Figuring Out Socialism: Do We Have To? (Yes.)

When Bernie Sanders began to talk about Socialism at the beginning of the 2016 election season, I thought to myself: oh no; they are totally wasting their time; anti-socialist propaganda has been bred into our DNA by business interests for too long.  Businesses (and their owners) are obsessed with keeping a share of their profits that they themselves decide, usually arbitrarily.  Taxes cut into their profits, so they hate taxes.  Minimum wages cut into their profits, so they hate the minimum wage.  Regulations cut into their profits, so, naturally, they hate those, too.  When an unemployed person applies for a job, the employer, usually a businessman (or his flunky) offers the applicants a wage rate.  In theory, of course, the applicant can haggle about the wage rate, but in practice, the rate must be accepted.  Being the employers, the businesses/employers wield a great deal of power, and they resent any attempt by the government to restrict this power.  Of course we do, they say; we take the risks, so we get to set our prices, and your wages!  In actual fact, the workers share the risks, which everyone knows, in particular, GM workers.

In conventional (old-time) Socialism, the government owns all the 'businesses', and hires all the workers.  That's the broad outline of Socialism, but the devil, obviously, is in the details.  Furthermore, just like economics, Socialism also has a lot of technical terms (a.k.a. jargon) which is a problem when we have to understand what people like Hilary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, and Nomi Konst start talking, which Tucker Carlson found out when he started trying to interview her (Nomi Konst).  Some of the jargon is essential (otherwise, every sentence will take about a week), but some of the jargon is actually unnecessary, so just having seen the words is probably enough; we can always come home and Google them.

Some hard-ass Socialists, when asked about how they would proceed, would say that they would confiscate all the businesses, and run them efficiently for the good of the country.  That will be totally repugnant to almost everyone; we would naturally think that the government will next come for our stuff.  (Business owners would probably sneer when we talk about our stuff, but hey, it's just as important to us as their damn factories and oil rigs are to them.)

That's---probably---not going to happen.  But I'm willing to bet that things like oil companies, (which are the certified big polluters, as well as major recipients of government subsidies), perhaps the Internet, electric companies, those will be likely prospects for takeover.  Or maybe the government will not takeover anything.  There are more delicate ways in which the government can take control of key business---including the most polluting businesses, and deal with retraining the displaced labor.  GM, for instance, does little more than token rehabilitation of their former workers.

Let's halt the speculation (which might be completely out in Left Field), and go straight to the source.  Here is an NBC report of the Democratic Socialists, right after the election.  The article is very clear; there are some five bulleted items, ranging from abolishing ICE (the border police), to opposing war.  Note: historically, socialists have identified with working-class people everywhere.  American Democratic Socialists might be different, but typically, a socialist in any country would consider every worker a brother.  The folks coming in across the Mexican border are our brothers, and so keeping them out by force would be something that is anathema to socialists.  Bear in mind that the USA is partly responsible for the failed governments in Central and Latin America; the CIA interfered with the governments of those countries since the nineteen fifties.  You cannot do that without those problems coming home to roost.  It is too late now to go back into South America to help make those nations stable; for evermore, fed-up Latinos will head here for a better life, just as those from former British Colonies head to London, which is one reason why they tried BREXIT.

Some things to think about.

The mentality of left-leaning Americans, and socialists everywhere, is that they're aligned with workers, that is blue-collar folks.  It always puzzled me that the typical American seemed to regard blue-collar workers with some suspicion.  But it's time to get over that; blue-collar folks are just as likely to help anyone as your supposedly friendly neighborhood white-collar worker; it's just that college-educated folk are uncomfortable with those who have not had a college education.  (This is a major problem with college education; a situation which has to be corrected in some creative way.)  It is these workers who suffer the brunt of business hostility, and so when the Democratic Socialists say workers, you have to think: that's us.  If you're a business owner, I suppose, you will probably think: oh, that's THEM.  Well, what can we do.

Going straight to the website of the Democratic Socialists of America, you get to a sort of FAQ about them, and I'll try to paraphrase the ones that I was most interested in.

Doesn’t socialism mean that the government will own and run everything?
Their bottom line is that Socialists have long given up the idea of running everything centrally ("from Washington").  Supply and demand methods work best with consumer goods, such as food commodities, clothing, etc.  (In contrast,) Public Transport, Housing, Energy, and things like that are best administered by the government.  (In other words, the time of the real-estate barons is going away; which makes sense, because they made insane profits, and then the Banks stepped in to crash the economy.)

