Romney Challenges Genghis Khan for "Furthest Right"

Oh, my.   Besen of MSNBC shares some alarming intelligence with The New York Daily News:

Romney has actually become the most far-right major party nominee in generations, eager to make the Reagan and Bush presidencies look almost liberal by comparison.

Apparently Romney has made it clear he'll dismantle the fabric of American society and re-write the social contract.  In fact, the author of this article uses language that I could swear is a verbatim copy from what I was reading four years ago about another candidate:

The man has spent a year showing the American electorate a road map, pointing at a distant, radical destination. Only the deliberately blind could miss the signals, and only a fool would assume he’ll change direction once he’s in power.

I feel his pain.

How not to fight over politics

Miss Manners, as usual, has fine advice for avoiding rude, unpleasant conversational gambits without resorting oneself to rudeness or unpleasantness.  A reader reports that she is well known in her community for espousing a particular controversial cause.  She prefers not to discuss it 100% of the time, however, particularly at parties.  When someone buttonholes her at a social event and wants to chew her out on the subject, Miss Manners suggests:

Try assuming an interested look, and without responding to the attack on your issue, say, “Tell me about your favorite cause. Besides this, what do you think is our most important question of the day?”

This doesn’t just change the subject, if it works. It challenges such a person to show whether he has ideas of his own, or just goes around attacking others. Miss Manners realizes there are risks. He could be tempted to say, “Stopping wrongheaded people like you,” although personal insults at a party would only mark him as even ruder than the confrontation, which might be passed off as conversation. The real risk is that you will then attack his ideas, and it will be a draw. The way to win is to listen intently, say pleasantly, “Hmmm, interesting you should think that,” and excuse yourself to get a drink.

Her readers add even more useful advice (sometimes even WaPo readers can get a clue).  One suggests calling over to a notorious motormouth nearby:  "Oh, Catherine dear, I have someone I want you to meet. Do come over and tell us about your weekend in the Hamptons" -- then escape and leave them to each other.  Another proposes explaining that she remembers better what she reads than what she hears, so would the antagonized person mind writing her a letter? Better yet, invite him to attend her next scheduled public appearance and discuss the matter there, because if he had really wanted a serious discussion he would have already done one or the other.  Another suggests the all-purpose: "I'm so sorry my opinion upsets you. Will you excuse me, please?"

Not all readers could get the message.  One wrote:

Yeah but that is kind of hard to do when the person has been advocating taking away your marriage rights for instance and then you find yourself sitting next to the blowhard at a dinner party. I would take delight in making them as uncomfortable as they have made me in my private life. He should get no pass because he wants down time from his hateful positions. Maybe he should rethink his stand on this issue if so many people are in vehement disagreement with him on it.

Fun dinner guest, I imagine. It was interesting that quite a few commenters got hung up trying to guess what the unpopular cause was, as if they couldn't decide whether Mr. Let's-Fight-at-a-Party was rude until they knew whether they agreed with him on the controversial issue.

A Bourbon Interlude

Although of course we all know Tocqueville, I had not been aware of the political backstory to his famous American tour.

The Revolution of 1830 overthrew the Bourbon king Charles X and put the Orléanist Louis-Philippe on the throne. Tocqueville reluctantly took a loyalty oath to keep his job. This placed him in a difficult position with his pro-Bourbon family and relatives, who thought his actions treasonous. But his oath did nothing to allay the regime's mistrust of him. This suspicion was not unwarranted; in 1832 some of Tocqueville's relatives would be involved in a plot to overthrow Louis-Philippe. Beaumont fell under suspicion for similar reasons. He and Tocqueville therefore sought a pretext to leave the country for a while. 

Fortunately for them, a shift was taking place, not only in politics but also in penal practices: torture and public executions were being replaced by efforts to rehabilitate criminals. The United States was seen as a vast social laboratory, in which prison experiments were being conducted that might profit France. Tocqueville and Beaumont were therefore able to convince their supervisors to grant them a leave of absence to travel to the United States to study American prisons.

