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Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
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10:23 pm - This is the funniest thing I have read in months (from Chris the Blogger)
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"Men of Gondor,
There is no doubt that the destruction of the threat of Mordor and the arrival of the new King has heralded an age of unparalleled prosperity for Gondor. But, I ask you, is everything as it seems?
King Aragorn came to the throne in the wake of the War of the Ring. The men of Gondor were understandably scared by the enduring threat of Sauron, and in their fear they gave up the rule of the stewards, a system of government that had served Gondor for centuries, and had seen the worst of Sauron's forces held at bay. Could it be that perhaps the threat of Mordor was inflated in the months preceding the siege of Minas Tirith? Could Aragorn, with the help of wizards and elves, have come the throne of Gondor, in lieu of our beloved stewards, under false pretenses?"
Read more at the source!
It comes to you from Myblogisagoodblog.blogspot.com and I have linked it without permission because I am pretty sure Chris won't mind. :)
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| Friday, November 27th, 2009
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10:36 am - Gordon Ramsay is amazing
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I made Gordon Ramsay's scrambled eggs this morning. I used parsley instead of chives, greek yoghurt instead of creme fraiche, and added a tsp of apple cider vinagre halfway through to make the eggs fluffier. It took about 20 minutes to scramble up fully.
They were the best scrambled eggs I have ever had. I can't even deal. They were fluffy and moist and literally melted in the mouth. It was like eating buttery scrambled air. It was magic.
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| Saturday, July 18th, 2009
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8:16 pm - Sometimes life can be summed up in a short gif
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| Saturday, May 16th, 2009
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1:04 pm - I want this dress
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This Mizrahi dress is amazing. It takes a relatively basic concept and elevates it beyond belief both in conception and execution. I want it so much I think I'm going to explode. Now obviously no normal human being has any occasion to ever wear a dress like this. And I don't even want to know how much it costs. But I don't care. It is utter fabulousness. Even ZQ agrees. 
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| Friday, May 8th, 2009
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5:02 pm - STAR TREK XI
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 I thought it said "SEX" behind them and I continue to believe that even though I suspect it doesn't. It was great. I think I'm in love with everyone in this movie (except the Romulans. Frickin Romulans). Minor criticisms: not enough "certainly" or "fascinating" in Spock's dialogue. Also not gay enough! But then again, compared to the gayness of TOS and the movies, what could possibly measure up? 
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| Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
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5:08 pm - Couple of things
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1. I'm leaving Paris soon, after having lived here for a year on my own. I'm going to miss it! But I have some exciting things hopefully coming up in Melbourne, and I am happy that I'll see my family again. 2. Anyone else watching Top Chef? I hate Hosea and Leah. I love Jamie, Stefan and Fabio. I mean everyone loves Fabio, with his adorable nearly-but-not-quite-fluent english. And he's William Shatner's private chef! But Stefan is an arrogant jackass. An arrogant jackass who can clearly cook better than anyone else there, with the possible exception of my girl Jamie. I have such a huge crush on her, and she's a lesbian -- so, in theory, I totally have a chance. I normally don't like tattoos at all, in fact they're pretty much a deal breaker usually, but I will totally look past them for Jamie. 3. Exam for "The Contemporary Arab World' is on friday. I am preparing by trying to read as much as humanly possible in the next few days. I'm loving "Jihad: the trail of political Islam" by Gilles Kepel right now and reccomended it to anyone interested in this stuff. 4. Star Trek movie is coming out in May! This whole thing is making me fall back in love with Zachary Quinto. I already loved him on So Notorious, and now he's Spock, and if you haven't seen the trailer, go and see it now. DAMN he looks like he does an EXCELLENT SPOCK. And by excellent, I mean hot. YEAH, I SAID IT.
5. Is it just me or is this dress totally hot? I know it's crazy and you'd have to be a crazy mofo to wear it, but she is totally pulling it off. I wish it were on the knee, and not over it, but I just love it so much that I don't even care. Shine on, Posh, you crazy diamond! 