Won’t socialism be impractical because people will lose their incentive to work?
"We reject the idea that the only reasons for people to work is either greed, or starvation.  People enjoy their work if it is meaningful and enhances their lives. They work out of a sense of responsibility to their community and society. Although a long-term goal of socialism is to [get rid of] all but the most enjoyable kinds of work, we recognize that unappealing jobs will always be there. These unappealing tasks would be spread among as many people as possible rather than assigned on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, or gender, as they are under capitalism. And this undesirable work should be among the best-paid, not the least-paid, work within the economy. Temporarily, the burden should be placed on the employer to make work desirable by raising wages, offering benefits and improving the work environment. In short, we believe that a combination of social, economic, and moral incentives will motivate people to work.

(I thought that was a wonderful paragraph; it tackles a central problem of the economics of labor, which Capitalists have never dealt with properly.  Work is a sort of take-it-or-leave-it thing in the Capitalist world-view; oligarchs never believe that workers need to enjoy their work.)

Aren’t you a party that’s in competition with the Democratic Party for votes and support?
No, we are not a separate party. Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and community organizing movements, many of us have been active in the Democratic Party. We work with those movements to strengthen the party’s left wing, represented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

There are many other Q & A items, all chosen very well, which do address a lot of the questions that people have, from: Isn't "Socialist" too discredited a word to call yourselves? and questions about the failed Russian Communist experiments, and the European Union, and the absence of established successful Socialist governments elsewhere.  There is no core 'manifesto' anywhere; which makes me sad, because as a mathematician, I like to have my axioms where I can lay my hands on them.

But bear in mind that in the US, the Media is very powerful, and clever.  And easily won over by money.  The onslaught from the Media against Democratic Socialists has already begun, with people trying to pick apart what the spokespeople for the DSA say; them being attacked both from the ignorance of the attackers of the reasoning behind their statements, as well as the newsmen's innate resistance to anyone who even calls herself or himself a socialist.  Prejudice is going to be hard to overcome.

So, at least for the moment, Amazon and other monopolies are not going to be interfered with, but the specter of regulation is very real.  Similarly for banks, which includes credit cards.  Just because a citizen is not very clever does not give banks and credit-cards the right to swindle them.  Financial organization have taken it to be axiomatic that if you don't read the fine print, it's open season.  Elizabeth Warren fought this, and it looks as though the Dem Socs of America are in her corner.

Arch

The Beatles, Live: The Rooftop Concert

I have never seen the Beatles perform live; it was always a video (or film, or a telecast of a film) of a live performance.  These days, "Live" seems to mean a performance before an audience.  (Even that seems a little ambiguous, because there are always people listening in while a studio album is being recorded, but I don't consider that a live performance.)  Perhaps a "live" performance is one where there is no possibility of re-recording any part of the performance.

Coming then to the video recordings of live performances, hardly any of the Beatles performances I have seen are anywhere as pleasing as that last crazy performance on the rooftop of some recording studio (you can Google it, if you want; it's probably Studio 2, or something like that) in London.  We know now that it halted traffic on the street below, and ended with the Police coming onto the rooftop to negotiate with the Beatles people to stop the performance.

Evidently it was a cold day, and John and George refused to go out onto the roof initially, but they later did, wearing cold-weather outer-wear, which someone called women's coats, and they may well be.  John and George were wearing furs, Ringo was wearing a parka of some sort, but Paul seemed to wear only a woolen jacket.  Amazing, especially since in the US, certainly, a rooftop would usually be a windy place.  Still, the video of this performance is still my memory of the Beatles as they were in the last several months of 1969, a fabulous year for many, many reasons.

If you've been a Beatles fan, especially if you had been one in the sixties, you would have realized, (assuming you'd followed popular music before the Beatles were famous, and seen their competing acts on TV) that the Beatles were super tailored; cut and pressed and neatly turned out (one of the contributions of Brian Epstein).  However, though initially their true personalities were held under control by their 'handlers', only bursting out of their cages intermittently, by 1969 we knew what they were really like (to the extent that it was possible), and the Rooftop Concert was them, being themselves; amused no end at the quandary the Police were in; pleased at the number of people who had stopped everything to watch them; probably pleased that their impromptu performance was coming off so well, though they had rehearsed it pretty well, and some of the songs were ones they had sung for years, e.g. 'One after 909,' and so on.  What a wonderful way to bring down the curtain!  I would not have it any other way.  (On YouTube there is a set of videos where the Beatles had evidently tried to do a complete concert on the roof of the Liverpool Central Library; I didn't watch them all through; I think perhaps the mood was not as exciting as the original performance in London.  Must find out more.)

