There’s little doubt that sexism is pervasive in most spheres of life. But I’d like to think, in modern western societies, that we’re (at least gesturing at) moving towards knocking these biases down. That belief took a shot earlier this week when I read this story. Terence Kealey, vice chancellor at Buckingham University in the UK, said that when female students ask male professors for help they should “Enjoy her! She’s a perk.” He continues: “She doesn’t yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife.” People were in an uproar when Larry Summers, former Harvard President, made comments to the effect that women didn’t have the intrinsic ability to work at the highest levels of science. His comments were surely wrongheaded. But Kealey’s are not only sexist, but in an indirect way, condones predatory behavior in male professors towards their female students.

If you’re reading this, well, then you can read. You were probably sufficiently motivated as a kid to get into reading that you were able to develop the requisite skills and perhaps even developed an interest in actively reading on your own. But this isn’t the case for everyone. In poor, urban areas, where schools simply don’t have books or children aren’t encouraged to read, illiteracy is a big problem.

My friend, E., is collecting donations for Read for the Record. She says, “Jumpstart is entering its annual to get books to children who need them. As some of you know, each year we choose a flagship book that will be read to children in schools across the United States. This year I am happy to say we will be reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar! If you are in the Atlanta area, I’d be happy to host you as a volunteer reader in the morning on October 8th at one of my three preschool site partners. It is lots of fun, and the sites are very easy to get to.”

So, if you’d like to donate to this cause, visit this site. She adds “It costs $10 to donate one book ($8.99 for the book plus shipping). Because I deliver these books every year, I know that each and every book is donated is delivered to a child who has few to no books in his or her home library.”

Most of you spend–”even in this ‘economic climate’”–more than $10 a night drinking. I think you can afford to donate at least one book to this worthwhile cause.

Conservatives are perturbed over President Obama’s education talk planned for this coming Tuesday. The planned fifteen to twenty minute speech is said to be about personal responsibility, staying at, and succeeding in school. Considering our current reverse brain drain, and the pitiful amount of science and math majors in our universities, it seems like a good idea. But conservatives are more than a little upset. The claim is that the President is trying to “indoctrinate” their youth and push a “socialist agenda.” The only problem is the national media have once again taken the bait. The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, AP, and others ran stories this morning about the “issue.” This outrage has been especially bad in Texas where several large school districts have opted out of the speech.

The White House has tried to make concessions by making the speech available in text on Monday morning and editing some of the supplemental materials that some found objectionable. It doesn’t matter. I think Conservatives just don’t want their children acutely exposed to Obama. Let’s also not forget the fact Ronald Regan did the same thing in ‘88, and so did Bush ‘91. What did Regan talk about that day you ask? Tax cuts for gods sake! The Republican party needs to take a long look in the mirror and stop allowing idiots to be the face of their party.

What’s funny about this whole debacle is that the White House saw it coming. President Obama perhaps figured that the kids who were not allowed to watch his speech would later be pulled in by this sweet Nascar PSA.

Rachel Maddow–who is quickly becoming a BYL favorite (or maybe just mine)–is no stranger to the political talk show circuit. (See, e.g., our earlier post on her appearances on Meet the Press and Hardball.) But she’s also making an impression on the late night talk show scene. Here are a couple of clips of her from appearances on Conan O’Brien’s and Jimmy Fallon’s respective shows. (This includes a clip of her amateur mixologist skills.)

A few days ago I posted on BYL’s Facebook page a link to a short Dissent piece on Ted Kennedy. (That piece can be found here.) That piece elicited response from a friend of mine. To get some conversation going here I’ll paraphrase his comments below.

• Dissent often quotes Richard Rorty who, in praise of the magazine, called it the most important publication for the American left. So when did they become “…fodder for limo liberals (snark intended)?”
• On Kennedy’s effectiveness, it turns out the “lion” was “willing to get into bed with the hunter after it was done roaring.” (Read this as meaning that compared to other liberals and progressives Kennedy was able to compromise and get things done.)
• Finally, on Kennedy being more liberal than his brothers, it’s perhaps the case of comparing people out of context. That is, “his brothers had a very different compromise environment.” (On this point, think of comparing athletes against other athletes in their own generation instead of comparing, say, Rod Laver against Pete Sampras against Roger Federer.)

So, food for thought. Things to mull over, etc.

Health care reform is on the forefront of political news these days. One aspect of Obama’s proposal has polarized the American right and left–the public option. (The polarizing effect of this piece is so great–as is Obama’s desire for bipartisan politics–that he’s thought of dropping it altogether. This move is perhaps having its own deleterious effects.) Town hall meetings have been marred by disruptions and Obama has routinely been called a socialist. (And, in other situations, he’s been compared to Hitler.) What’s striking from all this hubbub over the public option, however, isn’t rationing, euthanization of the elderly, or a government monopoly on health care. Rather, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding over what the public option actually is. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight has a point-by-point proposal for getting a better hold on the public’s view on the public option. These include (1) Make clear that the ‘public option’ refers unambiguously to a type of health insurance, and not the actual provision of health care services by the government; (2) Make clear that by ‘public,’ you mean ‘government’; (3) Avoid using the term ‘Medicare’ when referring to the public option; (4) Make clear that the public option is, in fact, an option; and (5) Ask in clear and unambiguous terms whether the respondent supports the public option–not how important they think it is. Forcing people to think about the public option in this manner surely will help politicians gain a better understanding of what their constituents want. And, perhaps more importantly, it will force citizens to think more clearly about what they want for themselves and others.

