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21 Jun 2004 — Korach the tax protestor

In response to Korach’s rebellion, Moses tells God, “Do not pay attention to their gift; I have not taken one donkey from them, and I have not harmed one of them” (Numbers 16:15). I pointed this out to my wife, contrasting it with Samuel’s statement on his deathbed, “Answer me, before the Eternal and his anointed: whose ox did I take? Whose donkey did I take?” (I Samuel 11), and she expounded it as follows:

This verse gives us the clue about what Korach and company are rebelling against. They’re not objecting to, say, the civil code that Moses has transmitted from God, or the organization of judges to hear claims that one Jew may have against another. They’re objecting to the tax structure that requires them to give a certain portion of their wealth to the priests. (A midrash quoted and translated here has Korach telling the Israelites a sob story about a widow who tried to eke out a living and was frustrated at every turn by the restrictions that Aharon placed on her property.) Moses essentially told God, “By setting my relatives up as members of this privileged class, you are creating this appearance of impropriety, so you have to do something to solve this problem.”

But without this institution of communal sacrifices, supported by tithes from everyone in the community, what would people have done? There would still be sacrifices, but people would only be sacrificing their own animals on their own altars for their own needs. And if everybody could perform sacrifices to God in private, then a person wouldn’t need much temptation before offering a sacrifice to an idol on the side, just to play it safe.

(By contrast, when Samuel is challenging people to identify any of their property that is in his hands, he is reminding them of his warnings about what would happen when the Jews got the king they were nagging him for.)

18 Jun 2004 — Big AmIHotOrNot.com Is Watching You

Matthew Yglesias responds to the laments of his elders regarding slovenly men:

Free marketers like Sullivan and Volokh are too blinded by ideology to see the compelling need for government intervention. A temporary regulatory solution could help us resolve this mess. For the next five years, say, straight women must “insist on only dating hot guys” (we’ll have to empanel a “Federal Hot Guy Commission” consisting of “shallow, beauty-obsessed [gay] males” to rank everyone) and see if the hot guy supply increases in response.

For shame, Matt. What kind of liberal asks the government to stick its nose into the little black books of its citizens, when good old-fashioned taxing and spending can yield the same results?

see also Belle Waring and Ezra Klein

09 Jun 2004 — Learn from the masters

Sgt. Javal S. Davis, 372nd MP Company, stated in his sworn statement…that he had heard [Military Intelligence officers] insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked what MI said, he stated: “Loosen this guy up for us. Make sure he has a bad night. Make sure he gets the treatment.”

—Article 15–6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade

[B]ecause [the Federal torture statute, 18 USC §2340] requires that a defendant act with the sepecific intent to inflict severe pain, the infliction of such pain must be the defendant’s precise objective…

[E]ven if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith…

[I]f a defendant has a good faith belief that his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture…

If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaida terrorist network. In that case, [the Department of Justice] belives that he could argue that the excutive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.

—Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism, a.k.a. the “torture memo”

“My colleagues had similar experiences. It was the only possible way to obtain results. The regulations were observed; not a prisoner was actually touched. But it happened that they had to witness—so to speak accidentally—the execution of their fellow prisoners. The effect of such scenes is partly mental, partly physical. Another example: there are showers and baths for reasons of hygeine. That in winter the heating and hot-water pipes did not always function, was due to technical difficulties; and the duration of the baths depended on the attendants. Sometimes, again, the heating and hot-water apparatus functioned all too well; that equally depended on the attendants. They were all old comrades; it was not necessary to give them detailed instructions; they understood what was at stake.”

“That’ll about do,” said Ivanov.

“You asked me how I came to discover my theory and I am explaining it to you,” said Gletkin. “What matters is, that one should keep in mind the logical necessity of it all; otherwise one is a cynic, like you. It is getting late and I must go.”

—Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

see also Balkinization and Discourse.net banging their heads against the wall

09 Jun 2004 — Attention, Mac users

Remember that recent Mac OS X security hole that allowed a malicious Web-page author to take over your computer with a specially formatted hyperlink? Were you so embarrassed by this flaw that you could no longer find it in your heart to sneer at the security, or lack thereof, in Microsoft Windows?