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| Friday, November 21st, 2008
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9:06 pm - Milestones
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There are many milestones in the study of taekwondo. Your grading to yellow belt, throughout which you are completely terrified. Breaking a plank of wood for the first time. Accidentally hurting someone in sparring for the first time. Grading to black belt and feeling like you haven't even started learning yet, and that 1st dan is when you begin to learn taekwondo. Using what you've learned outside of class for the first time (well hopefully that never happens but it happened to me last month). And then there's the first time you accidentally dye your uniform pink in the laundry. Goddamn it, I have training on monday, I don't have time to fix this! Though I do remember that there was one lesson Master Freiss was wearing a unifom that looked suspiciously blueish, I don't think he'd appreciate me showing up in my delightfully rose coloured dobok. I put it to soak with the only bleaching agent I have in my apartment, which is Jiff for bathroom cleaning purposes. I really, really hope this works.
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| Sunday, September 28th, 2008
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11:09 am - Attention Swimmers: A Post About the US Financial Crisis
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The usual blathering about "corporate greed" simply won't cut it here, and nor will a shrug and a "let the market work it out". I am seeing so many comments that are just posturing based on personal politics. Most people commenting on the crisis do not even know the facts about what is happening. Many follow Obama's line that the problem is lack of regulation, but the facts don't support this view.
Here is a very quick overview of what happened, based on my own reading. I am not an expert and I wish I knew more. I am very likely to get some of this wrong and I hope if you see mistakes that you will tell me. So let's see if we can try to untangle this so we all understand a little better.
There have been two distinct financial breakdowns in this crisis.The first was the subprime crisis. Banks sold mortgages to people who were unlikely to be able to pay them in full because not only would the bank still have the house if they defaulted, but the regulation on securitization (which is the process of transforming an illiquid asset like a mortgage into a financial asset that you can trade in markets) allowed them to bundle these mortgages with other ones and sell them off in chunks. I believe there were also issues about the rating agencies that may have further obscured where the bad mortgages were. It became hard for traders to know where the risk was. Traders ended up with more risk than they told their banks they had in their portfolios - many because the risk was genuinely hard to evaluate so they didn't know for sure (always a factor in financial markets, so get used to it), but naturally some conciously erred on the side of looking good (for many complex reasons: not only for a bigger bonus but because if I pretend an asset is less risky than it is, people expect a lower reward than is truly possible from the asset, so when a big reward comes in I look like a magic wizard).
Banks ended up with overvalued draft sheets because the risk in the books wasn't reported. When the housing bubble popped and people started to default, banks therefore suffered losses. They began to have to mark down their own value, which they had calculated without the risk included. As an aside: the bubble had to pop, and people defaulting in and of itself is not a problem: they move into the cheaper homes they should have originally bought, other people move into their defaulted-on homes (the transaction costs are nasty though). The problems come at the next level up as I described.
So the failure was twofold: one, the specific way the securitization of mortgages was regulated created the opportunity to hide risk easily, and two, the way banks structured themselves lead to underreporting of risk by traders.
This lead to the credit crisis. Banks exposed to subprime risk they didnt know they had suffered huge losses of capital. (The problem is exacerbated where banks use leverage, or borrowing in order to finance investment, because their loss of capital comes on top of the debt they already have on their books - but note that leveraging is an important part of an efficient financial market.) Our current regulations force banks to hold a certain amount of capital relative to their holdings. So you have several options to get capital: primarily you can sell the assets you have so your new lower capital level is sufficient, or you can raise new equity and thus increase your capital. Raising new equity always takes time and in this kind of market is especially hard. Additional complications arise because investors want to sell shares of weak banks, and they see any bank trying to raise equity as likely to have undisclosed risk on the books and thus,weak. So even banks who want to recapitalise can't, and will sell off their assets in fire sales. Such large scale selling in the market rapidly devalues the asset, possibly even below its fundamental value.
Selling assets like this is a rational action in this situation, but leads to (at the very least a temporary) downwards spiral of increasing devaluation as markets flood with assets people are trying to offload. In such a situation, the worst kind of assets to hold are illiquid assets - our friends the mortgages, as well as insurance policies and loans to small businesses. There may therefore be long term consequences in these markets in particular. The more banks fail, the worse the spillover will be. We may even be seeing the beginning of capital flight as the Chinese try to get out of US financial markets. This part of the crisis is hard for me to understand and the problems seem more complex. The two main ones I see are the inflexible regulation forcing banks to hold levels of capital relative to their assets (you need be allowed to hold less capital in credit crunches), and the tendency of banks to engage in fire sales rather than equity raising/recapitalisation (which is a rational action leading to an inefficient outcome, and so will require some intervention).
