Showing posts with label babies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label babies. Show all posts

Monday, May 17, 2010

Babies (The Movie): Abridged


These four babies are... babies, yet this French film brilliantly shows both the beauty of bodily functions and the subtle nuances that distinguish one culture from another: hippie-yuppie parents make their babies do yoga, urban Japanese parents make their babies wear leg warmers, Namibian parents let their babies chew on bones from the ground, and Mongolian parents let their babies crawl around under goats. No matter what their nationality, babies really like hipster music. (See Babies: The Movie)

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Heifersoapbox: Babies on the Supreme Court



In a recent NYT Sunday Magazine piece, a Yale Professor proposed that babies can make moral judgments about people's actions and mete out punishment accordingly. Apparently, we are born with a built-in sense of right and wrong, which is then sullied by liberal arts education and postmodernism.

This is an incredible breakthrough, both for political science and for actual science. We will soon be able to harness babies' innate purity and exploit -- I mean use it for our own devices by appointing them as judges and magistrates in our courts. No need to spend thousands of dollars on higher education when we can simply dispose of the judges (make them "analysts") once they've started wearing big boy pants and have lost all sense of right and wrong.

This plan would win the support of helicopter parents everywhere. No longer do young mothers have to launch cutthroat campaigns to get their toddlers accepted to elite preschools; they can now do it to get them elected to the Supreme Court, saving time, energy, and lives. Using babies would also reduce the Supreme Court's carbon footprint because babies use considerably less energy than the current justices do.

Several studies support this plan by demonstrating babies' moral fiber. In the lab, 2/3 of babies looked longer at evil people than they did at good people. According to a survey, 2 out of 5 of babies say they would throw a Barbie under an oncoming Tonka train without discernable cause (a trend that becomes much more prevalent in toddlers).