You may resume your sneering.

via Slashdot

08 Jun 2004 — Next time, we will seek alternative accommodations, such as a cardboard box under a bridge

Paul Hanley
President
Ramada Franchise Systems, Inc.
1 Sylvan Way
Parsippany, NJ 07054

Dear Mr. Hanley:

We stayed at the Ramada Inn Lake Shore (4900 S. Lake Shore Dr., Chicago IL) this past weekend (check-in June 4, out June 6; two adults plus a toddler) for the Gordon-Dumas wedding. We assumed that booking a room at a hotel in a nationally known chain would assure us of a reliable reservation for a clean room that would be reasonably quiet at night. On all three counts, the Ramada failed us.

The mother of the groom checked in on Wednesday, June 2, discovered that the Ramada had lost her reservation, and called to warn us. When we checked our own status, we discovered that the Ramada had two reservations for us, both wrong. The first reservation had been made through hotels.com before we knew of a wedding rate, and was cancelled in May. The hotels.com Web site confirmed that the reservation had been cancelled, but the Ramada Inn Lake Shore knew nothing of the cancellation, and we had to ask hotels.com to fax another notice to the Ramada. The second reservation had been made at the wedding rate by calling the Ramada Inn Lake Shore reservation desk, but when we asked for a faxed confirmation, the reservation in the Ramada’s computer was for only the second of the two nights we had requested. When we arrived, we discovered that the Ramada had lost the reservation for a third family. Since their last name was unique among the wedding attendees, we know that the Ramada did not simply confuse them with the many other “Gordon” and “Dumas” reservations that had been made for that weekend.

When I made the second reservation, I requested a refrigerator for the room—traveling with a toddler is far easier if you can keep food cold and ready for breakfast and snacks. Roxanne, the Ramada’s liaison with the wedding party, told me that the hotel didn’t reserve refrigerators in advance, but there were “quite a few” to go around, and “it shouldn’t be a problem” for us to obtain one. When we checked in, the person at the desk couldn’t tell us whether or not one was available, and said that one would be delivered if it was. Because we had brought refrigerated food for our son, we ended up taking the fridge that the mother of the groom had obtained several nights before. She had been given to understand that the one she had was the last one.

We checked in at the Ramada and were assigned room #340, which smelled like stale urine. The friend who had picked us up at the airport commented that it smelled like a “flophouse.” When we complained about the odor to the registration desk, we were offered room #337 instead, but it smelled even more strongly of urine. Since other relatives had told us that the Ramada was completely booked by then, we decided to keep our original room, asked them to clean it again, and opened the windows. (If we had not been staying at the Ramada for a family wedding taking place there, we would have checked out immediately and moved to the nearest hotel with a room open, regardless of cost.) At that time, we asked for an additional set of towels and toiletries, since the standard two towels, one soap, and one shampoo were not enough for two adults and a child.

When we came back to the Ramada about four hours later, the room still stank of urine, but also had a perfumed odor. We also noticed that our bathroom floor was sticky as we walked on it. Finally, we traced the smell to the bedspread. After this was replaced, the room smelled considerably better, though there was still a strong urine odor in some corners of the room, apparently coming from the carpet. I had call down to the desk again to obtain the additional towels, soap, and shampoo we had asked for several hours before.

(My wife commented, as we waited at O’Hare for our flight home, that the women’s room there smelled far better than the Ramada had. She was not joking. Doesn’t the Ramada wash the bedclothes between guests? I can understand how the housekeeping system could let one stained bedspread through the system by accident, but how could two rooms be cleaned so poorly?)

As we unpacked, we discovered that the bureau and night-table drawers were stained inside with mold, so we could not safely put clothes in them. I need not remind you that urine and mold residue is not merely unaesthetic but a health hazard.

We were told by one of the other wedding attendees that the mother of the bride had checked in late Thursday night, and was placed in a room “with every type of pestilence—mosquitoes, roaches, other bugs.” She had apparently been told there was no other room available, though once the groom came to the Ramada and insisted, she was moved to another room. Since we saw no insects in our room, perhaps we should count our blessings.

Friday night until 6:00 p.m., and Saturday starting at 11:30 a.m., we were treated to loud sounds from men working on the low roof just below our window. We could either close the window and suffer the stench more acutely, or open the window and suffer noise sufficiently loud that we had to raise our voices to be heard across our own room.

