Tag Archives: links

IENJTFPS

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I’ve begun working with a career counselor, and she thought it would be helpful for me to take two standardized tests: the Strong Interest Inventory, which evaluates your career interests, and the MBTI, which evaluates your personality type along four dichotomies: introvert (I) vs. extrovert (E), sensing (S) vs. intuiting (N), thinking (T) vs. feeling (F), and judging (J) vs. perceiving (P). I’ve taken abbreviated forms of the MBTI in the past, twice, a long time ago: the first time I came out INTJ, the second time INFP.

I just took the full MBTI for the first time, and it’s so frustrating. It’s a bunch of theoretical questions followed by two alternatives. For instance, do you prefer a schedule or do you prefer to be spontaneous? Do you usually introduce people at parties or do you usually get introduced? Do you prefer a boss who is good-natured and inconsistent, or one who is sharp-tongued and logical? (Can I pick good-natured and logical but also compassionate?)

I had a hard time with many of the questions. I don’t think I have a consistent personality type. I’m a ball of contradictions. Sometimes I want to be alone and sometimes I want to be around other people. I’m more social than I used to be, but it was something I had to learn. Am I more open or more reserved? It depends on how I’m feeling. Do I prefer a schedule or do I prefer to be spontaneous? It depends. Does my head usually rule over my heart or vice versa? No clue. My head and my heart are in constant conflict. I think too much and I feel too much. Do I prefer logic or emotion? Coldly logical people bother me, but I don’t like mawkish sentiment either.

Grrr.

You know, if I were on the Supreme Court I’d be Justice Kennedy. No, O’Connor. Or maybe Breyer.

Granted, this test doesn’t determine the outcome of my life, or anything, really. It’s just supposed to be insightful. But it still pisses me off because it tries to pigeonhole me into categories, and I don’t like to be pigeonholed. I mean, look. Once I came out INTJ and once INFP. And on the I/E questions 10 years ago, I came out almost equally introverted and extroverted.

Anyway, I’ll see how I wind up scoring this time. It will be really interesting. Or maybe not.

FAIR v. Rumsfeld

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Students from Lambda, Harvard Law School’s gay rights organization, convened Saturday at the first annual Gay and Lesbian Legal Advocacy conference to map out the course of gay rights activism following the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding the Solomon Amendment.

Whah? The case, FAIR v. Rumsfeld, was not some big setback for gay rights. It wasn’t even a gay rights case at all; it was about whether law schools have the First Amendment right to deny military recruiters equal access to their facilities without losing federal funds. Yes, the reason the law schools wanted to ban military recruiters was because of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but the case wasn’t about the validity of “don’t ask, don’t tell” itself. The Court ruled, in fact, that the law schools could use their free-speech rights to express their opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell” as loudly and as often as they wanted.

Anyway, Congress was the body that passed that legislation, not the military, so it was pointless for law schools to try to pressure the military by banning its recruiters.

There, I’ve wanted to get that off my chest for a while.

Lithwick on Hamdan

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I love Dahlia Lithwick. (You can see all her Slate columns here – I have it bookmarked so I can see whenever she has a new one.) Today she provides an entertaining summary of yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Apparently Justice Souter got uncharacteristically angry. As for another justice, Lithwick writes, “What the hell has gotten into Justice Antonin Scalia? Between his extracurricular pronouncements on the arguments in this case (and I urge you to listen to the whole speech yourself) and his extracurricular hand signals last weekend, nobody is quite sure what has come over the man. He is ever more the Bill O’Reilly of the High Court.”

As for the case itself, the issue is (1) the legality of military tribunals set up by the executive branch that it claims are justified by “the war on terror,” and (2) whether the Court is even allowed to hear the case at all, because after the Court granted review of the case, Congress passed a law removing the issue from the Court’s jurisdiction. But (and I don’t know if I totally have this right) because the issue involved habeas corpus, the right of an arrestee to challenge his/her detention, it’s not clear whether Congress was allowed to strip the Court’s jurisdiction in the way it did.

I’m kind of confused here. I guess I would be less confused if I read the briefs. But who has time?