Quote of the Month

Realistically, most people don’t construct their life stories with themselves as the villains. Everyone is the hero of their own story. The Enemy’s story, as seen by the Enemy, is not going to make the Enemy look bad. If you try to construe motivations that would make the Enemy look bad, you’ll end up flat wrong about what actually goes on in the Enemy’s mind. -- Eliezer Yudkowsky

OTD

Forty years ago today, I was in Washington, DC, marching for the Equal Rights Amendment to prohibit sex discrimination by government. This march won a three-year extension of the deadline set by Congress for ERA's ratification, but it was still a few states short of the requisite three-fourths when that date passed in 1982.

Today there are still a number of areas where government discriminates on the basis of sex -- two of them being the men-only draft registration and penalties for non-registration, and government-mandated batterer intervention programs based on the sexist "Duluth model." But there's a revived ratification campaign inspired by the belief that the Congression

ally set deadline won't stand Constitutional scrutiny. It's now only one ratification short of the needed thirty-eight, if the deadline is struck down and they're all counted as valid.