The wedding reception was held in the Ramada’s conference center. We would characterize the facilities there—particularly the ladies’ room, with three stalls (one handicapped) serving the guests from two simultaneous weddings—as very poor, and the catering service provided at the wedding as likewise very poor. Wedding guests should not have to use the bathroom to get water glasses refilled. However, complaining about that is the prerogative of the bride and groom.

Saturday night at about 8:00 p.m. we were treated to loud stomping and banging from the room directly overhead. This was particularly disturbing as we were trying to put our child to bed, and he was repeatedly startled from sleep by the loudest thuds. By 9:00 p.m. this had shifted to loud talking, laughter, and cheering, along with music loud enough to vibrate our ceiling. Our neighbors overhead were obviously having a party, not just a loud radio. I went to the Ramada’s desk to complain, and was told it would be dealt with. When after about 20 minutes the music and voices were still incredibly loud, my wife went to the desk to complain and ask for a manager. She was told that there was no night manager, and that they had “called up the room but no one had answered.” Well, of course, she pointed out, the music was too loud for anyone to hear the phone. (They finally sent someone up, and the noise eventually subsided.) I cannot fault the Ramada for having noisy guests, but I expect the desk staff at any hotel to take reasonable and prompt steps to stop unreasonable noise.

At 9:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, when we checked out of the Ramada, we discovered that there were no luggage carts available. While we weren’t the only ones checking out, there was no general exodus at that hour on a Sunday morning. My wife, who has stayed at hotels for conferences, has never had a problem obtaining a luggage cart, even when many guests were checking out at the same time.

We have slept at many hotels over the years, including youth hostels, no-name motels, and “economy” chains. Our experience at the Ramada is the worst that either of us has ever had. According to the “President’s Letter” on your Web site, “At Ramada, we are committed to providing you with the highest quality of hotels and services, and we have never been more intent on consistently providing comfort and value to each of your accommodation experiences with us.” According to a_Inn_Lake_Shore_Chicago-Chicago_Illinois.html”>reviews at TripAdvisor.com, Ramada Inn Lake Shore guests have reported problems similar to ours since at least July 2003. A Google^TM search for the phrase “Ramada headquarters” did not turn up the address of your corporate headquarters, but did reveal similar complaints regarding Ramada franchisees in California, Florida, Texas, and Virginia. I would say that the Ramada Inn Lakeshore is an embarrassment to your trademark, but it appears to be a true representative of your brand’s quality. We have to wonder if the other hotel brands owned by Cendant have similar problems.

Yours,

Seth Gordon

08 Jun 2004 — A tale of two crooks

Philip Greenspun reminds us that “Ahmad Chalabi, formerly Our Man in Iraq, is an MIT graduate.” He neglects to mention that Theodore “Unabomber” Kaczynski went to Harvard.

Both Chalabi and Kaczynski were mathematicians before they turned to crime. Kaczynski received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and worked as an assistant professor at UC-Berkeley. His mail bombs killed two people and injured several others. Chalabi received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and taught at the American University in Beirut. A Jordanian court sentenced him to 22 years of hard labor for embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank that he created. Kaczynski is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. Chalabi remains at large, and living large, in Iraq.

For high school students who aspire to become criminal geniuses, the choice is clear.

03 Jun 2004 — You like me! You really like me!

Last Wednesday was what the cool kids call my “blogiversary”, the anniversary of the first scintillating nugget of prose that appeared on this blog. In honor of this august occasion, I will, for this one posting, drop the pretense that I don’t care about how many people are reading my work.

I wrote a crude one-line script that digs through my Web server’s access logs, picks out the hits in a given month that are most likely from actual human beings reading the site rather than spiders or other bots, and counts the unique IP addresses that the hits are coming from. Here are the results for the year ending May 31:

(22 people read this blog via its LiveJournal syndication feed, and about 20 others read it through other syndicators. However, I suspect that most of these readers, at some point during every month, click through to see the continuation of an article directly on the Web site.)

If we assume, conservatively, that most people who read yesh omrim read it both at home or at work, and some people have dynamically assigned IP addresses, then every IP address represents a little under half a reader, so we had at least three hundred readers in May. Compared with, say, Atrios, that’s small potatoes, but I don’t think I could name three hundred people who know me personally, so I must be doing something right here.

