Fri Apr 15/05
Star, not so bright

This article, from yesterday's Toronto Star, is absolute garbage:

A 1999 World Bank study matched up a so-called "corruption index," used in economic research, against an Intraparliamentary Union survey of women's representation in elected office. The results were clear: "The greater the representation of women in parliament, the lower the level of corruption." The title of the report was: "Are Women Really the 'Fairer' Sex?"

Jaw-dropping. This is the sort of fallacious cause-and-effect reasoning that kids in middle school should be picking apart. Here's Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, to which the garbage article refers. Scroll to the bottom and ask yourself how many opportunities women find for themselves in the halls of political power, or indeed anywhere, in places like Nigeria, Turkmenistan, pre-war Iraq, Yemen and Libya. There are none, of course.

"Corrupt" doesn't even really seem like the right word to describe people like Hussein, Qadhafi and (who could forget?) the peerless Saparmurad Niyazov, Turkmenbashi, Head of All Turkmen, but to the extent that Iraq, Libya and Turkmenistan are corrupt, it's obviously not because there are no women in government. Rather, there are no women in government for the same reason that the countries are corrupt: because the countries are complete basket cases, run by maniacs.