Month: September 2009

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ENDA!!

NCTE held a conference call tonight about ENDA & they’ve put a recording of it online (.mp3). The deadline is rapidly approaching. They’ve got a bunch of resources up (.pdf), and on Facebook, Jillian Weiss is posting daily actions.

This is for all of us – LGBTQI & all our families & allies.

No one should lose or not get a job because of their sexual orientation or gender identity and expression. Make those calls, send letters, emails, and forward this info to your friends & families so they do the same.

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Open Thread!

Ah, the first of its kind, because the database for the MHB forums is acting up. Feel free to post here instead.

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Health Insurance

I’ve talked to a bunch of people about health insurance in this country but I want to talk about how it goes for someone like me.

I don’t think anyone can argue that I don’t contribute, am a deadbeat. I’m not poor enough to get Medicaid & I’m not old enough for Medicare. I want to pay my medical bills.

Now that I’m employed by a university, I can get good health insurance for $250/month.

As a freelancer, though my union, I could get shoddy health insurance for $1000/month.

That’s what Obama is trying to fix. Someone like me, who works part-time, or contractually, has very few options that are competitive as per a capitalist system.

It’s not socialist or anti-capitalist to want the free market to work.

Right now, however, it’s not: the health insurance companies have become a kind of monopoly, or trust, that enables only the biggest corporations and institutions to get a fair shake.

I’d like health insurance that’s affordable and good without being part of a corporation. From things I read, I get the idea that more & more people are employed in the way I am. We are not unproductive members of society. We’re often entrepreneurs, self-employed, or artists of some stripe or another.

I’m tired of being treated like a second-class citizen because I’m on the cusp of tradtional & non-traditional employment.

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What A Socialist Isn’t

I love this tirade about Obama, & people who call him a Socialist:

To be sure, they looked like complete jackasses before the speech, but now that the man’s actually done the deed, people feel more comfortable saying so. One wonders why they felt they had to wait; perhaps they were expecting this least spontaneous of all recent presidents to have the head of Eugene Debs erupt from his collarbone, take control of his body, and snatch and bloodily consume members of the audience while howling about the Pullman Strike. It did not happen, unless the live television cameras of the liberal media were somehow able to mask the gory sight of Obama Possessed By Undead Eugene Debs feasting on the tender young bodies of our nation’s youth. WHICH THEY MIGHT HAVE.

& not just because of the Obama/Socialist part, but for the plea for the accurate use of words. Fascist & Socialist mean different things. The Nazis called themselves Socialists but were not, in fact, socialists. Fascism was an actual political movement, out of Mussolini’s Italy, & is not a generic slur against anyone who is an authoritarian jerk. &c.

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Sex Difference Studies Suspect

Kudos to Scientific American and Lise Eliot – who published & wrote an article on sex brain difference studies, particularly the ones involving emotional sensitivity & the SG size in brains.

However, in both studies, Wood and colleagues added another test that reminds us to be cautious when interpreting any finding about sex differences in the brain. Instead of simply dividing their subjects by biological sex, they also gave each subject a test of psychological “gender:” a questionnaire that assesses each person’s degree of masculinity vs. femininity—regardless of their biological sex—based on their interests, abilities and personality type. And in both adults and children, this measure of “gender” also correlated with SG size, albeit in just as complicated a way as the correlation between “sex” and SG size. (Larger SG correlated with more feminine personality in adults but less feminine personality in children.)

In other words, there does seem to be a relationship between SG size and social perception, but it is not a simple male-female difference. Rather, the SG appears to reflect a person’s “femininity” better than one’s biological sex: women who are relatively less feminine show a correspondingly smaller SG compared to women who are more feminine, and ditto for men.

This article is some of the best writing on science & sex difference I’ve read – especially for lay folks who don’t want to tackle the work of someone like Fausto-Sterling.

It happens so rarely, but it’s so lovely when it does.