Midnight linkage
- [tag]dooce[/tag]: Healthy sleep habits, grumpy baby » Let your child cry/scream. That has always been my parents’ tactic to attempt to avoid creating a child incapable of realizing that the world will not always bend to her will. That said, I had no idea of the trauma this would cause in the mother.
- SugarBank: Thinking Porn » 10 Lies [tag]Pornographer[/tag]s Tell » *laugh* Just… *laugh*
- Lani Guinier on [tag]Meritocracy[/tag] | Dollars & Sense » From blackfeminism.org: this is a *very* interesting article on what "merit" in America really is–i.e. (in the eyes of the writer) [tag]aristocracy[/tag].
- Rashid Muhammad: Merit in America » An analysis of the above meritocracy article.
- [tag]Atheists[/tag] identified as America?s most distrusted minority » "From a telephone sampling […], university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in ‘sharing their vision of American society.'”
One Comment
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Rashid Muhammad’s response is excellent. Guinier’s initial contention is thought provoking, but Muhammad’s answer put it in better perspective. Of course, this is coming from a white male from a magnet school of a rich county of Florida (though I commuted there.) Just mentioning fairness at the end said volumes, because that’s what merit-based decisions are supposed to be. I think it will never be fair for two reasons:(A) life’s not fair – we don’t get to choose our environment, and (B) our environment definately has an effect on our quality of life and person (I hold that nature vs nurture are typically on the same order of magnitude). That said, I think that my position here (R-H) came not only from my own innate qualities, but from the (rather expensive) effort the local government went through to foster a better education for me. By the time a person goes to college or hits the workforce, it may be too difficult to change environmental variables to improve a person’s lot substantially – save for those of extraordinary will and drive. Knowing myself, I doubt I’d be doing anything besides a dead-end labor job without the magnet programs.