It's interesting that was his reason for coming.  The shift to rehabilitation is something we've discussed from time to time; it turned out to be based on theories of psychology that hold no water at all.  Sadly, if anyone followed the American model of prisons, they made a detour into an expensive new way of failing to solve the problem.

They're subject to an additional complaint, which is that they were probably worse forms of torture than the ones they replaced.  Prisoners were forced to remain silent twenty-four hours a day, and kept in solitary confinement when they weren't working in gangs:  they were also lashed regularly.  The stated point was to "break down their sense of self," so they would be easy to reform.  It's roughly the idea later mocked by A Clockwork Orange, but before the advent of psychoactive drugs.

So it turns out that Tocqueville came to learn about something we did poorly but were reputed to do well, and ended up learning about (and writing about) something we did well in fact.  That shows a good judgment. 

Ice Cream

I went into the kitchen a while ago, and poking around in the freezer I found a container of ice cream that I didn't know we had.  It's been a rather warm day, so I took it to my wife and asked her if she would like some.  "No," she said, "but you enjoy yourself."

So I stuck the container against her bare shoulder, which caused her to kick and scream until she could get away.  This took a moment as she was trapped against a countertop at the time.  "What?"  I said.  "You told me to enjoy myself.  Can you think of anything I could have done with the ice cream that I would have enjoyed more?"

And do you know, she went red in the face, turned on her heels, and fled running out of the room!

Women.  Who can understand them?

When communication makes you feel further away

A Maggie's link led me to a shrink site I'd never seen before, which emphasizes judgment over feelings.  Not pretending feelings aren't there, just remembering that we have other cognitive functions, too, to keep our lives in order and avoid repetitive disasters.  His advice for the lovelorn:  feelings are exciting, but next time work on finding someone with good character before you dive deep into the great emotional rush.  Also: "Before we discovered communication as the solution to family conflict and misunderstanding, we knew better. Back then, people thought before they spoke."

Dr. Lastname offers sensible advice to a mother who worries that she's trapped in an endless cycle of post-binge feeling-fests with her adult son, when what she really needs to do is send him to AA:

Tell him he has to find strength in himself by thinking hard about what he wants for himself and what drug and alcohol abuse does to him. He’ll need to get a lot stronger before he can stop and stay stopped, and talking to others about addiction and hearing their stories can give him the strength. Still, he’ll have to work hard every day, and the part of him that wants to use is pretty strong and will never go away. 

No, you’re not discouraging him — false hope yields false courage — you’re telling him that life and his own feelings have totally discouraged him and he’s going to have to learn how to think differently in order to get his courage back. You’re not telling him anything he won’t learn from AA, but they’re the lessons that will help him take back his life. 

The immediate response may well be negative; he may claim you’re letting him down and making him feel worse, and may openly regret talking to you. Instead of getting defensive, tell him you see a positive way forward and that your vision differs from his. Then stand pat, don’t argue, and stand ready to help him whenever he takes a positive step. It may be awhile before you feel close again, but, if and when you do, it will be the real thing. Until then, you can talk all the time, but every conversation will make you feel further away.

He also offers excellent practical advice for dealing with intrusive nags:

If your mother is needy and believes that intimacy is a matter of sharing spontaneous feelings, it’s natural for her to try to get close by asking you direct, intrusive questions and then sharing her honest response. Anyone who does that is, however, is just somebody who has never figured out that this method never works (and probably never will). She gets an A for expressing her feelings, and you know what grade she gets from me. 

Don’t make the same mistake by assuming that sharing your honest objections (to her honest questions) will lead to improvement; she might never learn her lesson, but you should know better. If your goal was to see whether confronting her negative behavior works, now you know. No need to repeat the experiment, the results will always be the same (and awful). 

So put aside your disappointment and consider other approaches, like steering the conversation to pleasant topics of common interest, or politely refusing to talk about personal topics. The more you stifle your own need for intimacy, the more likely you are to steer the dinner table agenda towards topics that work and come away appreciating the desert and not hating the conversation.