The performance list is:

00:11 Get Back
03:22 Don't Let Me Down
06:57 I've Got A Feeling
10:39 One After 909
13:42 Dig A Pony
17:36 Get Back (reprise, and John announcing "We want to thank you on behalf of the Group and Ourselves . . .")

One of the things that delighted me the most was to see John playing lead guitar on Get Back, and the tiny glimpse of Billy Preston, freezing in the cold (around 18:47).

There is a lot more information about the circumstances surrounding the performance at
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/beatles-famous-rooftop-concert-15-things-you-didnt-know-58342/
many of them not having to do with the music.

Archipelago

Education for the Individual

Now that I’m no longer a teacher, I’m beginning to look at Education differently.  There are two ways to look at Education.  Firstly, it is an organized human activity.  All social animals—in the case of mammals, they tend to be the more evolved, usually—have a certain degree of social education; though in the case of elephants, it is more like pre-school, or daycare.  Secondly, it is important, I feel, to look at Education from the point of view of the child, or the student.

If anyone were to say: Nobody can teach anything to someone who does not want to learn anything, most of us would agree, though of course some would say, too bad; there are things kids have to know, even in those evil years when they don’t want to do anything.  As the Bible (that much abused book) quotes Jesus as having said: Nobody is as blind as those who don’t want to see.

This is sad, but interesting: some schools steadily turn out kids who are eager to learn, others turn out kids who want to get out of class as quick as possible.  I know this.

Our school had a brilliant program that gave a total free ride to the Valedictorian from every school in the local area.  Why?  Because they were a good bet.  I have had students from certain local schools for decades, and they were invariably a good bet.  There was something in those schools that made their students not prone to reject formal teaching as authoritarian.  They sailed through my courses, and it was too much of an effect to simply dismiss as coincidence.

Now, of course it is possible for an ultra-authoritarian teacher to turn off the most receptive students; some teachers do have a gift for it.  (I mean, I have insisted, for instance, that my students do not wear earphones during class, which might have come across as needlessly draconian, but I felt affronted by their attitude.  But if I was ultra-authoritarian, I have to admit that as a fault.)

I have said often: all children are born curious and receptive.  To some of them, just the usual stuff we teach in class is interesting and magical!  But there are at least two sources of the jadedness that seems to eat away at their natural receptivity to learning.

Firstly, the social pressure to regard formal schooling as essentially boring.  This is a consequence of the fact that the kids who dominate classes early on are those who are backward educationally, and it is a way for them to continue to dominate their classmates even when they arrive at grade levels where they’re intellectually out of their depth.  This is a sort of bullying, but it is hard to see in that light because it does not have any associated physical violence, and it very successfully proceeds by persuasion.

Secondly, it is the parents.  Without being helicopter parents, I think parents—especially if they themselves had never bought into the belief that learning is boring, but such parents are probably a small proportion, after centuries of anti-learning propaganda!!—can effectively, and tactfully, convey that the material their kids are learning was interesting, and useful.  My mother used to do this; she would say: have you come to compound interest yet?  Oh, that is fascinating!  She showed me how to do problems using algebra, long before we were supposed to use algebra.  (This would never work these days; the kid would bring home a strongly-worded reprimand to the parents.)  Parents often don’t realize what a huge influence they are, because the kids often learn from their peers how to keep their uppity parents in line by expressing scorn about their parents’ mental capability.  You can’t “thump it out of them;” it has to be addressed indirectly.