The question is: how bad will the spillover be? What could be the consequences of the regulations or solutions we try to put in now on the capital markets in the future? The answers to these questions help determine whether the government should intervene and how they should do it. It is worth noting that most Wall Street economists support the bailout plan, and while they have more incentive to do so, they also have more information than most of us about what is actually happening. The split of academic economists is more complex: some support it, others support some kind of intervention but not this kind, others support no intervention at all (and point to the remarkable health of the US financial markets given the situation). Bernanke, the economist who knows more than anyone else in this situation, favours the bailout - but of course he is not infallible. There are numerous alternative proposals coming forwards including some about temporarily mandating recapitalization to disrupt the moral hazard problem. (Some are saying "Recapitalisation is a public good".) Let me state that I have no opinion on the bailout. I don't know what the right action is.
It's very tempting to believe Obama's line because it makes the solution easy: just regulate more! But this is likely to be disastrous. Remember that how government and independant bodies regulated the markets played an active role in both parts of the crisis. The solution will have to involve smarter regulation, using what we learned from this crisis instead of blindly whacking THIS particular mole, because the next financial crisis is not coming from mortgages, that's for damn sure. It'll be coming from new asset classes that whatever regulations we make now are not smart enough to deal with. (Or I guess if we fuck this up really badly it could come directly from whatever it is we do now). As Kashyap, Rajan and Stein say in their paper: the aim is not to have a policy to eliminate financial crises, since such a policy would be likely to cripple financial markets far worse than any crisis. The aim is to reduce systemic problems, and minimise spillover from the crises when they occur.
But don't take my silly undergraduate word for it. If you want more info, a good start would be to visit Greg Mankiw, and Marginal Revolution, and read everything they link to. This paper is especially good. It explains exactly what happened and provides good, high quality analysis of the factors at work. Its policy proposal is interesting but should be considered one voice among many. It will be a hard read for people without economic training but give it a shot.
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| Saturday, June 7th, 2008
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11:37 pm - A Revelation vis. Pug Dogs
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Pug dogs used to be one of my most hated animals. I used to volunteer at the RSPCA back in Melbourne and those pug dogs had like permanent respiratory problems. They would snort and snargle the entire time I was walking them. Only my ukranian supervisor Peter seemed to like them, and he also wore overalls all day so his opinion did not give me pause in my campaign against pugs.
But guess what, you guys! Pugs are actually great.
I don't have the rights to that photograph. I got it off some site about how you shouldn't let your pug get fat. Look in that pug's eyes. He knows he'll be doing 90 crunches tomorrow morning to work off that bread. I see the fear! (Alternatively, I could be projecting.)
I'm going into exams and final assessments for the first semester in France. After that I'll be hopping off to London, then to the Canary Islands to get my Scuba Diving License, and then to Seville for two months to learn spanish. That is all assuming I survive these exams. I am so excited for Seville because I hear the food culture there is amazing. If anyone has any inside tips about any of those places, please advise!
Anyone else watching Top Chef? My heart weeps for Dale and Antonia while that no-talent Lisa remains in the competition. I wait eagerly for her destruction. I hope she goes down hard in the finals.
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| Friday, May 30th, 2008
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9:00 am - Looks like I'm not the only person who hated the film V for Vendetta...
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Turns out that Alan Moore, the author of the graphic novel, also disliked the film. Here's what he had to say about it.
"[The movie] has been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country… It's a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives—which is not what the comic V for Vendetta was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England."
This is exactly how I felt about that film.
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| Sunday, May 25th, 2008
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1:32 pm - Mr Spock vs Homer Simpson
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Tim Harford, the guy who wrote The Undercover Economist, has a new book out called The Logic of Life. There's a great talk up on youtube in which he discusses it. The basic thrust of it is that enough humans behave rationally enough of the time to make an economic model of the world a very good one - and that humans are rational in surprising circumstances. Even juvenile delinquents and speed daters are weighing up costs and benefits somewhere in the back of their minds, and the data bears this out.
However, there are a few areas where we are a mix of rational and irrational. A good example of this is accomplishing things have decided are worth the cost, like losing weight or exercising more or quitting smoking, but as the time to pay the costs approaches our priorities switch and we decide those costs are not worth it. Harford calls this dilemma "Mr Spock vs Homer Simpson", and suggests that you can empower Mr Spock by locking yourself into a contract to lose weight or quit smoking.