Asymmetrical deafness

More support for Jonathan Haidt's thesis that conservatives have a clue what progressives think, but progressives cannot return the favor.  Frank Luntz managed to get the WaPo editorial page to print a short piece exposing five major myths that the left believes about the right:

1. Conservatives want to smother government in its crib.  Luntz believes polls are beginning to show that conservatives are less concerned about "large government, small citizens" theory than about practical measures to ensure increased accountability, so that whatever is spent on government will give demonstrable bang for the buck.
2. Conservatives want to drive all illegal immigrants to the border and dump them in the desert. Polling suggests widespread Republican support for "tall fences and wide gates," and for some kind of path to citizenship for immigrants who have demonstrated good citizenship in various ways, including military service.
3. Conservatives believe Wall Street can do no wrong. Liberals are confusing Wall Street with Main Street.  Conservatives are more enamored of the free market than of abstract "capitalism," and would happily see some of the miscreants in the housing market scandal strung up by their thumbs (though they may disagree about who the miscreants are).
4. Conservatives want to smother Social Security and Medicare in their cribs. In fact, most conservatives want to preserve them, but believe they'll collapse altogether without reform.  Conservatives are also much more likely to believe that reforms based on individual choice and market competition will be broadly benign in their results.
5. Conservatives don't care about inequality. Actually, conservatives differ from liberals in their beliefs about the best way to combat inequality, and are much more focused on opportunity than result.

Luntz might as well have held his breath, as far as the WaPo readership goes.  The comments are a hoot.  Luntz is a liar.  Luntz is a paid Rethuglican hack.  Conservatives don't really believe any of these things, but have been trained to say they do in order to mask their nefarious spot.  Conservatives hate charity because it's paid to black people and hate President Obama for the same reason.  All conservatives want to do is take reproductive choice away from women and steal tuition money from poor students.  They do it just because they're mean.  A few, milder readers report that they know some conservatives personally, and can confirm that they're not the spawn of Satan, but they are gullible children who are being misled by their evil leaders' secret agenda and Fox News.  Most commenters, however, dismiss all the information Luntz tries to give them about their opponents and express considerable resentment for having been exposed to it in the first place, especially at their beloved WaPo, where they are not accustomed to having to encounter such things.

Update:  It's occurred to me that a point about asymmetry depends on showing that the same thing doesn't happen all the time in reverse.  I've been hunting for some "Top 10 Stupid Things Conservatives Believe About Liberals" articles, published in conservative venues, that elicited purely conservative backlashes along the lines of:  "We don't believe you espouse any such benign motives behind your revolting slogans.  Our caricatures were actually quite accurate.  Everyone knows the root of your insane liberal beliefs is that you're paid Communist operatives.  The author of this piece is a smelly hippie."  I haven't been able to find any, but maybe some of you can link to them in the comments.  I did find some "Top 10 Dumb Conservative Beliefs" posts, but no comparable reader response.  Mostly they were explanations that liberals don't really hate America or the troops or family values, and don't intend to encourage personal irresponsibility, etc., with reader responses that were mild or mixed.  I admit that I have participated in more than one argument among conservatives that degenerated into the blanket explanation that all liberal initiatives were Alinsky-style tactics intended to destroy the country.  I just haven't seen that approach adopted unanimously in the comments section of a major newspaper in response to an "olive branch" style of op-ed piece.

New things are fun only if you're a predator

From Nicole Cliff at The Hairpin, via Never Yet Melted via Maggie's Farm:

If you haven't spent a lot of time around horses, you may have the idea that they are like dogs and cats (really big, dangerous dogs and cats). This is untrue. YOU are like dogs and cats, in that you are a predator. . . .  [I]f someone says to you "hey, let's try this new brunch place that has amazing cocktails," there's a decent chance you'll say "great, meet you there." Your dog feels similarly. New things are fun! That is because you are a predator. . . . If you try to take your horse to a new brunch place, you need to convince them that a) you've been there before, b) there are no cave trolls at the brunch place, c) there will be other horses at the brunch place, and d) you will be a royal pain in their ass until they quit dicking around and agree to go to the brunch place.