Thank you all for coming! Please let me know how I can serve you better! And remember, a permalink to a yesh omrim posting is low in carbs, complements any decor, and is made from 100% recycled electrons. It’s the perfect gift for all your friends, relatives, and e-mail lists.

OK, back to the pretense.

03 Jun 2004 — The libel of a thousand scratches

And this is what the people of the age of the Flood used to do: When a man brought out a basket full of lupines, one would come and seize less than a perutah’s worth and then everyone would come and seize less than a perutah’s worth, so that he had no redress at law.

(Genesis Rabbah 31:5, translated and cited here)

I was reminded of this midrash when I read Alexandra Polier’s account of how the John Kerry sex-scandal-that-wasn’t, in which she was rumored to have had an affair with the senator, changed her life. In the article, she demonstrates her journalistic skills by following the rumors back to their source:

1. Polier expressed interest in working for Kerry’s campaign, got free tickets to one of his fund-raisers, and had dinner with the senator and several of his advisors. She dated Kerry’s finance director for a few months.
2. A close friend of Polier’s, observing how quickly Kerry returned one of Polier’s phone calls, “got excited and told friends about it.” One of those friends, apparently, was Bill Jarrell, a Republican lobbyist. Either the friend or Jarrell interpreted this behavior as evidence that something skanky was going on. (You see, in the rarefied world of Republican policy wonks—and apparently, some Democratic wonks as well—no senator would ever talk to a twenty-something woman with an interest in politics for any reason other than, you know, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.)
3. Chris Lehane, a Democratic dirty-tricks specialist who left the Kerry campaign to work for Wesley Clark, may have also been shopping the rumor around.
4. Stephen VanDyke, a 25-year-old computer programmer in Atlanta, posted the rumor to WatchBlog on February 6.
5. The Drudge Report picked up the rumor (not necessarily from WatchBlog) on Febraury 12. Drudge did not mention Polier by name, but other reporters knew who he was talking about.
6. The next day, The Sun, a British tabloid, ran an article by Brian Flynn who named Polier and, according to Polier, fabricated quotations from her parents. (When Polier tried to interview Flynn, he referred all of her questions to The Sun’s PR office, and the tabloid’s PR manager refused to comment.)
7. Drudge linked to The Sun’s story, seeing it as confirmation, and more respectable media outlets (the Times of London, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal Web site) picked it up from there.

In a world where libel attorneys work for free, Polier would have a slam-dunk case against every person mentioned in this list. In most contexts, a journalist who quotes a libelous statement, even if the quotation is accurate, is committing another libel. But every link in this chain of rumor-mongering could say, “Well, by the time I published the rumor, lots and lots of people knew about it from other sources, and other journalists spread the rumor to an even wider audience after they picked it up from me, so even if we are all liable for damaging Polier by spreading this falsehood, my share of the liability should not be very great.” Furthermore, I suspect that if Polier has any ambition left for a career in journalism, she knows that being a plaintiff in a libel suit would hurt her employability even more than being the involuntary star of a sex scandal. Even if she doesn’t care about that, how much can she expect to gain from winning a lawsuit, compared to the time and money it would cost her to prosecute it?

And so the merchant sees her property leak away, penny by penny, until there is nothing left and nobody worth suing, and our generation is one step closer to the generation of Noah’s flood.

see also Camworld, Mark A. R. Kleiman, Pandagon

30 May 2004 — The real test

Maimonides’ discussion of the laws of the sotah, a married woman suspected of idolatry, starts as follows (MT Hilkhot Sotah 1:1): “The jealousy that the Torah speaks of, ‘and he became jealous of his wife,’ is when he says to her before witnesses ‘do not seclude yourself with so-and-so’…”

Oddly, the first Torah verse quoted in this legal code is not the first Torah verse in the section describing the laws of the sotah. That section begins as follows (Numbers 5:11–14):

The Eternal said to Moses: Speak to the Israelites, and tell them: Whenever a man’s wife goes astray and defiles with an act of defilement—that is, a man had sexual intercourse with her, and it was hidden from her husband, and they were in secret, and she became impure, and there was no witness with her, and she was not raped—and a spirit of jealousy came over him, and he became jealous of his wife, and she had become impure; or a spirit of jealousy came over him, and he became jealous of his wife, and she had not become impure…

From the literal Hebrew text, it seems like the wife is expected to be guilty, and the possibility that the husband’s suspicion is misplaced is almost tossed aside as an afterthought.