Some economists have already set up a way to do it! StickK is a site where you can literally take out a contract on yourself. So, for weight loss, you choose an amount to lose every week and if you don't lose it, StickK will send that week's money to the charity or person you nominate (they suggest a person or charity you hate - may I suggest GodHatesFags.com?) You generally have to have a verifier so that you don't lie. It's a great way to put Mr Spock in control, as Harford says.
I took out a contract on myself to lose weight (with my dad, not with the site) and it's working really well! I'm nearly done. And let's all take a moment to remember that I live in Paris, land of the chocolate-coated caramel macaroon. Sometimes I still press my nose pathetically against the bakery window. Okay not really because in Paris they beat people for that kind of uncouth behavior.
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| Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
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6:35 pm - A boat full of strawberries
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On my way home from Sciences Po I pass numerous greengrocers near my house. Normally I ignore them since they are staggeringly overpriced but today I saw rows and rows of beautiful strawberries sitting out and I knew I wouldn't get the same quality in the supermarket. So I got into line and waited for a server - the grocery stores here are decidedly not libre service.
The server who eventually helped me out was outrageously cute. It was so unfair, he had the Clark Kent glasses and everything. Luckily I didn't want anything too complex, just "du persil et des fraises". He got me the parsley and then he asked me how many strawberries I wanted. I just wanted one carton but I didn't know how to say carton, but I noted it was priced per carton: or per "barque" as the label said. So I asked for une barque.
He sort of grinned at me and said, "English?". So I knew I had made a mistake. I admitted that I was Australian and he grinned apologetically again and said that on the sign barque was short for barquette. "A barque is like a little boat," he said, in his frustratingly french accented and perfect english.
"Oh," I said, feeling stupid. He handed me my groceries and suddenly said, very excitedly, "Nicole Kidman! She's Australian!". I laughed in his face. I didn't mean to! It was just so absurd! (Reason #245 why I am still single.) I think he forgave me because he gave me another smile and a cheerful goodbye when I left.
I wish he had asked for my mobile number - every other young french guy seems to be trying his luck with me on the metro. Of course none of them are as cute as this guy. I would totally have given him my number. Assuming, of course, that I could carry that conversation without completely embarrassing myself.
Outlook: not so good.
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| Saturday, April 12th, 2008
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4:00 pm - "Everyone's very busy, though not exactly working." - PJ O'Rourke
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I made a Lolcat. I suppose it was only a matter of time. Obviously it is a small government lolcat.
And to round off our sniggering at big government, some words from the master, PJ O'Rourke.
"Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine."
"Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking."
"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life; but only a fool trusts either of them."
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| Sunday, March 30th, 2008
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12:12 am - Communism: bad in theory, bad in practice, bad as a solution to global warming
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Many people, if pressed for their opinion on communism, will regurgitate the standard answer that it is "great in theory, but it doesn't work in practice."
Clearly, communism is actually bad in theory and bad in practice. So why do people say this stuff? Well, I used to say it and it's mostly because you actually wish you could support it, but you have to admit it's horrific, so you say you support it "in theory". These people sympathise with the goal of total enforced equality and would be happy to hand over everybody's economic freedom for it. However, as if the theoretical tradeoff were not distasteful enough, history rather distressingly shows that you end up trading all your freedom (economic, social and political) in exchange for poverty, corruption and state-sponsored violence.
In trying to tell whether a theory or a solution is bad in theory and in practice, generally you can ask this question: Does this rely on large numbers of people acting against their own self-interest? If it does, in general it's going to fail. This is not only true of communism, which is also stupid for many other reasons. This is also true of most of the things some well-meaning people do every day in their efforts to stop global warming.
You can't solve global warming by "raising awareness" that using fossil fuels is really bad for the environment. You can't solve it by shopping at co-ops and eating only local produce and not driving your car or not eating meat or not buying new things or not flying in planes. Ultimately only a minority of people will chose to do these things without being coerced, and therefore your decision to do these things doesn't change the endgame.