Husbands can be similar.

Outlaw!

He has spent eight years churning out hundreds of thousands of copies of “The Hangover,” “Gran Torino” and other first-run movies from his small Long Island apartment to ship overseas.  “Big Hy” — his handle among many loyal customers — would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied DVDs, almost 4,000 boxes of them to date, free to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.... 

“It’s not the right thing to do, but I did it,” Mr. Strachman said, acknowledging that his actions violated copyright law. 

“If I were younger,” he added, “maybe I’d be spending time in the hoosegow.”

Well, you know, even if you were younger they'd have to get it past a jury.

Fun with nomenclature

"Warming Hole Delayed Climate Change Over Eastern United States," declares the headline at Science Daily, describing the results of new studies from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).  It seems that particulate pollution in the late 20th century created a regional "warming hole," a/k/a a cold patch, a/k/a a place where the global warming model was an abject failure for many decades.

It seems to me you could as easily say "we found a large area where global warming didn't happen, thus confounding our expectations and making us question our causation theory."  Or you might say "particulate pollution appears to be a stronger driver of climate change than the oft-reviled CO2, and in the opposite direction, so now we're really confused about that positive-feedback assumption on which most of our alarming predictions are based."  You might even say "particulate pollution paradoxically acts as a benign umbrella to protect industrialized regions from global warming," but what fun would that be?  A "Warming Hole" sounds a lot scarier and more interesting.  Who wants to crucify industry barons who are only spreading a lovely parasol?  And what respectable science journal wants to run a story about counter-evidence for global warming causation theories?

Like most of the announcements in this area, the new report is based on re-jiggered models, in this case a "combination of two complex models of Earth systems."  That's terrific.  The only thing that inspires more confidence than a complex model is two of them jammed together.

In Washington, It's Always 1945

Another good American Enterprise Institute review, courtesy of Maggie's Farm (which by the way is also the source of my last two posts). Nick interviews Jim Manzi about his book "Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial and Error for Business, Politics, and Society," in which he laments public policy that has not been subjected to controlled experiments.  Manzi argues that our political leaders can't shake the mindset they acquired after World War II, when the U.S. had half the world's GDP:

Our almost casual disregard for the erosion of the foundations of our political economy — endless talk but little successful action on internationally uncompetitive K-12 educational results; a widely touted university system that produces more visual and performing arts graduates than math, biology, or engineering graduates; an immigration policy that all but ignores the need to upgrade our human capital; underinvestment in certain kinds of infrastructure, science, and technology; the relentlessly rising tide of social dysfunction among the majority of the American population that does not graduate from college; somehow convincing ourselves that we are uniquely responsible for maintaining global order, when we represent only about 25 percent of global economic output; a continuous trade deficit for more than 30 years; federal government debt of 70 percent of GDP, without any real prospect of achieving fiscal balance, never mind running the budget surpluses that would be required to pay it down, and so on — is shocking and profligate. . . .  The United States can thrive in this new world, but is not destined to do so.

Manzi doesn't oppose reform; he merely advocates federalism:

My argument is not that we should avoid reforms. To the contrary, it is that we should attempt many more potential reforms by trying them out on a small scale to see how they really work.

Cash Now!

"It's your money, use it when you want it" -- so goes the late-night J.G. Wentworth TV commercial aimed at beneficiaries of "structured settlements," which are basically annuities paid over time.  You can cash out one of these settlements for a lump sum, but obviously at a discount.  Alex J. Pollock at the American Enterprise Institute asks if you'd take 80 cents on the dollar for your expectation of Social Security benefits.  Would I?  Does the Pope have lips?

The problem, of course, is that it's not your money.  It's not even money.  It doesn't exist at all.  So on that basis, heck, I'd take 10 cents on the dollar and feel like a successful bandit.

