Month: January 2011

Upping Generational Warfare: Letting Children “Vote”

Kinsley goes there:

[E]xtend the franchise to children, but let parents vote on their underage children's behalf. In effect, parents would get an extra vote for every child. How would this solve the entitlement problem? It wouldn’t, directly. But it would revise the allocation of political power to more closely reflect who has the most at stake. It would reward long-term thinking rather than short-term thinking. Right now seniors are all-powerful because they vote in such large numbers, while young people must rely on the good will of their parents and grandparents to protect their interests. Every politician invokes "our children" as the most important consideration on every issue, and then, having done so, is free to ignore them.

The Missing, Ctd

A reader writes:

As my partner and I head into our second year waiting for what your reader calls the "right" kind of child, I feel the need to step forward and defend our decision to adopt a child of the same race as us (namely, Asian, Caucasian, or a mix thereof).

Our agency conducts and we have attended extensive training on trans-racial adoption, and the bottom line is really that, if you're going to need to make new friends merely to connect your child with their race's culture, you should not be adopting a child of that particular race. Your child needs to feel culturally connected to their race. If your Korean child grows up in an all-white world, heads off to college and suddenly is confronted by her Asian friends on her inability to use chopsticks or unfamiliarity with kimchee, you haven't done your due diligence as a parent to expose and help integrate your child with their cultural heritage.

We decided that since our child will already be faced with two major challenges in life – namely, having same-sex parents and being adopted – we would prefer that they not also have to surmount the trans-racial barrier. It may seem selfish or self-serving, but it is what we have discussed, considered, prayed about, and decided.

And so we wait.

Cancer And Dementia, Ctd

A reader sends along a somewhat NSFW video and writes:

I couldn't help but contrast the NY Dept of Health AIDS video with another PSA I recently ran across from Director Bryan Jackson. It is a Christmas themed video aimed at the Japanese gay community. From his Youtube Description:

Little Taiko Boy combines Western holiday traditions, Shinto mythology and Japanese gay culture to advocate a very different way of wrapping gifts for a loved one.

Little Taiko Boy's soundtrack is a safer-sex parody of the American Christmas carol "The Little Drummer Boy" interspersed with the slow rumble of a traditional Japanese taiko drum that sounds like a massive throbbing heart beat. Against this backdrop, several men meet in Tokyo's bathhouses, love hotels and cruising spots for intimate encounters, watched over by a glamorous drag version of Amaterasu Omikami, the Shinto goddess of the Sun played by Japanese activist and artist MADAME BONJOUR JOHNJ. Like a queer Santa Claus, the goddess leaves each couple a condom in a bejeweled wrapper as a gift and blessing for the night.

I guess that the bottom line for me is that while good sensible fear should be a part of HIV education, if you really want to reach the target audience you have to remember that sex is also just plain fun.

The China Delusion

Drezner puts the country in perspective: 

 If one measures power strictly according to GDP at market exchange rates, then the United States is roughly 250 percent more powerful than China. If one uses a combination of metrics — as does, for example, the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s 2025 project — then China possesses a little less than half of America’s relative power. Even on the financial side, the U.S. still reigns, and, hype notwithstanding, the dollar is not going anywhere as the world’s reserve currency. The renminbi could be an alternative in the far future — but after the 2008 financial crisis, China is loath to open up its capital markets. Even by the less tangible metrics of soft power, the United States still outperforms China handily in new public opinion surveys from the Pacific Rim by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Right now, the United States is vastly more powerful than the People's Republic of China. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.

Yes, right now. And we can stay that way with fiscal reform. But not without it. And soon.

(Hat tip: Pejman)

A Journey, Not An Escape, Ctd

A reader writes:

You may want to consider a Poseur Alert for your most recent reader: "After I came down from my Oregon sky odyssey, I felt a brief urge to return – to escape back – into the third-eye-pleasure-dome." Give me a freaking break. I can't think of many recent Poseur Alerts that top the pomposity of that sentence!

Another writes:

"I love acid.  If I had some, I'd take some and hole up this weekend, watching old movies on TV.  But the idea that it gives you some deep insight into the world is bogus."

I'm the guy who sent that to you.  Since no one seems to be agreeing with me, I'd like to try to defend it a little bit.

