I’m as critical of school and college as the next libertarian, or whatever, but isn’t it odd that the criticism is so ferocious now, just as women and Asians have proven that they can dominate these institutions?  (I’m sure there are great examples of outright rather than tacit hostility all over the net, but I’ll leave the reader to find them for herself.)  Getting a diploma isn’t just expensive, but a mere woman can get one; how worthwhile could it be?

Isn’t it also odd that critics of government schooling, and homeschooling proponents, are nonetheless fiercely competitive?  Here’s Penelope Trunk confidently predicting that her white son will surpass his Asian classmates in music and in life, and here’s a horrified Bryan Caplan contemplating his sons’ future without college.  In the Chronicle Caplan says “Going to college is a lot like standing up at a concert to see better. Selfishly speaking, it works, but from a social point of view, we shouldn’t encourage it.”  I guess that answers that question.

Filed under: Education Tagged: gynocracy!, paper tigers

No more objections!

Filed under: Misc Tagged: gay marriage, hollywood, new york

Good news, though I can’t help but compare Maye’s sentence to Mehserle’s.

Filed under: Prison Tagged: corey maye

liberticide – Definitions

Noun (5)

1.  The destruction of civil liberty.
2.  A destroyer of civil liberty.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1.  Destruction of liberty.
2.  A destroyer of liberty.

Wiktionary

1.  One who causes the destruction of liberty.

Other (1)
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1.  That destroys liberty; liberticidal.

liberticide – definition and meaning.

Not to be confused with libertarianicide, tempting as it is.

Filed under: Libertarianism Tagged: happy 4th

Turns out that branding breast cancer pink isn’t just offensive and stupid, it’s also counterproductive:

Stefano Puntoni ran a battery of experiments in which he primed women with gender cues by, for example, showing them ads dominated by the color pink or asking them to write essays on gender. He then asked them to rate how likely they thought they were to contract breast cancer or to give money to efforts to eradicate ovarian cancer. The women primed with gender cues were far less likely than the control group to think they’d get cancer—and far less likely to donate.

Defend Your Research: The Color Pink Is Bad for Fighting Breast Cancer – Harvard Business Review.

This makes me wonder about the cognitive effects of the AIDS-red iPod option.  Also, what other creepy branding options will we be presented with when people finally notice that heart disease is the leading cause of death, or that hepatitis poses a much greater threat to global health than AIDS ever will?

Filed under: Medicine Tagged: advertising, branding, breast cancer, disease

I find the discussion of gay marriage tiresome, but not for the usual reasons.  I find it tiresome because the left talks about love and equality, and the right about God and family and morality, but it’s so painfully obvious that marriage is really about none of those things.  They matter tangentially, but paramount are the wealth and privilege of adults.  If love and equality were so important to the left, they wouldn’t be so utterly indifferent to the collapse of marriage rates among the less-privileged.  (Are they implying that lovelessness and poverty is the natural condition of those who aren’t in the elite?)  If the right cared so much about children, they would have celebrated the report that kids in lesbian families apparently report no sexual or physical abuse whatsoever.  The rates of abuse in heterosexual nuclear families simply don’t bear scrutiny:  ”The paper found that none of the 78 U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study adolescents reports having ever been physically or sexually abused by a parent or other caregiver. This contrasts with 26 percent of American adolescents who report parent or caregiver physical abuse and 8.3 percent who report sexual abuse.”

I’m not surprised that New York finally capitulated on the gay marriage issue, considering that divorce is down in the state, especially among the elite.  The recent article “How Divorce Lost its Groove” is particularly eye-opening:

Ever since her divorce three years ago, Ms. Susie Thomas said, she has been antisocial, “nervous about what people would say.”

After all, she had gone from Park Slope matron, complete with involved husband (“We had cracked the code of Gen X peer parenthood”) and gut-renovated brownstone, to “a Red Hook divorcée,” she said, remarried with a new baby and two children-of-divorce barely out of preschool. “All of a sudden, this community I’d lived in for 13 years became this spare and mean savannah,” she said.

It was as if, she said, everyone she knew felt bad for her but no one wanted to be near her, either. Even though adultery was not part of the equation, Ms. Thomas said, “I feel like I have a giant letter A on my front and back.”

More like P for Poor.  If that isn’t enough, see the New York Times last year on couples who separate but stay married, “The Undivorced“:

What couples therapist Toni Coleman finds surprising is that the primary consideration is practical and financial, not familial. The effect of endless separations on the children rarely seems a priority.

“People split up and have these God-awful joint custody arrangements, so you would think that they stay separated for the kids’ sake, but I’m not seeing that,” she said. “It usually comes down to money.”

The affluent and educated can’t fathom why their gay friends are not allowed to consolidate their own affluence and education in legally recognized partnerships.  It is obviously unfair not to extend them the privilege.  And then there are those who have the privilege of legally marrying if nothing else, and would like to hold on to it, and blame society’s breakdown on those who covet it.  It is not as though the warm fuzzy concepts like love and children and children’s welfare have nothing to do with the discussion, but they take a distant second in consideration.

Filed under: Children

There’s a great chapter in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational called “The Cost of Social Norms:  Why We Are Happy to Do Things, but Not When We Are Paid to Do Them.”  In this chapter he examines the collision of market norms and social norms.  Most of the examples are to the effect that it’s more acceptable to bring a $20 bottle of wine to a social gathering instead of offering the host $100 in cash.  For instance, lawyers would refuse to work for a reduced fee in the name of a good cause, but for the same cause were happy to work pro bono:

There are many examples to show that people will work more for a cause than for cash.  A few years ago, for instance, the AARP asked some lawyers if they would offer less expensive services to needy retirees, at something like $30 an hour.  The lawyers said no.  Then the program manager from AARP had a brilliant idea:  he asked the lawyers if they would offer free services to needy retirees.  Overwhelmingly, the lawyers said yes.

