Doctor Science

by Doctor Science

There’s been an interesting conversation about sex education going on in the comments to the previous post, which I invite you-all to roll over into this one, to leave the abortion discussion over there.

I’m starting off with something I wrote a few years ago. I’ve tacked in one cite where I could find it; if there’s anything else in here that strikes you-all as needing supporting evidence, please point it out — most of it seems incredibly self-evident to me.

I think “abstinence until marriage, faithfulness afterward”, far from being “the only 100% safe approach”, is a proven formula for disaster.

As far as I can tell, “abstinence” in this sense includes never having any orgasm-related contact with another human being before marriage. That is, it encourages ignorance, clumsiness, and lack of knowledge of self and others. For women in particular, this means that they are much more likely to find marital sex unsatisfying, as neither half of the sketch has enough hands-on knowledge of female sexual response to get her where she wants to go. Unsatisfying marital sex is a Bad Thing, not least because it leads to more divorces, a Really Bad Thing.

Abstinence-until-marriage also naturally leads to earlier marriages, as young people get married so they can legitimately have sex. Early marriages lead to more divorces, which, again, a Really Bad Thing.

Abstinence-until-marriage also encourages the mindset in which certain behaviors are labeled “sex” by adults, and so teenagers indulge in other behaviors because they “don’t count”, but without taking appropriate precautions either medically or emotionally.

For instance, oral sex is a *really* effective contraceptive, but there are still disease risks — which is why teenagers could stand to learn about flavored condoms — and it has emotional/relationship risks if it doesn’t go both ways, if it just becomes a power trip. Exploitative sex is also a Really Bad Thing.

One of the worst things about “abstinence until marriage, faithfulness afterward” as an educational program is that it is so patently hypocritical. Kids aren’t stupid — they look around at the behavior of the adults they know and the ones depicted in movies, TV, and ads, and they will infallibly conclude that AUMFA is not standard, normal adult behavior. “Do as I say, not as I do” is a Bad Thing, because it leads kids to assume adults are always lying, even when we say “don’t mix downers and alcohol” or “don’t drive 70 on that twisting road”. And those are Really, Really Bad Things.

AUMFA makes adults feel good, but it is a disservice to young people on multiple levels, and I’m against it.

Some comments re sex ed from the earlier post that I think are particularly good jumping-off points:

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by Doctor Science

I wanted to do a round-up of the recent surge in Republican/conservative attacks on abortion.

• A Catholic hospital de-Catholic-ed for saving a woman’s life with an abortion
• An Idaho pharmacist who cited the “conscience clause” in refusing to fill a prescription to control bleeding — because the Rx was coming from Planned Parenthood, apparently.
• The many-faceted attacks of H.R.3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.
  • HR3 originally included a provision to restrict the “rape exception” of the Hyde Amendment to “forcible rape” (or what Whoopi Goldberg calls “rape rape”), but that has been dropped.
  • For over a week, Sady Doyle has been blogging, twittering, and organizing against HR3. She was big force behind making it not re-define rape, and she’s not stopping. The bill also affirms “conscience” clauses — now extended to include a hospital’s right to refuse to save a woman’s life.
• Anti-abortion activists tried to scam Planned Parenthood by pretending to be child traffickers. PP reported them to prosecutors immediately after the visits, but somehow this is supposed to make PP look bad, anyway.
• I would be more surprised that those activists were willing to cynically exploit child sex trafficking (as though it’s something that doesn’t deserve to be treated seriously), except that Republicans have been blocking the Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Deterrence and Victims Support Act of 2010. The deeply conservative Concerned Women for America opposed the bill because they think child sex slaves should be arrested as criminals, not supported as victims.
• The return of the back alley

There’s lots more, but I’ll stop for the moment.

Now, the post I wanted to write was about abortion, sexuality, and women’s rights in America — but I realized that that post and the ensuing discussion would fall apart into derailing flames without *another* post, first. This is my post about some premises.

I can only call a person or organization “anti-abortion” if they are also pro-contraception.

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by Fiddler

I’ve been watching the coverage of the protests in Egypt on Al Jazeera and CNN the last few days. Throughout this, it’s impossible to avoid seeing varying levels of relationship between Egypt and the United States.

I’m glad that the Egyptian Army has refused to fire on protesters. Instead of shooting, army officers are trying to persuade the protesters to go home and resume normal life, on the 12th day of protests. It’s not working too well; people keep coming back to the crowd despite the last few days’ violence.

For the past two days, while Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron (whom I saw on Al Jazeera) and others have pushed for an orderly transition of power, the pro-Mubarak forces have done their best to crush protest with clubs, machetes, and any force possible, even while military personnel in the streets have stood aside to let these armed enforcers past. I’m not sure how the army justifies this as non-interference with the protesters.

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by Doctor Science

Your ObiWi front-pagers are doing some re-shuffling, again, as various people find they have less time for blogging than they’d hoped. I’d like to introduce a new candidate, “Fiddler”, and her first post.

