On the web
•Aziz: A mirror image
Blog Left points out something in regard to Tariq Aziz that I've been thinking about the Iraqi information minister. He cites Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy on Aziz.
"With Aziz in custody, top U.S. officials are patting themselves on the back. But they have only proven that victors are able to imprison the vanquished. . .Aziz epitomized the urbanity of evil. He was articulate and deft at rationalizing government actions that caused enormous suffering. His similarities to top U.S. officials are much greater than we're comfortable acknowledging."
Has anyone else noticed the much mocked Iraqi information minister is the mirror image of Ari Fleischer?
•The placebo effect
Pen-Elayne zeroes in on an important aspect of civil rights analysis. Should people who are not similarly situated be treated as if they are in the name of gender blindness?
Well, you wouldn't know it to look at it, but today was Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. My thoughts on this can be found here - essentially, that I feel the Ms. Foundation people completely capitulated on this issue to anti-feminist corporate morons who whined, "well, what about the boyyyyys?" Instead of saying, "Hey men and boys, it's not always about you!" and re-emphasizing the original point of the day - "to introduce girls [my emphasis] ages 9 to 15 to the workplace, and to help them feel that their future participation in the labor force is both expected and welcome" - backed up by studies which have shown that girls' self-esteem plummets at that age, whereas boys' self-esteem is just fine and dandy, they just blanded the hell out of it. So not only don't I know any businesses commemmorating the day now that it's fairly pointless and toothless, but I don't care.
The same reasoning should apply to the color-blindness argument in my opinion. It does not make sense to pretend minorities are similarly situated when they are not.
Poverty rates for African-Americans, however, remain well above white poverty rates. At 22.1 percent in 2000, the poverty rate for African-Americans was nearly three times the non-Hispanic white poverty rate of 7.5 percent. The story among Hispanics is similar — poverty rates declined in 2000 but remain comparatively high. Some 21.2 percent of Hispanics were poor last year.
That is a world of difference. Yet, conservatives, and unfortunately, some liberals, want to pretend it is not there for their own selfish reasons.
•Not a friend of John Lott
I haven't been a consistent reader of Jim Henley. So, when I read an entry saying "the Lott affair shows us the reliability of Lott's
scholarship," I read it to mean Lott was a reliable source. Jim writes to say that because of lack of background, I misinterpreted his position:
When I said the Lott affair shows us "the reliability of Lott's
scholarship," I mean it has shown us that Lott's scholarship is
_unreliable_. In the context of other things I've written about the Lott
case specifically, I think that's clear. But it looks like I phrased things
better for regular readers than occasional ones. Regardless, I first said in
January that gun rights supporters could no longer trust Lott's work to
prove their points and reiterated that judgment within the last month.
I sit corrected and will be reading Jim Henley's blog more often.