Why don't most people do them? Well, you might think it's in their self-interest to do them, but it isn't. Most people know that the biggest catastrophies of global warming will only start after they die. They know other people know that, and they know that these "solutions" only work if most people do them, which they know is laughably unlikely. Given how expensive or lame most alternatives to things that are bad for the environment are, there is little incentive to actually do anything about global warming. This is pretty much textbook game theory.
In fact global warming is a classic, textbook case of a negative externality (which for extra excitement is also a public bad) that has to be solved by governments. But can we please remember what I said about communism, and not try to use communism to solve global warming in some kind of massive meeting of the FAIL?
Any realistic solution must rely on changing what the incentives are, and then using the working of the free market. For example, forcing people to buy local produce or stop driving cars or stop buying new things is a BAD solution, which will create corruption, poverty, and have to be harshly enforced. I don't know why people think admitting government needs to be involved means the government should use policies based on watered down communist or socialist ideas. Possibly they think that if you take an extremely dumb idea and water it down, you'll get a good idea!
In conclusion, governments need to levy some carbon taxes (or a cap/trade system) and they need to do it progressively. Capitalism has had the theoretical framework to deal with global warming for about 200 years. It's time for environmentalists to catch up.
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| Friday, March 21st, 2008
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7:34 pm - Something cool I saw near my house
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| Saturday, March 1st, 2008
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6:34 pm - War on drugs? Give peace a chance!
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In my last post I argued a position that generally offends the left. Today, allow me to offend the right.
All drugs should be legalised. All the thousands of people in jail for mere possession of drugs should be released immediately. That's not to say that I think drugs are great (I don't), and I find it hard to understand people who take them. But the costs of prohibition are just too great.
I could write out an argument here, but I'll let someone else a lot smarter than I am make the case instead. Jeff Miron is an economist (now at Harvard), but this talk is not only about the costs and benefits of prohibition - he also discusses the morality of the "hardline" stance on drugs.
Miron is clearly a formidable intellect and a nerdy econometrician. This is really one of the best speeches, and certainly the best case for legalisation, I've ever heard. I personally guarantee that if you watch this you will become smarter. (For non-economists: the word he's using that sounds like "syntax" is "sin tax" - taxing something because we think it's bad and therefore want to reduce its prevalence.)
I was on the fence about drugs because of the harm that some people who use them do to others, which they would not do without the drug (increasing theft, murder, DUI etc). Miron convinced me that prohibition does nothing to mitigate these harms, and indeed only hinders their prevention and exacerbates their severity. It is more effective - and morally consistent - to police these harms, not the drugs themselves.
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| Sunday, February 24th, 2008
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6:08 pm - Governments shouldn't subsidise Universities
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Everyone agrees that having high levels of primary and secondary school graduation levels benefits society (or, confers "positive externalities" to society). It makes markets function better because their participants are more intelligent and informed. Arguably having more intelligent and informed citizens also makes democracy function better.
It makes sense therefore that the government should ensure that all children have the opportunity to go to school even if their families can't pay for it (and they should do it with school vouchers, but that's another story).
University education is a completely different situation. The benefits of university education are all private - that is to say, they are conserved by the people who go to the university. Why? Because if other people want to benefit from the skills you got at university, you make them pay you money for it. That's why people who graduate from universities and other higher education institutions often go on to enter the wealthiest sector of society.
The state should not be taxing its population and giving the money to the people who are the most likely to become the future rich. People that go to university are the minority (it's a sizeable minority, but still). That means that if the government taxes people so it can pay for students to go to university, they're taking money from people who are (on average) poorer, and giving it to people who are (on average) richer. They are literally taxing everyone more, including people who work low paying jobs at Safeway and Kmart, so they can give money to people who will soon become professors or lawyers or doctors.
I know students aren't rich now, which is what economists call the liquidity constraint: their lifetime income is high but they don't have access to it yet. That's why HECS (government loans) is a good idea - you have to pay for your own education, but the government lets you wait until you have the liquidity you need. That means poor but smart people can go to university and end up rich. Yay.
HECS right now is less than it would be because the government also subsidises universities. And if you agree that taking money from poor people and giving it to rich people is wrong, then you should oppose that.
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| Friday, December 14th, 2007
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10:30 pm - Black Belt: Aquired
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I got my 1st Dan Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do!
