Your mistakes are responsible for terrible suffering, but you stand among your victims and urge public support for your policies as a sign of support for the people those policies have injured. This is a plot worthy of Shakespeare.

It just sums it all up.

imagine every woman whose husband made a career move to another country had been given Cary's advice to divorce and not to just follow her husband - i wonder how many more divorces that would have resulted in.

i do concede that just announcing "i'm gonna join the peace corps, no matter what you say" would be an inferior strategy to having an honest discussion about it, but somehow i doubt this just came out of the blue to the lw's total surprise.

i applaud the increased childcare facilities thanks to larry summers - which will benefit both mothers and fathers. not all women, however, are mothers and women as a group are underrepresented in faculty positions, not only mothers. i'm surprised broadsheet seems to equate women with mothers here.

not all choices women make are feminist choices. As a drastic example: suicide can be seen as a choice, but it's not a feminist choice, even when committed by women.

The way I read Hirshman (at least her paper) is that IF you want to take a choice that advances the feminist cause, THEN don't take the traditional stay-at-home choice. (Given that you have a choice, that is.)

Conversely, if you have a choice, and you chose the traditional role of staying at home, you are free to do so, but to claim it is a feminist choice would be unjustified.

- According to the article there is a 60 % circumcision rate in the U.S.

- There are countries like Austria, Switzerland, Germany, etc. that have no routine circumcision at all, yet their men seem to be fine.

- American and European men don't have significantly different anatomies

This does rather point to the conclusion that it's a "bizarre American custom," does it not?

That has been practiced by Jews for just the last several thousand years.

Idiot.

-- Tuvalu

Of course. How does that refute my reasoning? The circumcision rate does not equal the percentage of Jews in the population of the U.S., not the stated 60% now and not 90% a while ago. So much for the "American" part.

Now for the "bizarre" part: if it were done for health reasons, countries that do not circumcize would have a problem with the genital health of their male citizens. They don't seem to. I don't see how reasons other than health concerns, e.g. tradition, would justify cutting off a part of the body. Bizarre.

you just let this stand as if it were true? Must be this American satire striking again!

The funniest thing about the whole ordeal, said Pete, is that "I come from Germany -- a German economy, a German culture, German friends. And Germans have no humor." When he first came to the States, he said, he worked at Wells Fargo, where he befriended "a bunch of good old boys" who used to prank him. "They'd tease me to the point where I'd say, 'Really?' and they'd say, 'No, you idiot! When are you going to get it?' So I've been struggling with this kind of thing for a long time." Satire, he said, "is an American humor. Saying something but not really meaning it and egging a person on to see if they believe it so you can say, 'Dang, you're dumb!' I'm kind of used to people laughing at me." He said his father and brother used to do this to him as well. "What I didn't know was that there was a whole country of people doing this."

IANAG, but talk to your international (including German) friends and ask them about their experiences trying satire on ye average American, you just might hear some good stories.

I don't know how much credence to give to the "love is chemistry" theories or plausible-sounding rationalizations for evolutionary benefit, but the breakup after a 3.5 year long relationship seems to fall into the range given by anthropologists like the following (taken from an ABC 20/20 interview):

Is there anything to the belief that spouses are most likely to feel the urge to stray after seven years? Actually, according to evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher, it happens a lot sooner, and the reasons for this may go back to the dawn of humanity.

"As it turns out, the standard period of human birth spacing was originally four years. We were built to have our children four years apart and I think that this drive to pair up and stay together at least four years evolved millions of years ago so that a man and a woman would be drawn together and stay together, tolerate each other, at least long enough to rear a single child through infancy," said Fisher, author of "Why We Love."

Following the urge to find a new partner after that four-year period, she says, may have been a way that humans added more variation to the gene pool.

So there is an itch — it's just a four-year itch, according to Fisher.

"People around the world tend to divorce during and around the fourth year of marriage," she said.

...by the car and oil industry propaganda in this country?

And what of the riding the train? Even though he hates it, he probably recognizes how morally superior train riders are in their self-abnegation, how they pack themselves in like medieval flagellants, punishing themselves for their sins of opulent consumption.

No traffic jam, no road rage, no parking problem, no gas price worry, no repair and maintenance, no concentrating on driving but opportunity for reading, chatting, or sleeping, etc. - I wouldn't equate that with self-flagellation. And the morally superior reasons? They feel good, too.