I’m sure there are class and prestige issues at work:  accepting a low wage would mean the lawyers had a low market value, but no wage at all was community service out of the goodness of the lawyers’ hearts.

It’s too bad Ariely did not investigate the collision of social and market norms when it comes to organ donation.  My initial reaction to this article was a mental facepalm:

Chinese teen sells his kidney for an iPad 2 – Telegraph.

But consider the social norms for organ donation.  If the teen had given up his kidney for free, he would be considered a hero.  For a relatively trivial amount of money, however, he was willing to trade his kidney, and that seems foolish.  So either a donor should not be compensated at all, or compensated highly.  But if he had the option of being compensated highly, there would be an outcry that only the rich could afford to compensate a seller.  Then we’re back to square one:  globally speaking, only the rich, well-connected, and lucky can obtain a donor organ, legally  or not.

One thing I know for sure, if the desperate people on organ transplant waitlists could trade an iPad for a few more years of life, they would be ecstatic.  The fact that the teen probably saved a life is also overlooked in the news report.  If the teen had donated his kidney and saved a life, he’d be lauded as inspirational.  Since he all but donated his kidney, saved a life, and in return was able to buy a gadget that most Westerners take for granted, he’s a jackass.  He’s saying his own life is cheap, instead of showcasing his generosity.

However, the truth is that most people will not be motivated to donate organs in the face of zero compensation, and with laws enforcing donor anonymity, even public recognition is forcibly withheld.  China is well on its way to replicating the U.S. failure in transplantation rates, with a staggering million-and-a-half on the waitlist and only 10,000 transplants performed each year.  I’m sorry to see that this is getting less attention than one confused teen’s mismanagement of market norms.

Filed under: Organ Transplantation

First of all, let’s fall to our knees together and thank God that the administration is protecting us from illegal Chipotle workers. I couldn’t sleep at night knowing that my quarterly Chipotle bowl had been assembled by someone unpapered.

Fortunately the likes of Eva Longoria and Rosario Dawson will not see their employers similarly harassed, and have the relative freedom to challenge our president on his immigration policies.  His response?  Apparently it was similar to what he told Karen Maldonado:

“America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that,” he told Maldonado, insisting as he has ever since becoming president that he would not act without Congress. “That’s part of my job.”

Hey, come on!  The guy just works here!  Hing notes that Obama actually does have the executive authority to keep immigrants, you know, immigrated.  But taking the president’s argument at face value (don’t worry, I don’t), is he saying he never met a law he wouldn’t enforce?  Isn’t there always the option of resignation?  Or is he, as all his defenders love to argue, just the best, most irreplaceable guy to hold his nose and do whatever the Republicans want him to do?

(The Colorlines article is via Charles Davis.)

Filed under: Immigration

via BroadSnark:

source:  America’s Voice.

Interesting that both criminal and non-criminal deportations have more than doubled since 2000.  I doubt it means that immigrants have become more criminal, merely that more of them are getting caught up in bureaucratic dragnets.  You’ll notice that the number of non-criminal deportations dips slightly in 2010 relative to 2009, but that the overall total is bumped up by the rise in criminal deportations.

This is an awful lot of unskilled and skilled labor we’re keeping out.  And I guess the family-values types will be predictably indifferent to the scores of families that will be torn apart by the rise in deportations.  But, hey!  Facebook’s the future and will singlehandedly revive the economy!

Previous post:  ¡Obamanos! Indeed

Filed under: Immigration

As incomprehensible as it is to shun both the Democratic and Republican parties, apparently it borders on incoherence to find fault with both pro- and anti-natalist arguments, or so it seems.  This month Cato Unbound has a pretty good feature on the politics of family size–see in particular Matthew Connelly’s excellent “Pro-Natalism’s Checkered Past“:

With the coming of state population control policies aimed at engineering specific population outcomes, beginning with eugenic programs to sterilize the “unfit,” Church leaders were stalwart in opposing what they deemed to be government interference in personal matters of faith. But they voiced no opposition to a eugenics program that aimed at encouraging “fitter” parents to have ever larger families. The Church defended—and continues to defend—state laws that limit or preclude access to birth control and abortion.

[...]History suggests that, however alarming population trends may sometimes seem, and however alluring the idea of a quick fix, we will pay dearly if we do not maintain an absolute commitment to reproductive rights. State policies to pressure people to have more or fewer children can have long afterlives, and may contribute to social pressures that can also be quite oppressive. If you wonder why there is so much pressure to produce perfect children—beginning with genetic testing, and ending with the college admissions madhouse—recall how pervasive and popular eugenics was when today’s grandparents and great-grandparents first came of age.

I have not yet read Caplan’s book except for the introduction, but I believe I’ve read most of his recent blog posts on the subject.  When Caplan advises would-be parents to take advantage of “hand-me-downs and nannies,” it’s pretty clear that his book is aimed at getting people in a certain demographic to reproduce–what appears elsewhere as euphemistic handwringing that those “best-suited to be parents,” i.e. the “right people,” don’t have enough kids.  (Though the “right women” are eagerly sought out to sell their eggs.)  What would Caplan tell the nannies to do?  As far as I can tell, he has so far said nothing to them, because to him they don’t exist as mothers in their own right.

(Also see this post where he appears to miss Megan McArdle’s point about domestics entirely.)

Filed under: Children Tagged: the politics of domesticity