The limits of scientism

John Gray, emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, has an interesting review of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" in The New Republic.  He admires the book in many ways, but argues that Haidt suffers from provincialism (he's hung up on American notions of the left/right split in politics) and from the usual limitations of a faith in scientism.  In Gray's view, Haidt's newest work is a sophisticated example of "attractively simple theories that [are believed to be] invested with the power of overcoming moral and political difficulties that have so far proved intractable."

Gray gives Haidt credit for overcoming the recently voguish "primitive type of rationalism" that so often ignores the strength and value of our irrational or extra-rational nature; he acknowledges that the conscious mind is like a rider on a strong, beautiful animal.  Still, he faults Haidt for his emphasis on group morality:

Understanding morality as a group phenomenon neglects the fact that human groups are complex, historically shifting, and internally conflicted. Tribes and nations are not natural kinds of things like genes and blood types. They are historical constructions whose existence depends on human recognition. Human beings rarely, if ever, belong to only one group. One of the tasks of morality is to arbitrate the clashing loyalties that regularly arise from the many group identities that human beings possess. In some cases, morality may lead people to put aside group loyalties altogether.

Gray also argues that Haidt's functionalist definition of morality leaves him in a number of unresolved difficulties:

There is a slippage from “is” to “ought” in nearly all evolutionary theorizing, with arguments about natural behavior sliding into claims about the human good. It may be true—though any account of how precisely this occurred can at present be little more than speculation—that much of what we see as morality evolved in a process of natural selection. That does not mean that the results must be benign.

Gray cautions against Haidt's naive confidence that evolutionary psychology can resolve the conflict between utilitarianism and pluralism:

Issues such as abortion and gay marriage are not bitterly disputed because legislators have failed to apply a utilitarian calculus. They are bitterly disputed because a substantial part of the population rejects utilitarian ethics. . . . .  Haidt appears not to grasp the importance of the fact that intuitionism and utilitarianism are rivals, and not only in moral philosophy. They are also at odds in practice. Making public policies on a basis of utilitarian reasoning requires a high degree of convergence, not diversity, in moral intuitions. Such policies will not be accepted as legitimate if they violate deep-seated and widely held intuitions regarding, for example, sexuality and the sanctity of human life. . . .  Once again seemingly unaware of the depth of the problems he is addressing, Haidt tells us that such conflicts will not arise, or else they will be soon overcome, as long as people are brought together in the right way.

A good review should either warn you not to waste your time, or inspire you to acquire the book and spend time ploughing through it. This review is tipping me toward the investment of time and effort.

An Article for Eric Blair

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a review of a new book on Rome.  As always, I'll defer to Eric for a read on the quality of the thing; Rome is his bailiwick.

"The Better Half"

Here's a cheerful song about finding the good in a hard life, built around friendly lyrics and a playful arrangement.

"Suicide Doors"

Popular Mechanics has a delightful article called "The 13 Most Dangerous Car Interiors in History."  Runner up is the Lincoln Continental with suicide doors.

"Suicide doors" got their name for a reason. Many early cars didn't have locking doors, door latches opened by pressing downward, and a downward-opening latch often served as an armrest. It was a recipe for catastrophe. Without a seatbelt, anyone chilling in the back of a car with rear-swinging doors could easily fall out, especially since the wind would catch the door and blow it open. The gorgeous 1961 Lincoln Continental had suicide rear doors, harking back to a much earlier era of coachbuilt luxury cars of the 1920s.

That happens to be the subject of a pretty great rockabilly song by the Reverend Horton Heat.

Women & World Peace

Foreign Policy has an article that claims that the best predictor of a state's stability is how it treats its women.

What's more, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are as insecure and unstable as nondemocracies. 

Our findings, detailed in our new book out this month, Sex and World Peace, echo those of other scholars, who have found that the larger the gender gap between the treatment of men and women in a society, the more likely a country is to be involved in intra- and interstate conflict, to be the first to resort to force in such conflicts, and to resort to higher levels of violence....  

