[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Border Thinking's Laura Agustín really doesn't like Sweden's sex-purchase law, which criminalizes prostitution by penalizing the john, not the (presumably) much weaker sex worker. What happens, she wonders, to the individual autonomy that has encouraged many people (not only women) to exchange their sexual services on the market?


• The Global Sociology Blog argues that Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is tailor-made as source material for a studies on the sociology of gender, showing--and not only through the character of Lisbeth Salander--the challenges of women under patriarchy.


• At GNXP, Razib Khan makes the point that old stories about wild men have less to do with folk memories of extinct hominin species and more to do with the ability of people to dehumanize others.


• Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen makes the reasonable argument that Germans are hostile to the idea that they should save less and spend more based on their own limited, displeasing, experiences with Keynesianism, and that they aren't unreasonable to be hostile.


• Slap Upside the Head notes that a bill in Canada's parliament to explicitly extend human-rights protections to the transgendered has passed second reading, the first time a bill of its kind has done so.


• From Understanding Society's Daniel Little comes some enlightening quotes on the complexities of human societies from the anthropologist and essayist Clifford Geertz, everything from wonderful summaries of Foucault to observations about the diversity of North Africa. Attention to detail, Geertz notes, matters hugely.