There certainly are a large number of people around us who have been totally successful in school, certainly in the lower grades.  But unfortunately, this success of these individuals is bad for education, because teaching being such a low-paying job, these people (who could make all the difference in our schools) get more lucrative employment, and forget to even inspire their own children to have a positive attitude towards learning, let alone a good attitude towards school (which is also important, obviously).  But because of human nature, we’re more likely to hear the negatives, rather than the positives.  There certainly are some young people who loved their teachers, love school, who go into the teaching profession, and resist all the negative influences in their schools, and resist the tendency for the administration to draw successful teachers into the administration as well.  I don’t know how that works, not having taught in secondary school.  But individuals with great attitudes are all around us, but they’re smothered by others who simply hate school, and hate everything.  At least 10% of the time, try to hang out with friends who have a good attitude towards things, including a good attitude towards kids, and learning.

One last thing.  Of course it is important to get a good general education; to learn to write well, to be able to make a presentation to a gathering of your peers; to explain some new thing that you have figured out, for instance, but your friends have not; to be able to manage the finances of at least a small charity, say.  Apart from this, it isn’t really important what branch of knowledge a child or youth wants to pursue, provided he or she doesn’t choose to pursue it to the exclusion of everything else.  This is a tricky point to make, because of the professionalization of the hiring process; HR people do tend to depend too much on surface qualifications, because they deal with such large numbers of applicants, and the people who will actually work with the new hire are only allowed to give token input into the process.  But in my humble opinion, the value of the pursuit of an area of knowledge that a student is genuinely interested in is too much to sacrifice in the name of employment.  Perhaps the thing to do is to allow your student to major (or minor) in the area dearest to her or his heart, and let her or him minor (or major) in some area perceived to enhance her or his “employability” such as engineering, or accounting, or (god forbid) business, or accounting.  Why should idiots have all the fun tanking the stock market?

Arch
‘’—“”

Cursed with Interesting Times

Nobody said that life would be easy, but nobody said it would be such a disaster as this, either.

I, for one, have been as restrained as humanly possible (given that I'm a blogger, bloggers being a population not well known for restraint), except for occasional bursts of . . . non-restraint.  Things that seem straightforward to us, appear to be highly complex to those in the parliamentary war-zones (or at least, so it appears to us).

This whole Russian thing seem silly to me; was there illegal hacking of our election equipment by the Russians?  That would be bad, but that does not seem to be what the Mueller investigation is about.  Was any attempts to compromise our election equipment instigated by our president, or on his behalf?  If there was, it seems clear grounds for getting rid of the president.  It does appear that the laws make it very difficult to get rid of a president who is determined not to be gotten rid of; in all previous cases of impeachment, it seems that the president in question simply resigned.  That isn't going to happen, as far as I can see.

But now we have a majority of Democrats, and I live in fear that we will squander that majority with senseless actions that waste our resources, and actually deliver the government into the maniacal hands of people such as Mitch McConnell, and others who ought to be placed in line for the guillotine.  We have replaced one set of agonizing circumstances for another, though this second set has more potential for re-delivering some sanity than the previous one.  Most of the freshman class of Democrat representatives are decent people with compassionate views.  I don't know whether to pray that they hold onto their compassion, or whether to pray that they become as ruthless as Madame DeFarge.  Even we atheists believe in compassion, but it seems that we ought to make a few exceptions to this prison reform initiative, and deliver Trump to the Taliban when the time comes.  (Actually, he may do very well with them.  Unfortunately.)


Arch

Washington Reverberations

At one time, however reluctantly, I considered the Republican Party (of the eighties and the nineties) as a bunch of wrong-headed fellows, but with honorable intentions.  The relentless hounding of Bill Clinton annoyed me, but I clung to the belief that they were decent guys, just a lot more interested in lowering taxes than was good for everyone.  Now, I have given up; regarding the present leadership of the GOP as a bunch of wrong-headed good guys is a stretch that I cannot undergo, without snapping my elastic.  Someday, I suppose, the GOP could ride again, but playing dirty has become a way of life, because as they understand it, their political base is incapable of understanding the gentility of old-school politics; but it does like crude behavior, and taunting the liberals, (they assume,) which probably explains the boorish behavior of the Trump-influenced GOP.

It is, I think, a big mistake to assume that T-GOP boorishness is going to be the norm for henceforth.  To assume that might be what will keep us sane, but it will paint us out of any possibility of even flashes of civility in any branch of Congress.  Balancing the budget, restoring environmental protections, none of these things are, IMHO, as important as holding out the promise of a return to civility.

