Lost Historical Moments

For all the history geeks.

Gender Issues

The different ways people choose to respond to real problems always amazes me, especially when they are poorly thought-out and counter productive. This story of a family that is keeping the gender of their child a secret for the first few years of their life is one of these times. I definitely agree that there are extreme pressures to conform to gender stereotypes in our society. We would be much better off if we were more accepting and open to differences and uniqueness.

However, this is clearly the wrong way to respond to these pressures. Teaching your children to act in ways that make their gender unclear is only a different way of preventing people from acting in ways that are natural to them. The ideal response to these pressures is to allow your child to be themselves and constantly teaching them against the stereotypes they will find in life. Fighting stereotypes is important, but we must do it in ways that achieve the right ends.

Blame the Pollster, Not the Respondent

Remember all those articles about polling results in elections where one candidate is a person of color and another is white? Well, this post takes a very different view - namely that pollsters should not blame the respondents for inaccurate results even though it is more convenient. Instead, poor results can often be blamed on poor survey design.

Kruman on Health Care

Krugman has a really good column about health care reform. I would not advise taking it as truth without doing your own research, since Krugman is notoriously partisan and sometimes not very objective. However, it does lay out some good arguments. Check it out.

About Palin's Exit

There has been a lot of talk and analysis about Sarah Palin's sudden resignation. I think this post by Stanley Fish, someone I rarely agree with, is the best I've read. I think he is mostly right that she resigned for the reasons she stated - that the intense attacks have distracted from the normal affairs of Alaska. I am not saying this was the right decision (after all, Clinton did not resign), but I can understand it. The only caveat I would add is that she was somewhat cryptic about her future plans, which has lead to a lot of the speculation.

This post by The Politicker is similarly critical of the all the analysis and is pretty fair.

The new conservative columnist at the times also wrote about Palin. His column though makes a common false claim about the way people perceive Palin. He, and others, claim that Palin was attacked for not having the right education. I find this absurd. True, her education was frequently mentioned, but the problem was not her education itself, but her lack of competence and thoughtfulness. Her education was used as evidence of these concerns, instead of the requirements for being a good public official.

I have always believed, and I think the country mostly agrees, that there are no educational requirements for public service. But being thoughtful and smart is required.