My grading went well - my terminology, forms and sparring were all pretty good. I hit a snag with the breaking. I broke four pine boards - first try on axe kick and side kick (easy!), but took four tries to break the boards on the front and back kicks. That was a little humiliating but I got them eventually. I was subconsciously holding back on the back kick because I was afraid my aim was not good enough. After three tries, Gary (our second head instructor) said "You're holding back" very quietly. I smashed through it on my next try.
[EDIT: I just realised they held the wood the wrong way for the front kick! So I had to break it against the grain! No fucking wonder it took so long!]
I have been working towards being a black belt for seven years. I'm not your typical candidate for martial arts (or I wasn't when I started) - fond of chocolate and sitting in comfortable armchairs. I'm still fond of those things, but now I'm also fond of a little yasok gyorugi (free sparring) and gyok pal (breaking boards).
I train under Grand Master Yon Dai Cho, the only 9th Dan black belt in Australia. It's an honour to be taught by him, even if he is strict.
I achieved one of my dreams tonight. It feels pretty good.
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| Sunday, December 9th, 2007
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2:51 pm - I am the queen of Econometrics (and modest too)
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Sabine Herold added me as a friend on facebook!
SABINE HEROLD! In case nobody follows french politics, let's say she's the younger, hotter, frenchier Maggie Thatcher. She probably added me because I joined the group Liberte Cherie (imagine the accent) but hell, I'll take it. I'm already friends with Greg Mankiw but I added him.
So, I quit my job at the beginning of the semester to try and get better grades. It paid off! I hooked a 93 in macro, a 92 in econometrics, and a less impressive 87 and 83 in my two french subjects. For non-Australians reading this: in our grading system a First is 80+ and getting over 90 is quite rare. So I'm pretty happy. Especially in econometrics, which I hear grad schools like to see. After this I'm feeling more confident about handling mathematics. In any case, my Macro tutor told me that students at Melb Uni don't need to take extra maths to get in the Ivies because they teach us all the math we need in third year and honours. I'm busy trying to verify that claim.
Anyway, I return to my job next weekend. When I quit, my boss said I could come back whenever. I don't really want to return but I guess extra money is worth it. Anyway, I don't want to use the scholarship money to replace my ipod, which I broke while I was in the gym. After two years of devoted service, I dropped it on the treadmill - it bounced onto the treadmill next to me, and then bounced high into the air and landed about 20 feet away. I knew only bad things came from exercise. Now I'm going to have to get a new one, and I definitely want one with video. Why, you ask?
Well, I just discovered the joys of Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis. The great thing about SGA is that one of the writers, Joe Mallozzi, keeps a blog. So does one of the actors, David Hewlett (happens to play my favourite character ever, Dr Rodney McKay - Daniel Jackson is a close second). So you get a lot of behind the scenes stuff and silliness. (You can see from my icon how I warmed to the fandom.)
This friday I am grading for my black belt in taekwondo. I will be breaking on my front kick, side kick, axe kick and spinning back kick. I'm pretty nervous as the entire grading is conducted in Korean, which means I had to learn about 300 words of it (I'm not quite there yet though). I've been training an hour or so every day for the last month. I'm so nervous, but also kind of geeking out about the thought of finally being a black belt.
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| Friday, November 23rd, 2007
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6:04 pm
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I finally got around to reading Bruce Bawer's book "While Europe Slept." I am about halfway through but I've got something to share.
On September 6, 2001, it was reported that 65% of rapes in Norway were committed by non-western immigrants (read: mostly muslim men.) Bawer quotes the prominent Oslo academic Unni Wikan as saying that some of the BLAME for this has to be shared by Norwegian women, who "must realise we are living in a multicultural society, and adapt to it."
Adapt? How might women do that? Wear a burqua? Nobody should have to accommodate or adapt to a world-view that blames women for rape. It is never acceptable to argue that a woman who dresses provocatively (and let's be totally clear about this: to a devout muslim that means she might be showing her shoulders) is asking for, or deserves, to be raped. It is truly worrying to hear a western academic saying things that would sound natural from the mouth of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Norwegian women (or any women) should not have to change the way they dress. The underlying issue is not how women dress. It is the fact that some muslim men think that because a woman is wearing a short skirt, it's their right to rape her.
To even imagine adapting to this is abhorrent.
(I shouldn't even need to say this, but I'm not suggesting it's all muslim men, obviously.)
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breakfastserial's journal
