My criticisms:
-Everyone needs to do what he or she can to be proficient in math. There should be no excuses, especially not from those who have to analyze issues and make decisions that affect millions of people. The artificial division between the "math" people and the "verbal" people is antiquated and confining and needs to be eradicated. Nobody should have to rely exclusively on the testimony of experts in any field as a guide for understanding the world. The general principles of what's being discussed should not be bewildering or intimidating.
-People who don't want to be parents should not have to be parents. There is nothing more painful or damaging to a child's self-esteem than to be raised by a parent who does not want to parent. Not only are there people who are incapable or unwilling to parent children with disabilities, there are people who wouldn't be good parents if they were given babies with no problems whatsoever.
The American foster care system is a tragic training ground for jail, rehab and mental hospitals, where children are subjected to the heartbreaking cycle of having every hope to be loved and cared for betrayed again and again by abuse, negligence and exploitation, until they are as hardened or as broken as the adults who have shattered their trust.
The world is teeming with people of all ages who were born into misery and who are either actual slaves or who live subsistence-level lives, devoid of every intellectual and emotional facility taken for granted by people for whom the nurturing and use of those facilities feels indistinguishable from being alive. There are many ways to be alive as a human being; for far too many people, life is synonymous with pain and degradation, and that is not going to resolve in my lifetime. There is no reason to believe that it will ever resolve entirely.
-It's not true that anything boys can do, girls can do better. For most things, gender should be disregarded as a predictor of success. For some things, it can't be disregarded. I think that words such as "better" should be used sparingly to discuss inherent ability of any kind. I don't agree with trying to overcome centuries of gender inequality by saying that girls are better than boys.
This past summer, I was out for a walk when I encountered a woman biking with her two small children. She was far ahead with her daughter. She had left her son behind and wasn't even looking back or encouraging him. Although he wasn't crying or calling to her, he was visibly distressed. I think this is the result of a distortion of feminism that casts men as inferior and worthy of resentment for being male in a world whose institutions favor men. No 4-year-old boy is responsible for misogyny.
-Judges who make their rulings from ivory towers, uninformed of or insensible to the long-term effects of their decisions, are neither impartial nor reasonable. They are cruel. Neither intellectualizing nor sentimentalizing absolves them of that cruelty. The law is written by people and is never infallible. Every opportunity should be taken to interpret the law as generously as possible to those who are most in need.
-Justice Ginsburg was a good judge, but she didn't own the seat in life and she doesn't own it posthumously. If she had screwed up while she was alive, she would have had to relinquish it. That's what it means to be a living person and not a symbol. Nobody can successfully be a symbol of anything; that is a stultifying and fearful existence.
I will not here discuss the historic and ongoing gender inequality of expectations for personal behavior, as enraging as it is.
-I think that high contact sports are not fabulous for people. If they didn't drive so much revenue, they wouldn't be so admired.
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