Not Yet A Buddha

by Gary Farber

This new Google tool, which Bob Mackey mentioning reminded me that I'd bookmarked for blogging Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers by Patricia Cohen, is truly useful and neat, at first look: Books Ngram Viewer.  Look up key words, and phrases, and thus track concepts over time, and much else, in hundreds of millions of books over the past couple of centuries, by frequency.

Then dig.  Yum.

Some link-dumping for you: How To Use PeaceTalk 101 by Suzette Haden Elgin.  Check out her writings on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. 

Use of some of these techniques, which I first started reading Elgin's writings on in the early Eighties, might be helpful to some, but not to others. 

See also popularizer Deborah Tannen, though I agree with Elgin's critique of Tannen's extreme over-reliance on gender stereotyping.   As usual, I don't endorse everything either writer says, but they're both worth reading, in my opinion.

Which could lead one to G.K. Chesterton on this topic, if one ever feels cranky:

There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word “suffer,” and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word “gladly,” and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.

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by hilzoy

"It is difficult to understand why she stayed in this awful relationship, given that she was not risking starvation and had no children with her abuser. Which is why, no matter how many times Steiner and Marcotte and the others tell them not to, people keep asking the question. And it's terribly important to do exactly that. Asking why women participate in destructive relationships is a mark of respect. The amazing thing is that, four decades after the birth of feminism, we are still arguing about it."

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by hilzoy

"It is difficult to understand why she stayed in this awful relationship, given that she was not risking starvation and had no children with her abuser. Which is why, no matter how many times Steiner and Marcotte and the others tell them not to, people keep asking the question. And it's terribly important to do exactly that. Asking why women participate in destructive relationships is a mark of respect."

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by hilzoy

"If it turns out that early faith commitments constitute the unexpressed but indispensable basis of Rawls's thought, then one may wonder whether there are other grounds on which those of different faiths, or no faith at all, can affirm the validity of his conception of justice as fairness."

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by hilzoy

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by hilzoy

Isaac Chotiner at The Plank found — well, read it for yourself:

“A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.”

Definitely. Because of all the parts of Dark Knight where the filmmakers had real scope for artistic choices, what the Bat Sign looks like is obviously at the top of the list.

But it gets worse: Andrew Klavan, who wrote this, moves from surreal stupidity to moral philosophy.

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by hilzoy

Yesterday, NPR had a fascinating story about two six year olds who are transgender. You can either read or listen to it here; if you have twenty three minutes, I recommend listening to it. One thing that becomes very clear when you listen to it is that these are not kids (biologically, boys) whose parents put the idea of being girls into their heads. They came up with it on their own. They played with dolls, not trucks; they identified with female characters, not male ones; one decided to go trick or treating as Dorothy when he was two and a half (and that’s not the half of it; read or listen to the story.) As for the other:

“Around the age of 3, Jonah started taking his mother Pam’s clothing. He would borrow a long T-shirt and belt, and fashion it into a dress. This went on for months — with Jonah constantly adjusting his costume to make it better — until one day, Pam discovered her son crying inconsolably. He explained to his mother that he simply could not get the T-shirt to look right, she says.

Pam remembers watching her child mournfully finger his outfit. She says she knew what he wanted. “At that point I just said, you know, ‘You really want a dress to wear, don’t you?’ And [Jonah’s] face lit up, and [she] was like, ‘Yes!'”

That afternoon, Pam, her sister and Jonah piled into the family car.

“I thought [she]* was gonna hyperventilate and faint because [she] was so incredibly happy. … Before then, or since then, I don’t think I have seen [her] so out of [her] mind happy as that drive to Target that day to pick out [her] dress,” Pam says.

Pam allowed Jonah to get two dresses, but felt incredibly conflicted about it. Even though Jonah asked, she wouldn’t allow him to buy any more dresses for a year afterward, so Jonah wore those two dresses every day, nothing else, until Pam got sick of looking at them.”

Eventually, both sets of parents sought counseling, and got two counselors with very different approaches. One believes in trying to get children like this to stop trying to be the opposite gender. The other does not.

I can see both sides of this question. I ask myself: suppose I had a transgender kid, and there was some completely benign thing I could do — providing a diet with more of some vitamin, for instance — that would make my child completely comfortable with his or her biological gender. (Note: to count as benign, it would have to be something like dietary modification, as opposed to telling my kid to act more like a boy or girl.) Would I do it? I think so. Being transgender is not just no fun at all; it involves pretty serious surgery and a lifetime on hormones, and if something like a dietary modification, undertaken early enough, could spare my kid this, I think I’d go for it.

[UPDATE: Hob, in comments, notes that being transgender doesn’t necessarily mean surgery. True enough, and I was too quick to say that it did. Hob also says that I make it sound unduly grim: “many of my friends were having no fun at all for some part of their lives, but they are now.” To be clear: I didn’t mean that it’s never fun (and should have been clearer on that; of course it can be.) I should probably have said: it can be tough, which is more like what I meant. Also, I meant to include the parts when people don’t have fun: the part before you figure out what’s going on and what to do about it, for instance. Though, on reflection, I should probably have hedged that too: maybe for some people it’s never confusing at all, and people are never bigoted and vile, and there is no employment discrimination, and so forth. END UPDATE.]

But that hypothetical assumes something crucial, namely: that gender identification can be modified. Maybe in some cases it can: human nature being endlessly various, I’m sure there are boys out there who decide to be girls, or vice versa, but for whom this is malleable. (Thus the word ‘decide’, which would otherwise be completely question-begging.) I’m also sure that there are a lot of transmen and transwomen whose gender identification is not modifiable in any way we know of: people who try as hard as they can not to want to be a different gender, without success. And before I decided what to do in response to the fact that my hypothetical child did not identify with the body s/he was born with, I would want to have some idea which s/he seemed likely to be.

Here’s what happened to the two kids.

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