Violet Blue's suggestion make a lot of sense -- I wished what she says were more widely heard! But I wonder if Barack's current shift to the center is not going to mean that most of her suggestions will go unheeded. What's your experience (I myself am not American): does this 'shift to the center' mean that Obama will stay there after he's ellected, or will he shift back to the left and start tackling these issues?

Sandra M makes a good point: we should of course let people make their own choices. Just as people should be able to choose their own clothes and style, there is no problem if they want boob jobs or Botox -- whatever they hope to achieve with it, I hope they get it. Sometimes it works: sometimes you look at the result, feel better about yourself, and then go through life as a happier person.

But in some cases the results only generate more desire for other changes, since nothing is perfect and everything can be improved without end... There are, after all, more important things in life to concentrate upon. I am OK with the idea of the bride enhancing the beauty of her maids, but I must admit it's not something I would ever think of as desirable. Are Botox and boob jobs so frequent those days that they can be freely offered to friends -- like, I don't know, tickets to a theater play?

Yes indeed. Let us all laugh at PETA. I cannot but feel after reading amysarah's letter that it would be well deserved. So you'd rather sell the boys than the pigs? I'd like to see what hierarchy of values that choice is based on... Call me old-fashioned, but yes, I think if we have to choose, we are better than pigs and should be saved first.

Education as a choice? Sure that would be better. But I suppose you haven't got much experience with Nepal, or such situations. As someone who spent over a year among South American Indians, I can tell you -- it's not easy to set up an education project that would really work and have the effects you want, especially when the main reasons are economical. Even assuming that you'd have all the necessary money, and also the personnel (a teacher per village at least), and a way of training them in pedagogy, curriculum, etc., this would take so long that most of the 3,000 saved girls would have become slaves by the time this new education system would start having some chance of influencing even one single family.

Education is better? Sure, in the long run, and if you have the resources. Before that? And in fact, concomittantly with it, while education sinks in and starts having results? Please kill the pigs, if that saves girls. And boys.

Yes, for specific people of genius, we cannot tell off-hand whether or not marriage would have made them better or worse. I think that was the point in JugSouthgate post above: some personalities are more compatible with marriage, and others aren't. Some people of genius may have shone brighter because of their domestic life with a partner, and some maybe not. (I imagine the ideal situation would be if both partners were geniuses, and had the same passion for the same ideal/goal; then they would also be partners in their Great Task. Marie and Pierre Curie come to mind, as well as their daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband Pierre Joliot. Richard Bach and Leslie seem to have made their very marriage an art form.).

But I would still claim that, among people of genius, some kind of 'narcissistic-obsessive' personality is more frequent than in the wider population -- and, unless they find someone who is as intelligent as they are and wants to co-operate on the same tasks, chances are these people of genius would more or less ignore their spouses -- at least when in the height of their creativity pulses. And, given their personalities, it may be that the only way to make their marriages really, really work would be for them to slow down or decrease the intensity of said creativity pulses -- which would lead to less interesting work. Perhaps better for them as individuals, but not for their goals, Art or Knowledge.

Sometimes it all boils down to choices. For some (not all, but still surprisingly many) people of choice: do you really want to make your 'vision of paradise' come to exist, or do you want to work on this other artistic masterpiece that we call a healthy marriage? Some people can manage both; some can't.

In Brazil, my native country, Blacks do have a cultural visibility that they lack in the US: no Brazilian can pretend they aren't there. Yet they are certainly overrepresented in the lower social classes, and society does get quite white, perhaps even whiter than in the US, as you move up the social ladder. So I tend to think that the problems of Blacks in Brazil are more obviously (though also not entirely) the problems of low class Brazil.

In America, however, the stereotypes against Blacks seem to be still very powerful. I'm not sure. Do you people think that, if all Blacks in America suddenly came out of poverty and got good jobs, the discrimination against them would mostly disappear?

I have to agree with manniwood: the number of no-nonsense female characters doesn't seem to me to be so small, and looks like it's increasing. When I watch cartoons with my 5-year-old daughter, we see shows like 'Totally Spies', 'Kim Possible' or (less frequently) 'Winx', where the males seem to stick arround for comic relief... I'm not necessarily claiming Ms Garr is wrong, but I think the bias mentioned in the quote is becoming increasingly less strong. It's not the 80's anymore.

My daughter, by the way, has quite a strong personality herself, and has already decided to become either a spy or a superhero...