It's ironic that authors such as Steven Pinker who claim that the world is becoming much more peaceful have not recognized that violence against women in many countries is, if anything, becoming more prevalent, not less so, and dwarfs the violence produced through war and armed conflict. To say a country is at peace when its women are subject to femicide -- or to ignore violence against women while claiming, as Pinker does, that the world is now more secure -- is simply oxymoronic.

Well, Pinker's argument is one I don't think much of myself (we discussed it here); nevertheless, I'm not sure what to make of this argument.

Stability as such isn't much of a goal, if what is being stabilized is injustice.  Thus, to some degree, you would think it would be a good thing to see that states that are fundamentally unjust were also unstable:  that's just what we might think we would want to see.

On the other hand, growing instability doesn't seem to improve the situation for women much:  in fact, it seems to worsen it.

It seems probable that they have their causality exactly backwards.  Good treatment for women does not cause political stability; it seems to result from it.  It is in a stable atmosphere that women have often done best in human history, because it is in such an atmosphere that the traditional male advantages are minimized:  size, strength, and a mental structure that evolution has shaped for war.  In a stable environment, it is development of long-term relationships rather than combat that tends to shape society:  and these are traditional female strengths.  It's the periods of long-term prosperity and stability in which women have advanced their political and legal position.

This suggests that if you want to see women's treatment improve, you should work to stabilize society; but you will almost certainly be stabilizing an oppressive environment for the women when you do it.  The goods that come for women will come from their own work and their own natural strength, over time, not because of external efforts.

Nevertheless, there are some counterexamples to the theory that occur to me.  It would have been true during the height of the instability of the industrial age, for example, that women had greatest equality (if not best treatment) in the places rendered most unstable by the revolution; and likewise, in WWII, it was the instability that created the opportunity for large-scale female migration into factory work.

This set of data suggest that creating instability is a great thing to do insofar as it gives women a greater hand in the means of production, which may only be possible in industrialized or post-industrial societies.  It was certainly true that many Marxist revolutions promised women this very good if they would join the revolution and help overthrow the government, which is why many third-world Marxist leaders were women.  However, after the revolution the promised goods rarely materialized.

If this is the truth, though, then there's no general rule about correlation or causation to be made here.  The fact that stable states are correlated with female rights is true only just now; it was not true before, and might not be true later.

The authors would like it to be true that the correlation (and even the causation) ran in their direction, because it could allow us to avoid making a value judgment between stability and freedom for women.  In fact, I suspect we will often have to make such judgments:  and I am as ready to strike a blow for freedom today as I ever was, though experience has made me less hopeful about how much we can actually achieve in our own historical moment.

"Counsel, do you have any other arguments?"

These are not words a lawyer wants to hear from the bench, especially if his only honest answer is, "Your Honor, I got nuthin'."

Arguments before the Supreme Court this week on the Arizona immigration law went far worse than I ever imagined they would, in part because I haven't been playing close attention to the exact position of the federal government.  I did not realize, for instance, that federal law already permits local police to check the immigration status of a person they suspect of being an illegal alien.  Arizona's law merely makes such a check mandatory.  The purpose of the change apparently was to permit the state authorities to override local preferences for annulling the federal immigration laws; in other words, this law works out a conflict between state and municipal authorities, not between state and federal authorities.

I also did not realize that the government stipulated at the outset that it was offering no arguments about the danger of profiling.  The law itself is race-neutral, so any such argument from the DOJ would have to await the implementation of the state law and the application of the usual statistical tests.  There may come a day when we have to endure "disparate impact" arguments on this subject, but today is not that day.