That is not to say that we consider bad behavior as something in which a president can indulge with impunity.  All this reckless golfing, all the blatant promotion of Trump's businesses at government expense, all the maneuvering to obscure obstruction of justice, and to load the administration with Trump loyalists, is bad, but so is the rudeness extended to foreign heads of state, and the encouragement extended to racist organizations at home.  The latter strikes me as cowardly; Trump may not be himself a racist, but he indulges racists in the belief that they are friends and family of the Alt-Right, and they are a means to an end.  Or rather, chastening them might be a possible beginning to his possible end.  Many of the essential flaws of Trump, (laying aside his essentially flawed character, to begin with,) have to do with the flaws of businessmen turned politician in general.  They are unethical.  I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise, but this is the lesson we can take away from the poster boy of Business: Donald R. Trump.  He has ruined the reputations, in the eyes of the Democrats, of everyone who associates themselves with Business.  And Democrats are not just those in Congress whom he considers to be "losers".  There are Democrats everywhere, and as long as Trump and the GOP orchestrate the flow of our money to the haves, the number of Democrats are going to rise, and the GOP may have to re-think the wisdom of alienating the Working Class.  We may have thought of ourselves as The Middle Class, but, haha, it is looking more than ever as if we're becoming the proletariat.

Meanwhile, I sincerely hope that the vast number of women elected to Congress will be received with civility and respect by their Republican colleagues.  Just as importantly, I hope they are able to deal with their outrage at the overreaching of the Congress of 2016 with stern control and moderation.

Arch

Some Thoughts after the Mid-Term Elections

After a sleepless night—actually, I slept like a babe; I cannot lie—I tried to get some straight information about what happened; a summary of the election outcomes, but unlike in earlier years when I went to the TV or YouTube this election, I got only some vague hysteria.  I fairly soon learned the main facts: the Democrats had gained a majority in the House, and the Republicans had got a couple of extra seats in the Senate; an absolute majority, in fact.  Well; I like the House gaining a majority, though the days when the House acted predictably and reliably seem to have gone—had gone some time ago.  A few years ago I would have thought that the Republican majority in the Senate would not be anything to worry about.  But no; these days, even the Senate is running scared before Trump.  I now understand: it appears that when Trump campaigns for his favorite members of congress, they tend to win; when he does not campaign for Republicans, they lose.  So by selective campaigning, Trump appears to have weeded out those who do not support him implicitly.

Before I try to guess what the implications are, beyond the obvious ones, I would like to say that Nancy Pelosi, in her press conference a couple of days ago, came across as someone who was capable of dealing with the situation much more competently than I had thought.  She struck what I thought was the appropriate tone; she did not seem to seethe with anger, but she gave the impression of being very determined; she drew the lines in the sand that hardly anyone could argue against: she would not tolerate interference with the oversight of the other branches of government with which Congress has been charged.  All the time, she was cool and polite, and did not indulge in any sort of incendiary rhetoric at all.  But she did come across as very old, but hardly decrepit.

For those who want to see Nancy Pelosi in a more informal setting, here she is with Stephen Colbert.  Stunningly confident, but not worrisomely so.  I was delighted to hear her occasional chuckles, while Steve Colbert cringed, thinking her prediction of success would precipitate a bad turnout.  (It is possible that the outcome might have been better if halfhearted Democrats in the southern states had not taken Ms. Pelosi's blithe confidence to be permission to sit out the election, but it is a free country, even if some of us wish it wasn't.)

To summarize: Trump gave a rare press conference the day after the elections, and he deplored the fact that those Republicans who had not embraced him with open arms had not won their seats; he hurled insults at those who accused him of being racist; he refused to answer (or answered vaguely) questions about what he would do, now that the Democrats had a majority in the House; he did not answer questions about his cabinet.  Soon afterwards, he banned a particularly aggressive CNN reporter from the White House Press Corp (Jim Acosta), though I personally believe that Jim Acosta was at fault for not surrendering his microphone, and thus hijacking the press conference.  What is Trump to do: just patiently wait until Acosta thought he was done?  (Sarah H. Sanders played a video—which some Democrats insist has been altered—to support their claim that Acosta wrestled a female intern for the microphone.)  Next, he asked Jeff Sessions for his resignation, and then appointed a fellow called Matt Whittaker as acting head of the Justice Department.  There is some belief that such an appointment had to be approved by the Senate.  (But of course, now the Senate is running scared that without Trump's willing support and campaign, they may never win an election again.)