Rachel Maddow is quickly becoming a firebrand for the left. This past weekend she was on NBC’s Meet the Press. Notably, she argued with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Here’s footage of them locking horns.

And, for kicks, here’s an earlier video of her on Hardball arguing with Pat Buchanan about SCHIP.

Human Rights Watch have just released a 124 page long report, “Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police,” detailing abuses by India’s police. (There’s also a smaller, 12 page report for those of you who don’t have the time or the stomach to work through the longer version.) The report details, among other things, the deteriorating state of the Indian police, human rights violations, the lack of accountability, and, finally, HRW’s recommendations.

For a country that heralds itself as the world’s largest democracy, the picture painted by the HRW report isn’t pretty. In January 2009, “Officer Singh” told HRW: “This week, I was told to do an ‘encounter.’ I am looking for my target. I will eliminate him.” The “encounter” Officer Singh refers to is “the practice of taking into custody and extrajudicially executing an individual, then claiming that the victim died after initiating a shoot-out with police. Officer Singh says he wanted to be an honest cop. He says, “[n]o one is born corrupt. It’s a tailor-made system: if you’re not corrupt, you won’t survive.”

But the story doesn’t stop there. There’s also torture. One torture victim, an eighteen year old boy, says, “[a]fter they finished tea they pulled off my shirt and trousers. The constable kicked me, and then constables came and held my hands and legs. They drenched me with a bucket of cold water…For one and a half hours, I was beaten like this…. [On the third night] the SI [sub-inspector] and SO [station officer] pressed their feet against my thighs. I felt my veins, it felt like they would burst. They said, “We’ll make you impotent and you’ll be of no use.” The police, however, are unrepentant about their actions. A constable from Bangalore, for example, remarks, “We do use some extralegal methods. You might disagree, but we cannot do all work by the book. Then the police would be completely ineffective.”

These are only a few snippets from the report. India’s population, as most well know,  features one of the world’s largest underclasses, which includes a pronounced north-south gap. The rich, and middle-class, can, then, if it comes down to it, bribe the police. But this isn’t an option for the socially, politically, and economically marginalized lower classes and untouchables. There’s obviously a lot of noise about India as an emerging economic (super)power. But there’s been substantially less attention paid to issues like police abuse, class warfare (in the literal, not Palin, sense), and violence against females.

Since its publication in 1971, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has shaped the conversation about justice. Rawls’s writings have attracted many followers and equally many critics. Rawls’s “difference principle” is one aspect of his theory of justice which has been especially critiqued. Since delivering his Tanner Lecture critiquing Rawls on this score (”Incentives, Inequality, and Community”), G.A. Cohen spent nearly the last twenty years further scrutinizing Rawls’s methodology. His arguments can be found in two books–If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? and Rescuing Justice and Equality. I’m very sad to have learned that Jerry Cohen passed away this morning after suffering a massive stroke sometime yesterday afternoon.

I was very fortunate to have heard Cohen while I was at Harvard. He first delivered a paper on conservatism. (As he wrote in his paper, “Things ain’t what they used to be.”) The next day he debated UCLA’s AJ Julius on the topic of justice. (Julius has a fantastic paper, “Basic Structure and the Value of Equality,” in which he engages Cohen’s critique. He also had a handout which looked somewhat similar to this. [I also think there's no greater respect you can pay your teacher or someone you've learned from then working on a large project engaging one of their ideas.]) I was intending to leave after the debate but some of my friends who had previously gone to Oxford told me to stick around. They told me that when Cohen was an undergrad at McGill he was so poor that he’d do standup comedy to get some money together. So, after dinner, Cohen went to the front of the auditorium where, a couple of hours earlier, he’d locked his intellectual horns with Julius’s, and did some of the funniest comedy I’ve ever heard. His books aren’t easy to to read, and you’ll need to be familiar with Rawls to understand the latter two, but his writing is first-rate philosophy.

I was on Netflix the other day looking for a movie to stream when I chanced upon Two Lovers. The film was well-received by the critics. But it’s perhaps most notable as Joaquin Phoenix’s last film before he retired to become a rapper. Some may think this a curious development. And perhaps it is. But actors, I suppose like any other sort of person, are prone to seemingly eccentric behavior. Anyone remember when, in the mid to late 90s, Bill Murray announced he was retiring from acting to devote himself to trying to make it to the NBA? In that case, one might argue, Murray hadn’t put out a great film in a while, and so a diversion, like trying to be a professional basketball player, might be warranted.

But Joaquin Phoenix is on the top of his game. He’s had a slew of very well received films, including Two Lovers and, before that, Walk the Line. He’s also involved with his work in animal rights. (The animal rights film Earthlings, mentioned in an earlier post, was narrated by Phoenix.) So, when I was reading about his recent film online, I was certainly surprised to find he was retiring from acting to become a rapper. And I was more surprised to see a recent interview of him on Letterman

and another video of him rapping in Miami and jumping into the crowd to attack a heckler

Make what you will of these two videos. Gwyneth Paltrow, his costar in Two Lovers, thinks it’s all a hoax.

(I know, it’s not political. But I just had to indulge myself.)