Remarks from the Justices amply demonstrated how badly the federal government's arguments were faring, but some of the worst came from moderate Justice Kennedy, from new, presumptively liberal Justice Sotomayor, and even from obviously liberal Justice Breyer.  Breyer asked how a provision that would require policemen call to check immigration status can be said to conflict with a federal rule that allows policemen to call to check immigration status.  Sotomayor got the DOJ to admit that the state would merely alert the feds that they'd discovered an illegal alien; nothing Arizona is doing (or could do) would require the feds to take the aliens into custody, if they didn't feel that doing so was a high priority or worth the expense.  (I'd just expect the feds to set up an automated message system that no one ever checks.  "Press one if you're wasting our time with more reports of illegal aliens, you red-state poster-children for hate crimes.")  Justice Kennedy's question was even more devastating: "So you're saying the government has a legitimate interest in not enforcing its laws?"  And as has been so widely reported, Justice Roberts stated, "It seems to me that the Federal Government just doesn't want to know who is here illegally or not."  But none of the Justices was impressed by the argument that federal pre-emption means the states are prohibited from giving the feds information they'd prefer not to know.

I don't know of any precedent for this situation, where the feds want to keep a law on the books, then claim pre-emption over the issue whether it will be enforced as written.  As Justice Scalia pointed out:

Anyway, what's wrong about the states enforcing Federal law? There is a Federal law against robbing Federal banks. Can it be made a state crime to rob those banks? I think it is. But does the Attorney General come in and say, you know, we might really only want to go after the professional bank robbers? If it's just an amateur bank robber, you know, we're going to let it go. And the state's interfering with our whole scheme here because it's prosecuting all these bank robbers.

Religion & Science, Together

Chemistry World discusses a new technique for recovering the original beauty of Medieval illuminations.  (Hat tip:  Medieval News.)  This is, of course, what the relationship between science and faith ought to look like:  a beautiful partnership, each seeking truth according to its discipline.

Tom Sawyer's Friend:

...the Washington, D.C. bureaucrat.

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land. 

Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

That means "no milking the cows," as well as "no picking the corn," and "no carrying bales of corn that I picked," and "no going to the farmers' market on Sunday, in the hope that your smiling face might charm someone into buying our tomatoes."  

It also means "No more 4-H" and "No more Future Farmers of America."

You can probably still whitewash the fence... at least until the next set of rules comes along.

Fixing Boys

Let's leave aside the question of whether there is a "war on boys" or a "war on women," or whether the system is stacked against one or the other.  It's clear that, regardless of how "the system" is "stacked," boys have significant problems with school as currently structured.

A better question, then, might be:  how can we structure school so that boys tend to excel?

Here are a few thoughts on structuring a program for boys, with a very small amount toward the end on how it would interact with a program for girls.

1)  It would involve longer school days, but with more and longer breaks for physical activity.  Boys at the elementary school level should be getting up for a good forty-five minutes' play at least three times during the school day.  At elementary levels one of these play periods can be formalized, into sports or (especially) martial arts; the others should be free.  At higher levels, first two and then periods should be formalized:  as boys grow into teenagers they need more structure to keep them out of trouble.

2)  It should assume that boys mature more slowly, and thus focus on topics earlier in their education that require less emotional maturity.  Math and science are good subjects at early ages; history and emotionally-difficult literature should be pushed back.  Stories that can be read to boys, or that have shown a long history of being interesting to boys, are good at this age -- adventure tales, Robin Hood, or books without emotional content like stories about airplanes and trains.  Stories that require them to confront or examine complex emotional truths are for later.  The technical skills of reading and basic composition do not involve much emotional weight, but advanced composition -- because it requires a mastery of content, which comes from emotionally laden things like history and literature -- should be pushed back as well.

3)  This implies that boys and girls should usually be educated separately, although the implication is not rigid; and in addition, there are substantial benefits to having boys and girls working alongside each other from early life.  It would be good to break school days into class periods for each subject, and the classes taught differently, so that individual accommodations can be made.  A boy who matures unusually quickly may benefit from being introduced to more emotionally complex materials, so that he might go to a class mostly filled with girls for the literary period; a girl might not develop as quickly, and go to a class filled mostly with boys.  Because boys will focus more on math and science early, those classes will probably advance faster; some girls who show especial aptitude may spend part of their days in boy-heavy classes.

These are just some initial thoughts; any or all of these thoughts may be wrong.  The point is to think about the problem from the perspective of trying to construct a solution that will work for the boys.  What do you suggest?