Among the freshman congressmen/congresswomen are two Islamic women, two Native American women, and two openly gay women, not all of whom are distinct; for instance one of the Native American ladies is openly gay.

 One article on the Internet (Atlantic Monthly) suggests that the divide between the Left and the Right is based on attitude towards education.  This was reported by at least two scholars.  Looking deeper at the effect, using exit polls, some scholars concluded that behind the "Diploma Divide" were uglier attitudes expressed as follows:

If you look at white people who voted for Trump—both those with college degrees and those without—and identify everybody with a high level of resentment toward minorities, women, and Muslims, as well as those who want an arrogant, assertive leader, there’s almost no one left. The vast majority of Trump voters share those sentiments, the researchers found, regardless of education level.

Sad as this makes us feel, we must remember that these attitudes are not permanent.  The article goes on to say that this seems to flow from nostalgia on the part of less educated white voters for a time in the past when blacks and immigrants did not share the rights and privileges that were exclusive to whites.  But whites with education appeared to have less distaste for the increased equality of more recent times.

Education.  Not related to the elections as such, I'm wondering what we can expect from the Federal Government in the area of Education.  Of course, personally knowing fellow-students of other races and colors is likely to make college youth more comfortable with the society we have.  But what can the Federal Department of Education (currently headed by Ms. Betsy De Vos) do for the country?

I have written numerous blogs on this subject, but I know I have failed to be clear, mainly because I was a teacher at the time, and I was too close to the facts to be entirely objective.  (I had taken the view that students had to learn all that was in the curriculum, because it was good for them.  And many of them needed all that, because they were certifying to be high-school teachers themselves.  But the culture that it was necessary to sweeten the deal with entertainment was gradually overtaking our institution, at which point I chose to depart.  But if some clever young fellow would be able to teach the syllabus as well as keep his students entertained, then he should be allowed to do it!  However, there was a simultaneous tendency to sacrifice some of the more difficult topics in favor of more entertainment, which seemed perverse.  The question is: are those last few difficult topics worth the effort?  If the objective is to be better at anything that Japanese, or Finnish, or Chinese students, then, yes.  But if teachers in high school are not really expected to cover all the topics that they covered in the past, then no.)

Everybody seems to be confused about the Federal role in Education, despite the fact that primary and secondary education is controlled by local governments.  Some people think that it is an economic issue: the nation needs educated labor if it is to compete economically with other countries.  But in the face of increasing globalization of manufacturing and commerce, the role of government needs to be re-thought.  It is more expensive to manufacture practically anything in the USA because life is more expensive, and education is more expensive here, because the kids must be entertained, too.  So our young people are going to be at a disadvantage in jobs that require actual hard knowledge, whereas they're going to be excellent at jobs that involve low-level thinking.

I was watching news programs where investors were discussing what to do in the event of a Blue Wave vs. a Red Wave, and they were talking about the S&P 500, and what it did on such-and-such a date, and how some investing firms focused on selling stock, while other firms focused on buying under-priced stock, and so on and so forth.  In certain quarters, this sort of knowledge is given a premium, and some of this is taught in Business courses in college.  It seems to me that the training (if you can call it that) received by a investment manager makes him or her useless for anything else.

However, if the Department of Education were to focus mainly on an excellent elementary education for all, they can't go wrong.  I think carrots are going to be more useful than sticks.  I have not studied the problem, but I have gathered that elementary education responds well to Federal support, provided they do not push it too hard, and provided elementary teachers do not respond too wildly.

To improve the level of high school education would be the greatest thing the Federal DOE could do, but I think it is going to be a tough undertaking.  There is more push back at every level, and hardly any success in the past on which they can base a successful program.  On top of all of this, the Alt-Right probably contains more than its share of education-haters, and parents of high-school kids are more likely to resent Federal supervision or influence than parents of elementary school kids.

Arch

Many Ways to Be a Girl, but One Way to Be a Boy: The New Gender Rules

This article: Many Ways to Be a Girl, but One Way to Be a Boy: The New Gender Rules is on a topic that has lots of relevance to something that I am concerned about.  But let's look at the main point first.

