Month: April 2001

Women In Combat

It always amazes me that the issue of whether or not women should serve in combat positions is still an active debate. Women who are up to the challenge and can handle the physical tasks entailed by combat should certainly be allowed to become part of combat units. Instead the debate typically ends up with those opposed and those in favor both offering sexist excuses for their position.

Great Britain is currently studying whether women should be allowed to serve in frontline combat units and some are charging that the armed forces are engaging in one of the forms of sexism — downgrading the physical requirements so that more women can pass. The British Army recently conducted field trials that were supposed to be gender neutral — men and women were supposed to do the same tasks — but the UK Daily Telegraph reports that the field tests simply dropped tasks that some women would have found difficult.

The exercises, for example, didn’t include heavy weapons or tanks and apparently found many women were incapable of carrying out physically strenuous tasks such as digging themselves into hard ground. The Telegraph reports that one of the findings was that women’s bodies had to work about 25 percent harder to achieve the same level of physical exertion as men.

If this is true, this is a pointless exercise in sexism. The military should set objective standards for minimum physical capabilities of combat soldiers, and then enforce those standards regardless of sex. If a woman can meet those standards, then she should be allowed to serve in a combat unit. If not, then she shouldn’t. End of story.

On the other hand, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce displayed the sexism commonly found on the other side of this debate by wondering whether or not women would be aggressive enough in hand to hand combat, saying that aggression was not “a natural female trait.” Give me a break. I’ve known plenty of women who had no problem with being aggressive.

Even if we assume that, on average, women as a group tend to be less aggressive than men as a group, this tells us little about whether or not any given man or woman is aggressive enough to be a combat soldier (and, in fact, even supposedly “naturally aggressive” men have to be subjected to intense training to overcome their long-conditioned responses against killing people. Far from being part of a natural trait, many men who have killed others in combat have reported any number of psychological problems from the shock and guilt at taking a human life).

Put men and women on a balanced field with objective standards and allow the qualified soldiers into combat units regardless of sex.

Source:

Combat tests ‘watered down for women.’ Michael Smith, The Daily Telegraph, March 26, 2001.

New FAQ Pages

Over the weekend I added several new FAQ pages. Two pages focus on the effect that AIDS is having on life expectancies and death rates in the countries where it is the biggest problem:

I also entered in data illustrating changes in forest cover for all nations of the world. This relies on FAO data that estimated the amount that forest cover changed from 1990-1995.

I’ve finally got time to go through a backlog of information I’ve tracked down over the past 6 months, so expect a lot more of such data-oriented pages.

Punishing Success in San Francisco

Salon.Com’s Joan Walsh has an excellent, in-depth look at the San Francisco Board of Education’s impending decision to close the relatively successful Edison Charter Academy school. Edison took over what was one of the worst schools in San Francisco and managed to turn it around, which, of course, is precisely the problem for its opponents. Walsh writes,

In fact, Edison has been a largely successful experiment in school reform, offering crucial lessons about how to help children, especially poor children of color, achieve more. It offers a window onto what the private sector can teach the public sector, and vice versa, at a relatively low cost to the district, and high benefit to most of the kids. All indications are, however, that the school board plans to close the book on this valuable lesson, for political, personal and ideological reasons that have little to do with the 500 students there.

According to Walsh, some of the academic gains made by Edison students are astounding. Last year, for example, African American students’ scores on the Academic Performance Index jumped 25 percent — the largest for any San Francisco school with a large African American population.

The pretext for revoking the school’s charter are allegations that it intentionally “counseled out” the poorer performing students. As Walsh documents, however, there seems to be no evidence to substantiate this claim. In fact, Edison has managed to keep its minority population high (there are actually a couple more African American students at the school than before it was a charter school), where other predominantly African American schools saw black enrollment drop after a mandatory desegregation plan was ruled illegal a few years ago and African American parents could choose to send their kids to schools in their neighborhoods rather than having the school system forcibly bus them to schools such as Edison.

As current Edison principal Vince Matthews told Walsh, “The fact is, it’s really a miracle. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this before. Instead of trying to learn from it, the district is trying to shut it down. You have a school that’s never worked for African-American and Latino kids, and now it is, and the district wants to take it away from them. I just find it so sad.”

