AllenKonigsberg

I went to a religious high school, which had only boys. Absent the company of young women our own age, some among us obsessed over any female teacher under the age of 30. The most fascinating of these was a Spanish teacher who had been a medic in a previous career and showed us photographs of herself in fatigues, carrying an Uzi, in some desert setting about which she tended to be vague.
She sent copies of these photographs to Soldier of Fortune magazine and would complain to the class (in Spanish, naturally), when they declined to print them.
Little kids have fantasy lives -- as cowboys or princesses or soldiers, or whatever. The best we can do as parents is to guide them away from fantasies that may be destructive. The princess thing is boring and encourages conformity but I doubt it's particularly harmful, and given the way these things develop, some fraction of little princesses must grow up to reject their childish fantasies and embrace goth culture, or gun culture, or something else unsavory.
That Spanish teacher's fantasy life had only a modest impact on my education -- specifically that, though I can't remember the Spanish word for a pitcher of water, I will never forget that "ametralladora" means "machine gun." posted 03/31/2008 at 14:27:28

In my neighborhood, one can typically see vans parked on major thoroughfares emblazoned with pro-Mugabe posters. This is not just in election season -- they're out there year-round. The major theme seems to be that Mugabe is a great liberator of Africa, that anybody who says otherwise is a puppet of the U.S. Government, which wants to keep the black man down, and that any ill effects felt by the people of Zimbabwe are the result of U.S. manipulation and skullduggery.

I've always suspected that most people who see this nonsense believe it. posted 03/30/2008 at 21:21:50

How quietly can he be doing this, if it's on the front page of Huffington Post? posted 03/27/2008 at 16:18:36

The comparison to the 1960s seems odd -- you can't seriously believe that the workplace opportunities and conditions were better for women then than they are now? I remember seeing a magazine ad a few years ago, I believe from the early 1960s, which purported to depict a modern, liberated workplace by showing a secretary changing a baby's diaper at work --- HER BOSS'S BABY. "You've come a long way," etc.

Are women with infants at home as productive as those without? If not, should they get paid the same, and promoted at the same rate?

posted 03/20/2008 at 18:13:12