“I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford,” wrote college student Martin Luther King Jr. in a 1944 letter to his mother. John Connard-Malley, a documentary-maker and high school student from Simsbury, Conn., a suburb of Hartford, argues that Dr. King’s summer there “made a huge impact” on the civil rights leader’s life. For there he tasted a non-segregated life, and there he was elected to lead religious services. (The Associated Press)
Jan 242011
The UK government is working on proposals to require employers to grant new parents a total of one year’s paid leave, to be split between mother and father, possibly with an incentive to men to take some paternity leave, The Telegraph reports.
Jan 242011
Miss America Teresa Scanlan, 17, says age doesn’t matter in winning the crown. (The Daily Caller)
What does Internet porn tell us about human sexuality? Natasha Vargas-Cooper suggests that it reveals the nature of male sexuality — and thereby shows sexual equality to be a feminist fantasy. (The Atlantic)
In short, from the fourth page:
If the shadowy cabal of Internet pornographers posited by Dines were not able to use 30-second clips of porn as bread crumbs to entice men away from their true sexual personas, what sort of “authentic sexuality” would males possess? Dines seems to have in mind a Rousseauistic pygmy race of sexually neutered males; perhaps many feminists (and perhaps many fathers of daughters, and perhaps many sensible and civilized people, for that matter) would applaud this emasculated masculinity as progress—but we’re never going to achieve it. While sexual aggression and the desire to debase women may not be what arouse all men, they are certainly an animating force of male sexuality. They may be unattractive and even, if taken to extremes, dangerous, but they’re not, perhaps alas, deviant. Leaving aside for the moment the argument that some things that might be sordid and even ugly can also be arousing and satisfying, the main problem with the new anti-porn critics is their naive assumption that if only we could blot out Internet porn, then the utopia of sexual equality would be achieved. But equality in sex can’t be achieved. Internet porn exposes that reality; it may even intensify that reality; it doesn’t create it.
I don’t completely agree, but I do think she’s onto something.
Jan 242011
A man arrested for displeasing airport security by failing to show ID and recording video has been acquitted of all charges without mounting a defense, the Seattle Weekly reports. In other words, the jury found that the prosecution’s case was insufficient to support a conviction even without the defense making a case of its own. Before the trial, KOB Eyewitness News (Albuquerque) noted that it was to be the first criminal trial arising out of an incident at airport security.
It’s remarkable how much obedience the TSA has been able to exact from Americans before putting anyone on trial.
“We all came to college/But we did not come for knowledge,” says an old University of Virginia song. Now two professors, one from U.Va. and one from New York University, have released a book suggesting the song may be all too true: 45 percent of undergrads in their study “demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college.”; half didn’t take any courses requiring more than 20 pages of writing. (The New York Times)
Jan 242011
Considering that Martin Luther King Jr. stressed the importance of responding nonviolently when assaulted during a protest, one might assume he’d responded to the many death threats he received in much the same way: by being prepared to go down to martyrdom rather than kill a would-be assassin.
But it turns out Dr. King owned guns — and even sought a concealed-carry permit. The authorities, of course, denied him the permit. (The Huffington Post)
As gun-rights advocates always point out: If you want to oppress someone, it helps to disarm him.
Donald E. Graham, chairman of the company that owns Kaplan University and The Washington Post, argues that harsh regulations on for-profit colleges would reduce educational opportunities for the neediest students. (The Wall Street Journal)
Notice, however, his eagerness for some regulation. One must wonder why he is unwilling to trust the market: From whom does he wish to be protected?
Jan 242011
Some high-school classes require you to do your own research. But The Washington Post reports that at one competitive public high school, three Advanced Placement World History teachers are forbidding doing your own research. Looking things up on Wikipedia would be cheating — and so would discussing what you’re studying with people who were there.
Can you imagine a better way to teach intellectual dependence?
One question, though: Why is a public school trying to teach smart, intellectually ambitious students to be intellectually dependent? The virtue they should be teaching is independence.
Not to mention that how to do research is supposed to be one of the things you learn in a high-school history course.
Jan 242011
If you want to be a Catholic online personality, says the Pope, you must do more than proclaim Catholic ideas and get a lot of hits: you need to maintain a “Christian style presence.” (The Washington Post)
From his full statement:
When people exchange information, they are already sharing themselves, their view of the world, their hopes, their ideals. It follows that there exists a Christian way of being present in the digital world: this takes the form of a communication which is honest and open, responsible and respectful of others. To proclaim the Gospel through the new media means not only to insert expressly religious content into different media platforms, but also to witness consistently, in one’s own digital profile and in the way one communicates choices, preferences and judgements that are fully consistent with the Gospel, even when it is not spoken of specifically.
The sound point here for people of all worldviews is that even online, actions — actions that consist largely of words — still speak louder than words: Your online message is your online personality as much as it is the ideas you explicitly endorse. For example, if I argue (as I do) that some respect is due to everyone who tries to figure out what a good human life requires and pursue it, then I ought to show that respect when dealing with the ideas of people with whom I disagree on fundamental questions (e.g. the Pope).