Source:

The shame of San Francisco. Joan Walsh, Salon.Com, March 29, 2001.

When Is It Okay to Kill Infants?

The Sydney Morning Herald has a generally positive profile of Peter Singer that touches on the controversy over his comments on bestiality. Singer defends his book review in Nerve by saying,

There are cases [of sex with animals] that you can imagine that don’t seem to do harm to animals. The question then is what is really wrong with that? Why do we have that taboo? I just wanted to raise those questions.

Anyway, what continues to strike me as bizarre is that Singer insists on claiming that his critics misrepresent his views, but then he almost always follows this up by making them even more extreme than his opponents do. For example, Singer says that his view on infanticide is misunderstood. He says that his defense of infanticide is meant to apply to severely disabled infants who are going to die anyway. But then he apparently cannot resist adding that infanticide is also okay if a child is less severely disabled but nobody wants to care for the infant. According to Singer, “If there’s no-one else who’s sufficiently interested in the life of this child to want to care for it, then I think it’s not [unethical to kill the child].”

His students — well at least the one interviewed by the Herald — find him intriguing, which is downright scary. Presumably if Singer wrote articles arguing that homosexuals could be killed because they are not living a quality life, the reactions would be less sympathetic, but as long as he sticks to infanticide and forced euthanasia of people with Alzheimer’s, he’s safe in his position at Princeton.

Source:

The philosopher from Monash excites fury in Princeton. Gay Alcorn, Sydney Morning Herald, March 31, 2001.

If This is Atheism, I’ll Take My Chances With the Christians

Normally I keep my comments about Peter Singer over at AnimalRights.Net, but I couldn’t help but post this here as an example of what I mean when I talk of atheist fundamentalism. Here’s a pretty good summary of Singer’s views from the Sydney Morning Herald,

Singer, an atheist, challenges the sanctity of life ethic, a religious hangover that, he argues, has collapsed because of the evolutionary understanding of human beings as animals, not as creatures made in the image of God, and because of medical technology that now forces daily choices about life and death.

He suggests a different ethic that recognises the quality of life as relevant, and includes the interests of non-human animals. His views are particularly threatening to many Americans.

A large part of the reaction is because of the prevalence of a strong religious belief, essentially of Christian fundamentalism, that pervades every aspect of American culture in a way that is alien to Australia.

One of the common fundamentalist Christian arguments against evolution is that since it teaches that humans are really no different from other animals that it will steadily erode moral values. Most defenders of evolution, whether they be atheists or otherwise, typically respond that, in fact, the sort of moral teachings present in most religions are completely compatible with evolution (see Robert Axelrod’s writings, for example, on the evolution of cooperation).

But along comes Singer and announces to the world that the Christian fundamentalists are, in fact, right — evolution implies dispensing with thousands of years of moral tradition and adopting some new revolutionary ideas.

The bizarre thing is that Singer repeatedly says that his critics misrepresent his views, but then he defends his pro-infanticide position by telling the Herald that while his view on infanticide is meant to apply to severely disabled infants who are going to die anyway, it also applies to less disabled children as well. According to Singer, “If there’s no-one else who’s sufficiently interested in the life of this child to want to care for it, then I think it’s not [unethical to kill the child].”

His students — well at least the one interviewed by the Herald — find him intriguing, which is downright scary. Presumably if Singer wrote articles arguing that homosexuals could be killed because they are not living a quality life, the reactions would be less sympathetic, but as long as he sticks to infanticide and forced euthanasia of people with Alzheimer’s, he’s safe in his position at Princeton.

Enough about the Afghanistan Massacre Already

Okay, I understood why the media practically obssessed about Afghanistan’s extremist Islamic government destroying Buddhist statutes. U.S. newspapers, radio stations, television news, all featured an enormous amount of coverage of the event given that it was an international news story, but after all these were priceless statutes.

Now, however, the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and television are devoted to way too much coverage of the government-sponsored slaughter of 300 men, women and children in northern Afghanistan.

Wait a minute, what’s that? They’re not covering the story and you haven’t heard about the massacre? Well, thank goodness the American media have their priorities straight — they wouldn’t want to put real human beings ahead of statues now would they?

Source:

Afghan massacre reports firm up. The BBC, March 28, 2001.