There isn't any doubt that psychedelics seem to bestow insights on those who take them. Almost everyone who trips says that they got a lot out of it. What I'm questioning is how real that is. I'm saying that as a person who has tripped many many times, and who has done so in the company of a great many people.

These drugs distort our perceptions. It's very difficult to get a handle on how much time has passed when you're tripping, for example. What I'm arguing now is that they also distort our ability to accurately determine how significant ideas are. They tend to make things seem more significant than they really are.

Obviously, it's pretty hard to get a handle on whether or not such an exaggeration actually happens. Who's to say how significant an idea really is? The only meaningful way to gauge it, I think, is to try to see if people really do grow and bring back things from the trip that make them better people. My contention is that acid and shrooms don't really help much.

First, people don't really change that much after they trip. This is something that people talk about in books about psychedelics – Ram Dass, for example. He said that the problem with psychedelics is that you always come back down. That's why he started to study religion. And second, if you hang around with people who have taken psychedelics, they don't seem to be unusually wise.

You wrote about the documentary "Into Great Silence" when it came out. I think that if we were able to talk to the monks who have devoted themselves to prayer and to that lifestyle, we'd pick up on something from them – that they'd be unusually calm, that they'd be centered. You simply don't get the same feeling from people who take psychedelics. In fact, if you hang around with people who take too many of them, you often get a fairly negative vibe off of people.

The problem is that those monks are probably on the right track. And that means that becoming wise takes time and practice. It would really be great if you could get it from a pill, or even from a book. But I just don't think it works that way.

I'm someone who bought into what you might call psychedelic spirituality in a big way as a teenager, and I had a couple of very large experiences that seemed more or less miraculous at the time. But I always came down.

I know that the claims of the people you're quoting aren't terribly extravagant. But when I was a kid, people were really pushing the idea that psychedelics lead to spiritual enlightenment. I don't know if it's fair to call it a con, because I think the people who were putting those ideas forward believed them. But I do think it was a big wrong turn. At least it was for me personally. I think that the notion that psychedelics impart wisdom is a Bad Idea, in very much the same way that the notion that Che was a really great guy is a Bad Idea. They are things that are easy to believe in so you don't challenge things too much. I think I would have been better off watching a screening of Into Great Silence.

I really love psychedelics. As far as I'm concerned, you haven't really lived until you've seen Fanny and Alexander while you're tripping. I'm just skeptical of the people who come down from the mountain with special insights.

Another adds to the "Medicinal Mushrooms" thread:

This morning while visiting Johns Hopkins I came across a call for volunteers "with a cancer diagnosis to participate in a scientific study of self-exploration and personal meaning' using 'entheogen psilocybin." I came across it because my wife is a cancer survivor and we spend lots of time (now thankfully, just for follow-ups) visiting various doctors on their campuses.

Draw whatever conclusions from this what you will. The physical toll of cancer and its treatments are horrible. The psychological toll on the patient and even on the family are pretty awful, too. While I must note that my wife would never in a million years take mushrooms, even for the benefit of a study like this, I'm glad some other poor couple that is also dealing with this hell might come across it. Who knows if a mushroom trip would help a cancer patient with self exploration and personal meaning. The fact that we are open to considering that it might is a good thing.

The Dish touched upon that treatment here. More science on the subject here and here.

Feasting With Panthers

Adam Serwer and Jennifer Rubin are still arguing about the New Black Panther Party controversy. In the latest round, Serwer complains about “the feverish alternate universe of racial resentment in which some conservatives seem to reside”:

It’s not just that they casually accuse the president and the attorney general of being “allies” with a black hate group, it’s the implication that there was some political benefit to this relationship, as though the black community as a whole is somehow deeply moved by the NBPP’s racial hatred, and the narrowing of the case represents a kind of quid pro quo. We’re supposed to believe that without the racist rhetoric of the New Black Panther Party, black people would never have been motivated to go to the polls for Barack Obama?

That black separatism has some broad mainstream appeal among African-Americans? This gets more disgusting the more one thinks about it, which is why conservatives rarely go beyond mere implication.

