ESPN and the Left-Wing Conspiracy
No, not really. I'm dead certain ESPN has no axe to grind. But it's a case study in how biased reporting happens despite anyone's better intentions.

Bill Simmons thinks homeschool kids are freaks. He seems just to be out of touch. Almost nobody his age would have been homeschooled -- and very few my age -- because the resources weren't there, nor was the perceived need so great. (Public schools hadn't declined quite that far.) Also, he's from Boston, where they have above-average charter schools anyway.

Then there's this anti-anti-Title IX hatchet job, which Jonah Goldberg has already written on.

I don't want to read about this.
If this story (I right-clicked on the hyperlink from ESPN's main page to get the URL for my own link) is the one I think it is, I've already heard about it a few months ago and it ruined my afternoon back when I did hear about it.

I suppose it pushes several of my buttons at once. Anything involving brilliant, precocious girls, that is. (I infer "brilliant" from her going to college at such an early age; your mileage may vary.) The tricky question is just how much of her current lifestyle is of her own choosing. It raises major issues involving... well, everything you think it would involve.

Teen Sex
Or, what she said. If your time is short, skip the rest of this entry and read the one I just linked, by far the best comment on the subject.

Talking about teen sex is all the rage among political weblogs these days. Here's an example post; there are many others. Actually, I found Joanne Jacobs had the best summary/link set (look for the item heading "Teen Sex").

As a meta-issue, the weblog discussion phenomenon as of now seems disturbingly similar to Usenet political discussions as of ten years ago. Usenet quickly degenerated because people abused the system. Weblogs probably won't in that the most malicious things a person could do would be to post nasty stuff on their own weblog or make nasty comments on someone else's weblogs. In the former case nobody would read 'em; in the latter case, at worst, the owner of a weblog could use discretion and just remove offensive posts. That really wasn't an option on Usenet because "nobody owned it." Score one for reasonable allocation of "private" property.

Probably two types of people read this weblog. People who know me and who got here from my personal logs; plus political junkie webloggers who count this page among the dozens of others they check into. (Another difference between Usenet '93 and Blogosphere '02: The former was libertarian trending liberal; in this case it's conservative trending libertarian, sort of like if you took the people who listen to Rush (no, not Rush) and subtracted out the moral majority.) It's possible that what I'd have to say to each group differs a little.

It's a little hard to think about teen sex with anything other than wistfulness or jealousy, at least if you're a 20-something guy currently decidedly not involved in any kind of sex life. But deciding what part I most feel cheated to miss out on goes a long way towards deciding what I'd think or say to a teenager about sex. I'm thinking of the difference between emotional closeness and physical exploration/fun. If the latter were all it was about, the solution to my problem would be trivial: since I have a lot of disposable income and not enough sexual gratification, why not see where gratification can be bought?

As alluded to on a different weblog (and probably mentioned all too frequently), I had a "dancer" come to my room when I was in Las Vegas three months ago. Long story short, although this young lady was very talented, when she left I was by myself again, both literally and figuratively, and never felt emptier in my life. I wish there were some way to convey this particular feeling to teenagers and convince them that they should do their best to avoid it. Namely:

1. Don't do things you're not ready for, and especially don't do them if they turn out to be emotionally meaningless. Be very careful about hoping that any given act will turn out to be more "special" than it actually was. It's supposed to be special, in some indescribable way, and yet the act itself is not at all special in and of itself. It's just a tool, albeit a highly powerful and (if done well) highly effective one, a tool that can express love and affection but can also express flat-out horniness or ("need to fuck"?).

2. Then again, don't spend years of your life in some (metaphorical) shell. Go out and experience life a little, albeit without expecting everything to be miraculous or perfect. Be prepared to deal with the consequences of any given act -- but anything whose consequences you can deal with, go ahead and engage in life to the extent that you feel ready.

On the third hand, there are two issues that I really worry about with both teen sex and sex education. One of them is whether people are pressured to have sex. I wish more adults would reach out to teenagers (especially teen girls) and tell them, it's okay to say no.

The other thing is the risk factor. It's actually fine with me to tell kids that condoms and birth control amount safer sex, but I'm still not buying the idea that anything is every completely safe. Well, nothing in life foolproof I suppose. Heaven knows I go well past 80 on Bay Area highways often enough, increasing my risk for an auto accident by some value. Then again, I'll claim that I know the risk. I saw the scary movies in driver's ed. What there probably should be are scary movies in sex ed, about gonorrhea and syphilis and so on. Of course, nobody would take them completely seriously, but it's better than nothing in terms of getting the message across.