But even if every husband who subjects his wife to the sotah ritual has ironclad evidence of her guilt, why would the wife, who knows what she is guilty of, say “Amen, amen” to the priest’s curse? From the plain text, we see that the ritual requires her cooperation, and from the halakha (MT Hilkhot Sotah 2:1), we know that a woman can accept divorce without ketubah to avoid going through the ritual.

The answer comes from the last verse in this section of the Torah (Numbers 5:31): “The man will become clean of sin, and that woman will bear her sin.” What sin does the man become clean of? The Talmud quotes a Baraita that explains (Sotah 28a): “In a time when the man is clean from sin, the water tests his wife; if the man is not clean from sin, the water does not test his wife.” If the husband himself has had any prohibited sexual relations, whether prohibited by the Torah or by the Sages, then the adulterous wife will not die (MT Hilkhot Sotah 2:8).

If the wife survives the ritual, she has publically announced that either she is innocent of adultery and her husband has been jealous for no good reason, or that her husband has been misbehaving as well. The more the community suspects her of illicit behavior, the more they will come to suspect her husband of the same offense. For his hypocritical jealousy, the husband is punished measure for measure.

(Last year: A note regarding the nazirite)

23 May 2004 — Duh!

“So have you found something to blog about the parsha yet?”

“Well, I have a kashe, but no teretz.”

“What’s the kashe?”

“The text reminds us of Nadav and Avihu getting toasted (Numbers 3:4), and right after that (3:11–4:20) it goes on about all the special duties of the Levites to serve as assistants to the priests. I feel like there must be some connection, but I don’t know what it is.”

“It’s a warning to the Levites. Duh!”

“Duh?”

“Because of all their duties connected with the Mishkan, they are at particular risk for stepping out of line. The regular Israelites are too distant from the sacrificial activities to be likely to do anything, and the priests are trained for their work. For the Levites, as they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing—as we see later on from the story of Korach (15:1–10), a group of Levites who wanted to take over the priesthood. If they remember what happened to Nadav and Avihu, then they’ll be less tempted to step outside the limits of their roles, even as they see the priests doing the sacrificial service all around them.”

“Oh, yeah. Duh.”

20 May 2004 — The pink and blue highlighters in your brain

Why would so many people sacrifice money, effort, and social respectability, even risking their lives, defying rules that society has laid down for members of their sex…so they can follow rules that society has laid down for members of the other sex? I mean, if you’re going to get yourself in trouble with the Gender Police, why not be straightforward in your rebellion?

People who answer this question use clinical terms like “gender identity,” or clichés like “a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Kosse Phillip Feral, an FTM transsexual, told a filmmaker: “The way I explained it to [his children] was I’ve always felt like a boy on the inside and the outside didn’t match the inside… They’re just little kids so they can relate to I’ve always felt like a boy or I’ve always felt like a girl.”

Statements like this are obviously directed to an audience that includes non-trans people, and they imply that everyone in the audience, trans or not, adult or child, has a gender identity. I’m expected to read Feral’s remark and think: Ah, yes, I feel like I’m a man, and I’d be pretty damn distressed if, given that feeling, I had breasts and a vagina and people kept referring to me as a woman. Therefore, I can understand how someone who is in that situation is a human being deserving of sympathy and respect, not a pathological weirdo.

Here’s my problem, though: I agree with the “human being deserving of sympathy and respect” part, but everything that comes before it trips me up. I know what it feels like to have a penis. I know what it feels like to spend my childhood with other boys indoctrinating me into Appropriate Masculine Behavior. I know what it feels like to be told that it’s good for me to go into elementary education, because I’d be providing little kids with a “male role model” in the classroom, and then discover that without a spouse making substantially more than myself, I can’t make enough as a teacher to pay off my student loans and live in Boston. (Not that I’m, y’know, bitter.) I know what it feels like to think, well, a sundress would probably be a lot more comfortable than pants in this 90° weather, but I’ll never know, because if I go out dressed like that I would be risking my job security if not my physical safety.

