7, 3, 5, 2, 4 ; 6, 4, 7, 3, 5, 2, 4; 6, 4, 7, 3, 5, 2, 4 , hey why is my stomach full!?”

I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s quite funny.

It’s a Lovely Dog

People are tittering about a dog accused of plastic surgery. NYT coverage notes that “Dog shows, not unlike Miss Universe contests or episodes of ‘Are You Hot?,’ are little more than genetic trade fairs.” Their point is that surgically altering an animal to disguise its genetic value is unethical, and that’s true. The article touches on the ethical issues brought up by ultra-typing and the risks of genetic defects. Is it ethical to manipulate the genes this way? And, are these ultra-typed animals healthy? What if you alter the genes directly rather than by breeding?

I Do Solemnly Affirm

New Yorker article:

In the spring semester of my senior year of high school, my father got a call from the headmaster of the school I was about to graduate from. The headmaster said that he was expecting to speak soon with the admissions office at the single Ivy League college to which, on the headmaster?s advice, I had applied. He was wondering whether my father planned to attend a local cocktail-party fund-raiser for my school that Sunday. My father (rightly, in my opinion) hung up on him, and a few weeks later I received a rejection letter from the Ivy League college. This was my introduction to the meritocracy.

The phrase “affirmative action” is a slippery one, and its vague definition contributes to the difficulty of debate about it. If it means “lower standards for a particular group” then it has the potential to demean the achievements of individuals and crowd out otherwise qualified applicants. My personal ideal is that employers and recruiters make an extra effort to seek out qualified candidates that might not otherwise apply for a position in a job or a school. That, I think, is a positive action that one can take to improve diversity in educational institutions and workplaces. I don’t know if it would be enough, though.

In the workplace, it’s slightly less complex than the college admissions office, because there’s really only one question: can this person do this job? An employer doesn’t care what your excuse is. They don’t care what color your skin is, or where you’re from. They have a list of qualifications that you meet or don’t meet. At most, they’ll have a training program where you can demonstrate that you’re a quick learner and a good hire. But maybe not.

Schools have more luxuries, really. They can do things like make allowances for opportunity. Say, for example, Tom’s school had five AP classes and Bill’s only had two. We can see that both of them took advantage of all the AP classes that were available and both students work hard. Bill might be a great student who will excel given the chance. It’s impossible to tell in advance. And there are a million factors of difference between the two that you can’t quanitfy, all of which intevitably get tied up with the single overriding factor that shouldn’t matter: race.

Now, the “development admit” is more than just seeking out and asking rich kids to apply to your college. It’s every bit as serious as race-based affirmative action policies. It’s like “legacies,” where if your parents and grandparents went to the school they give you a bonus too, because people who have more than one generation at the same school give more and contribute to the culture of the school. These admissions policies are good for the school and good for all the other students. How else are you going to pay for those scholarships, that new science center, the security service that will walk you safely across campus after dark? Several universities in this country have gone from mediocre to top-twenty with the funds from development admissions policies.

Purely academic admission preferences are an impossible ideal anyway. Perhaps we should add money to the list of factors more clearly: poor students who haven’t had the opportunity to excel, and rich students who have had every opportunity to fuck up, can both get an extra weight.

Ethically shady? Well, yes. But few ethical decisions are truly black and white.

Fuck War

“Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out” says Dubya (via iiiii and nedia.)

That many-i’d site has a neat format, really, and I agree with his opinion on the protestors:

my issue is this: while i agree with the war protesters that the war is about as funny as steve martin’s oscar material, i also agree with the conservative commentators (but i repeat myself) that the war protesters are, on average, retarded.

Growl

From the IHT: “A former chief executive of Shell Oil Co. appears to be the leading contender to oversee the Iraqi oil industry after the fall of Saddam Hussein, according to industry experts who have spoken with U.S. officials.”

Bush is certain and that worries me. He knows what’s going on. He knows that his tax cuts will force either tax hikes or spending cuts down the road and he’s just left that problem for others to take care of. The Reagan strategy of deliberately bankrupting the federal government rides again. Why not cut back on entitlements? That’s politically difficult. He’ll just force someone else’s hand later.