As to whether or not there is “colorblind” enforcement of civil rights laws, I find the use of the term in this context, by both liberals and conservatives, to be a symptom of America’s near-pathological affinity for political correctness. The Civil Rights Division was created by President Dwight Eisenhower in order to ensure that the federal government could enforce the civil rights of black Americans in the South during Jim Crow. There’s no question that civil rights laws cover Americans of all backgrounds — and indeed, the voting section under Obama has intervened on behalf of white voters. But civil rights enforcement can’t be anymore “race-neutral” than our own society or history. Ensuring that people’s rights are protected regardless of race can’t actually be achieved through color-blindness.

That’s Colbert-bait. And true.

Will On Palin

A reader writes:

You asked, "[W]hy did Charles Krauthammer and George Will endorse her in 2008 if she is still so patently unqualified now?" George Will endorsed Palin in 2008?   Really?   I don't remember that. Can you provide a link?

In fact, at the time Will seemed to say that McCain's choice of Palin was baffling, and reflected McCain's own unquestioning self righteousness.  From his column shortly after her attachment to the ticket:

But is there any evidence that she has thought about such matters? [limits of federal govermment's powers.]  McCain's selection of her is applied McCainism — a visceral judgment by one who is confidently righteous. But the viscera are not the seat of wisdom.

I think you are making a lazy, breezy statement saying that Will endorsed Palin in 2008.

Indeed, Will also said a month before Election Day that she was "obviously not qualified to be president." But my criterion for endorsement is a simple one: did he back the GOP ticket? Yes, he did. When that definitionally means a chance of a Palin presidency, I don't think his positioning then or now gets him in the clear. To my mind, anyone who endorsed a national ticket with Palin on it endorsed Palin.

Mass Circumcision

Shaun Raviv reports on male genital mutilation efforts in Swaziland, where just "under 20 percent of Swaziland’s 1 million people are HIV positive." The data is there that it can help stem HIV transmission, but, as always, there are unintended consequences:

Many Swazi men want to get circumcised, “but most of them for the wrong reason,” says Bheki Vilane, the national director of Marie Stopes Swazi land, a non-governmental organization performing circumcisions. He’s voicing the main concern about circumcision as an HIV-prevention strategy: will it make Swazi men even more sexually reckless than they are already? “Some of the men have the misconception that they’ll be 100 percent safe.” To dispel this myth, NGOs are ensuring that every patient goes through counseling before and after the procedure. Each man is told to use condoms, and also given the option to be tested for HIV, which about 85 percent agree to do.

The Missing, Ctd

A reader writes:

My wife and I adopted our daughter from China seven years ago, a process that, at the time took less than two years. We are currently awaiting our second child – a process which has now entered its fifth year. When we first considered adoption (rather than fertility drugs and other procedures), we investigated public and private adoption here in Canada.

What we found was disheartening: the wait for a public adoption was a minimum ten years for an infant.  Private adoption, while shorter, was more like a lottery, with the birth mother choosing a family and still retaining the right to change her mind as much as 30 days after the baby was placed with the family.  Good friends of ours actually had a baby for 25 days when the birth mother changed her mind.

Our foster homes are overflowing with children.  They are lucky to have a public system capable of taking them in when their parents fail them (abuse, drug addiction, criminal activity, unsafe environments).  But their luck ends there.

In Canada, our system stills weighs heavily the rights of the biological parent over those of the child.  As such, children removed from bad homes are kept for six months, while the parent is given an opportunity to straighten themselves out. While this seems humane, it is often followed by extensions when the parent has not quite collected themselves.  So the child is kept in the foster care system, moving from foster care, back to home, back to foster care.  While this happens, critical early development months are lost. By the time courts decide enough is enough, the children are often too old to be wanted by couples seeking to start a family.

I wish that it were different, that families would adopt these children.  But those of us unable to have children of our own want to start families. Our motivation is not charity.  We want infants, not the challenges of an older child put through a foster care system which does its best, but fails to provide what these children need: family and early development.

The solution it seems to me is to place more emphasis on the child's well being, and to respect those critical first two years upon which everything else is founded.  If we did, those children would have permanent homes and families in EVERY SINGLE case.

As Steve Martin says in Parenthood: everybody needs to have a license to drive, but any asshole can have a child. What is happening today is nothing less than a tragedy.