But I don’t know what it feels like to be a man. Or, for that matter, a woman. At least, I think not. Do I have the emotion that Feral talks about, but label it with different words? Am I like one of those incredibly closeted people who call themselves “asexual” to avoid labelling themselves as “gay”? Or am I the pathological weirdo here—not because of my gender identity, but because my lack of gender identity? To sort out these questions, I have been on a quest to isolate this mysterious “gender identity” that so many people take for granted.

Mommy, this strange man is deconstructing me

So what is gender identity, in terms that an AI, an alien, or a cripple like myself can understand? It can’t be the desire to have a penis or vagina, since some trans people are content to keep the genitals they were born with. It can’t be the desire to conform to a male or female gender stereotype; as Colt Illicit points out, you can be an FTM trans and enjoy all sorts of non-“masculine” pastimes.

C.I. suggests that there is a spectrum of gender identity, similar to the Kinsey scale of sexual orientation, in which most people are somewhere in the middle. With all due respect, I think he’s fallen into a taxonomic trap: confusing gender identity with conformance to a gender role. If you look at how well people conform to the stereotypes of their gender, you’ll see a pretty wide distributions. But when people are asked what sex they are, they almost always choose one side or the other, not a point on a continuum. C.I. has “met many ftm men…who enjoy doing female drag,” but he calls them “ftm men”, not “80%-men-20%-women”.

We need to disentangle gender identity from gender role-conformance. How?

The curious incident of the girlfriend in the bio

Typically, a woman’s intimate, platonic friendships with her “girlfriends” are important parts of her emotional life. These friendships are radically different from anything that most men have experienced; when I read Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, the women there, in the ways they manipulated one another, might as well have been aliens from one of those “sociological” science fiction novels.

I am led to wonder: do MTF transwomen have these kinds of relationships with other women, especially non-trans women? Do they not feel any need to form such relationships? Do all of their close friends know their medical history, changing the dynamics of the relationship? Even after reading a number of autobiographies (near the bottom of Lynn Conway’s “Successes” page, there are a few dozen links), I have no clue; the topic just doesn’t seem to come up.

This absence of information is, in itself, informative. I assume that the people who write these autobiographies value their non-trans female friends, and put a lot of effort into maintaining those friendships, but they must not consider the friendships relevant to their lives as trans people. By contrast, descriptions of the physical and emotional effects of hormones are standard components of this genre. And this is a demographic group that is willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars for various medical procedures not covered by insurance, not to mention the thousands of hours they devote to learning how to “pass.” So why isn’t friendship with women part of the standard “MTF trans success” story? As they say in the Talmud, mai nafka mina, what’s the difference between them?

Here’s the difference: the unwritten rules of how to be a girlfriend are specific to women, but getting recognized as a woman does not depend on following them. Suppose that Alice and Barbara are girlfriends, and Barbara, unbenownst to Alice, is a transwoman. If Barbara violates Alice’s expectations of how a girlfriend should act, Alice might consider her less of a friend, or wonder at her poor social skills, but Alice is not going to suddenly realize, or even suspect, anything about Barbara’s gender.

In my arrogant opinion

Here’s my theory: gender identity is the desire, as an end in itself, to pass: that is, to be recognized by other people, even toddlers, as unambiguously belonging to a certain gender, for most of your day-to-day life. (I say “as an end in itself” to exclude, say, a 19th-century woman who dresses as a man so she can join the army.)

I think this theory fits what I have been looking for in my quest. It reflects the fact that most people, trans or not, seem to know what their internal gender is. The theory doesn’t make identity depend on genitalia, since most people who see you will decide your gender without looking at your crotch. The theory doesn’t make identity depend on role conformance: you can break every standard of Proper Femininity you ever learned, but as long as you want people to recognize you as a woman, you clearly have a female gender identity. The theory marks me as a pathological weirdo, but hey, I’m weird for all sorts of reasons, no harm in adding one more.

(A corollary is that if we lived in a culture where a child could change his or her social gender without stigma, hardly anyone would seek sexual reassignment surgery. I realize that this corollary is both controversial and unprovable.)

