It's been nearly a month since I've blogged on here. But I haven't stopped! I've just been blogging over at Devil's Aggregate. It's a place where I write about political issues under two different pseudonyms, Angelo and Devon. Both represent different voices in my head, and it's my goal to get the Left and Right talking again. It's a novel concept, and one that I have Rusty to thank for.

Really excellent article in the NYTimes. Lots of good quotes. This one in particular stood out to me:

When a Washington Post journalist asked Daniel Zemel, a Washington rabbi, what he thought about federal agencies putting a dollar value on human life, the rabbi cited a Jewish teaching explaining that if you put one human life on one side of a scale, and you put the rest of the world on the other side, the scale is balanced equally. Perhaps that is how those who resist health care rationing think.

I posted some thoughts about the article and healthcare in general over on Curious Phil, one of a handful of new blogs that I'm experimenting with recently.

Having said that, what tips do you have for driving while drunk? Since drunk driving is so prevalent (apparently 1 in 10 drivers in Austin between 10pm and 4am is drunk), should we teach drivers tips on how to be safe even if you have to drive home drunk? What if I told you I had a pamphlet on tips for drunk driving that decreased drunk-driving related accidents by 50%? Would you want to hand that out at the DPS offices?

No, that would be absurd.

But then, isn't it absurd to talk about protected sex among teenagers? Isn't it absurd to hand out condoms in middle and high school?

I'm not saying I side with the Christian Right on this one, but I think it's a challenging thought experiment. What does it mean to be offended by one conversation but not by the other?

I like the way this one article from boston.com starts:

Human civilization will heat up the planet.

The rest of the paragraph ultimately talks about ways to prevent warming. But without the context, that sentence just seems like a blunt fact, and one that I believe.

I'm sensing that global warming skepticism has finally gone passe. Maybe it's because Bush isn't in charge. Either way, I don't hear the voices of skepticism in power anymore.

Having said that, when will we start talking about what to do in the event that Global Warming takes place? Are we prepared for it? Do we have disaster prepardness funds in place for an accelerating pace of Katrina's? Should we be creating a Noah's Ark to respond to the mass extinction we're causing?

While the "inconvenient truth" of global warming is finally sinking in to the hold-outs, when will the environmentalists contemplate the inconvenient truth that we don't have enough collectivist willpower to adequately prevent global warming?

And true to form, I've behaved consistently with reverse psychology. I've since delved heavily into the world of men's rights.

My first thought when skimming "men's rights" material is, "Hmm, thinking this way seems like an easy way to not get laid."

But then I thought, "If early feminists shyed away from women's rights because they thought it'd make them appear less attractive, that would have been really unfortunate."

In exploring gender issues, I also noticed the phenomena of the random counter-feminism monologue that comes from a female. These tend to be one of the most popular kind of artifacts that get traded around in discussions about gender issues, and they resurface at least a handful of times each year.

Jodi Kasten's "Equal Rights for Men" is a new contribution, albeit written in a bloggy-tone with "social media-friendly" tidbits:

Bob and Jane are a middle class couple. They have two children. They get an amicable divorce. There is a custody hearing. Both of them are good parents. Both of them want to be the primary custody holder. Who gets the children? Seriously, every single time, unless Jane lights up a crack pipe in the courtroom she will get physical custody. Bob is expected by society to be happy with every other weekend and two weeks in the summer.

Jodi's post garnered an enormous response on reddit (2434+ comments). Which leads me to what I really want to highlight with this post. cartouche had a really poignant comment that I strongly agree with:

I think at this point, in American society at least, it's no longer accurate or productive to generalize that women have it best OR that men have it best. The fight for gender equality of the 20th century was a big-picture fight, but the fight for gender equality of the 21st century needs to be a details fight.

Read the whole thing.