Because of the tireless efforts of feminists, girls are gradually being liberated to present themselves in a variety of ways: all the way from being ultra-feminine to being almost ungendered, in the sense of having interests and dress preferences that are neither feminine or masculine, and personal styles that do not fit into those of their parents' generation.  Make no mistake: not all of these are endorsed with equal enthusiasm in every location, or by every society.  In some conservative hell-holes, a girl who wants to be a fireman or a police officer would be looked at with some concern, or even scorn.  But a boy who wants to dance ballet, or wear a dress, is regarded with almost universal distaste.

To make myself perfectly clear: it isn't literally true that there is only one way that boys are permitted to present themselves. There are increasing instances of boys who have creatively found ways of presenting themselves differently than the athletic, masculine, taciturn, "man of action" type of guy.  The beer-swilling, football-playing type of boy who claims to be uninterested in school is a stereotype that has had its day, certainly.  But this is, in some ways, the central stereotype from which boys dare to diverge in some ways, but usually not too far.  Depending on where you live, there will be young fellows who reject this 'norm' utterly.  They can be uninterested in athletics, perfectly articulate, interested in school, and satisfied with almost any drink but beer, and also depending on the locality, they may be called nerds, or some other uncomplimentary term, invented by the morons who find the old stereotype comfortable, and probably the only one they can aspire to.  But the point of the article above is a rather relative thing: girls can safely stray much further from the feminine stereotype norm, and with fewer negative consequences, than boys can stray from their stereotype; and this is what is being talked about: why not boys as much as girls?  Why isn't the spectrum of tolerated personality styles as wide for men as for women?

Now, boys who would like to wear feminine dress are not rare at all.  For example, Ronald Reagan's son, Ron Junior, who wanted to dance ballet, was often humiliated, but as anyone who has seen him recently will agree, is a man with a personality that will probably satisfy the most bigoted sexist.

Now here's my point: first of all, I deeply dislike the rush of some parents to gender modification of underage children.  A boy who wants to present himself in a more feminine style should simply be allowed to do so.  Often the parents are horrified by this situation, but more often it is the classmates and the school administration that is more uncomfortable with it.  Until we take a more aggressive attitude towards freedom of gender expression,  (I don't even know whether that is the proper term for what I want to talk about, but it ought to be clear) there are going to be kids---and some overenthusiastic parents---who want to settle the problem once and for all, but replacing the poor guy's genital apparatus with those of a little girl, or hitting him with hormones, with the intention of surgical 'improvements' later on.  And the same goes with girls who want to present themselves in the style of boys.

There certainly are children who are hermaphrodites by birth, where the gender assignment is ambiguous.  Not being one of those, or even knowing one closely, I don't know how traumatic that is for the child, though it is doubtless deeply problematic for the parents, especially in a society that views gender as a very dichotomous thing.  But those are the exceptions; the vast majority of children who feel themselves to be gender fluid in the sense of (a) not comfortable with their assigned gender in every regard, and (b) not satisfied with their assigned sexual orientation, should be permitted to express themselves in terms of personal style (clothing, hair, personal presentation, etc) any way they wish, without it being considered imperative that they should have surgery at the first opportunity.  In fact, they should not be permitted to have (and their parents should not be permitted to encourage) gender reassignment surgery until they're old enough to marry, for instance.  This is obviously an arbitrary choice of age, but considering that the surgery is not easy to reverse, this can be considered something that society should enforce for the protection of the minor.

If there was a way for a child to experience what gender reassignment is like without the actual surgery, (assuming it is not permanent,) it would be ideal, and that could be tried when the child is young, and not yet in a calcified gender state.  (In fact, it might be a good thing to moderate tendencies in certain young males towards sexual harassment, to let them experience what it feel like to be at the receiving end.)

These problems are very First World, admittedly.  For that very reason, unless we in the West do not address the issue ourselves, it is unlikely that anyone else will.  (Except, of course, that Japan might take the lead in this one, since their traditions seem to be more flexible in these sorts of matters.)

I'm still thinking about this problem, but for lack of a forum in which to talk about the issue, my thoughts on it are slower than molasses...

Arch

P.S.
On a related note, perhaps it is time to insist that whenever an instance of pedophilia is discovered in clergy, that a huge fine be levied on the church, which must be given to state controlled charities.  I'm talking a fine of millions of dollars, which should not go to the victim, certainly not all of it.  Ultimately, I believe that the blame has to be placed on the church, for requiring or encouraging celibacy on the part of the clergy.