I think this theory has some interesting political and sociological applications, but before I go on to those, I need a reality check. All of you readers who do feel like you have a “gender identity,” whether or not it matches your physical body: how well does the description in my words connect with what you feel in your guts?

14 May 2004 — The worst punishment

In this week’s parsha, we have the tochachah, the list of punishments for persistently refusing to follow God. This list does not only include physical and spiritual pain, but also emotional pain:

For those of you who are left, I will put fear in your hearts, while you are in your enemies’ homelands, and you will flee from them. You will run from the sound of a falling leaf as if running from a sword, without any pursuer. You will stumble over each other, as if from before a sword, without any pursuer, unable to stand up to your enemies. And I will sweep you away [from one another —Rashi] in your enemies’ lands, and your enemies’ homeland will consume you. (Leviticus 26:36–38)

A person can endure a tremendous amount of physical suffering, if they believe they are doing it for some higher purpose; if they are unaware of any other way to live, then they might not perceive it as suffering at all. On the other hand, someone who is not striving for any goals (perhaps because, as verse 15 says, they “detest My decrees and distance themselves from My laws”), or is acutely aware of how other people are doing better than themselves (perhaps because they are living in exile), can feel deprived even in the midst of luxury. As Paul Krugman observed: “I know quite a few academics who have nice houses, two cars, and enviable working conditions, yet are disappointed and bitter men–because they have never received an offer from Harvard and will probably not get a Nobel Prize.”

Most people who read this blog don’t long so acutely for a Nobel Prize, but we all enjoy a standard of living that, in purely physical terms, would be the envy of ancient kings. But this fact gives us little consolation. Whenever we look at the newspaper and wonder how secure we are, physically or economically, we are feeling one of the curses mentioned in this parsha. Because of our sins, we are not only cursed to live in exile, but to feel exiled. And for that reason, we should envy those Jews of ancient times who, if only for a few years, enjoyed the blessing “you shall eat your fill of bread, and live securely in your homeland” (26:5).

14 May 2004 — Priorities, priorities

Excerpt from an article in today’s Boston Globe:

Interrogation rules issued last year in Iraq are “not humane,” a ranking defense official conceded yesterday, and a top general told senators that they may violate the Geneva Conventions on proper handling of military detainees.

…

[A memorandum by the senior American commander in Iraq] listed a variety of methods soldiers could use in interrogations, including “dietary manipulation,” or depriving inmates of food for certain periods so long as they were monitored by a medical officer; changing their environment, such as from hot to cold; keeping inmates awake for as long as three days at a time; isolating them for up to 30 days; using military dogs to intimidate prisoners; or forcing them to assume “stressful positions” for as long as 45 minutes.

But you bleeding-heart liberals have to understand—Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and when we caught his henchmen, they wouldn’t tell us where they were! Obviously, in order to get this information that’s so critical to America’s national security, torturing an inmate is morally justified…

14 May 2004 — An analogy you don’t see every day

Ryan Lizza on the most unpopular job in the Bush Administration:

…the White House counterterrorism job is the bureaucratic equivalent of the drummer in Spinal Tap. Bush has now gone through five [er, six] of them since 9/11. (Clinton had one.) Like Spinal Tap’s drummers, who often choked on their own vomit or spontaneously combusted, Bush’s counterterrorism aides all seem to disappear under unusual circumstances.

We have nothing to fear but … um … I’ll get back to you on that.

via Brad DeLong

13 May 2004 — Eeeeeeeeeeewe!

A week and a half ago, we went to Gore Place to look at the animals, and we got to see a lamb being born. Fortunately, I brought my camera.

Warning: some readers, especially readers who have never seen a mammal give birth before, may find the following pictures disturbing.

Another newborn lamb was in the barn when we arrived, so we thought this was the placenta. It turned out to be the amniotic sac.	“Did I look like that when I was having our baby?” “Well, our baby’s nose wasn’t as furry.” Look for the hooves, below the nose, inside the second lamb’s amniotic sac.	Mama nuzzles her minutes-old lamb. The first one, in the foreground, hasn’t found Mama’s teats yet.
Oh, yeah, we had a cute toddler with us, too. Of course, we could never get him strategically positioned close to one of the animals for long enough to get a picture.

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