I’ve e-known Fiddler under another pseud for years (since before the ’04 elections, IIRC) — she was long one of my main sources for news and links on politics, energy, art, feminism, and interesting stuff. She lives in the DC area, very broadly speaking, and has worked in the newspaper business (when there was one) and politics. She’s also a musician (guitar, cello, fiddle), hence the choice of pseud for Obsidian Wings. And of course, there are cats.

In terms of the political landscape, Fiddler is on the lefty side (as am I, of course), but with a *really* solid understanding of the nuts & bolts of policy — much of what I know I’ve learned from her. Give us your usual forthright yet civil feedback, and we’ll see how this works out. Herewith:

Paging Charles Dickens, by Fiddler

Back in the 1980s, I spent a time working for a daily newspaper in a small city in New York state. The newspaper was part of a media chain owned out-of-state, and the pay scale was set for the other state, which didn’t have New York’s higher taxes. Because of this, as a single working person, I was qualified to receive government assistance for food in the form of free cheese and other occasionally available food products. I won’t deny it came in very handy at the end of the month, particularly in midwinter with sub-zero temperatures and high heating bills. But at the next desk, the reporter was a man who made the same money I did and who was married and had children. He and his family were on food stamps in order to keep food on the table all the time, although he, like me, was working full-time. In a different industry, we might have been able to work overtime to make up some of the difference, but according to company policy none of us were allowed overtime except on election night, which didn’t pay for a lot of groceries.

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by Doctor Science

I’ve spent days now starting posts about the Tucson Massacre and then stopping because someone else was saying it better. Examples: Sady Doyle: “The Arizona shooting FAQ”; Esquire: “The Voices in Jared Loughner’s Head Shall Not Be Respected; Julianne Hing: Loughner, Lovelle Mixon, and Our Quest for Narratives; Conor Friedersdorf: Tone Versus Substance and many, many more.

I’m going to just talk about one aspect of the Massacre and the resulting discussion. In brief:

a) we have too many guns, and the guns are too big

b) a major reason for this is that guns are more important as fantasies than as tools

c) in particular, guns have starring roles in our filmed fiction (TV & movies), and those roles are what we think of when we imagine “guns”.

In not-so-brief:

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by Doctor Science

The “Best/Worst Movies of 2010” lists are popping up all over, and “The Social Network” is on a lot of them. Here’s the review I drafted when it came out: dusted off, completed, and edited.

I went to see The Social Network the second weekend it was out — the 10:40AM Saturday show at the googlePlex, because that’s only $6 instead of $10 or more. Afterward, the group who’d gone sat around and talked about it: did you like it, did you not like it. When it came around to my turn, I couldn’t really say “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. I can only say: “it’s complicated”.

On the one hand, there’s the unmistakable zip of Aaron Sorkin dialogue: snappy, but with the sound of real people actually talking, not just characters expositioning. On the other hand, the story that’s presented isn’t as close to the real events as it’s trying to seem. On the other other hand, there are important aspects to the way historic events were broken apart and re-assembled to make the movie, especially the way women are included (or not). And on the fourth hand, I can see things in the movie — about Facebook, and about the way we live now — that Sorkin and David Fincher (the director) may not have realized they were putting in, but that are there nonetheless.

In a nutshell: The Social Network uses some historical documents, but it’s not a documentary; it references historical events, but it’s not historical fiction. It’s in the genre known as RPF, for Real Person Fic — along with, say, The Beatles’ movies, especially A Hard Day’s Night.

Detailed and comprehensive spoilers behind the cut, along with several embedded videos.

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by Doctor Science

In the discussion to Sebastian’s post celebrating the end of DADT, commenter avedis took issue. I found avedis’ comments more honest and comprehensible than most defenses of DADT, but they raise disturbing questions about rape culture in the military.

WARNING: POTENTIALLY TRIGGERY DISCUSSION OF RAPE AND RAPE CULTURE

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by Doctor Science

M.S. at the Economist talks about The lonely 6%: as Daniel Sarewitz discussed at Slate, the Pew Research Center found that while 23% of the general public identify as Republican, only 6% of scientists do. M.S. suggest three possible, testable hypothesis to explain this:

The first is that scientists are hostile towards Republicans, which scares young Republicans away from careers in science. The second is that Republicans are hostile towards science, and don’t want to go into careers in science. The third is that young people who go into the sciences tend to end up becoming Democrats, due to factors inherent in the practice of science or to peer-group identification with other scientists.

A month ago, Nils August Andresen posted a series at Frum Forum about why the educated young are shunning the GOP:

To simplify: Republicans have gone from having a clear advantage among top students in the decade following the Eisenhower administration, to being competitive under the Nixon and Ford administrations, and from being an energetic minority during Reagan and Bush Sr. to being almost eradicated today.
..
while students have fled the Republican Party, they do not seem to have moved very far to the left. The Weathermen are long gone. Hippies, utopian Marxists, socialists, anarchists – groups that were prominent in the 1960s and 1970s – are marginal today. Rather, today’s best students identify as slightly to the left of center, policy-wise liberals who massively prefer the Democratic party.
…
Let me advance another hypothesis. Today’s top students are motivated less by enthusiasm for Democrats and much more by revulsion from Republicans. It’s not the students who have changed so much. It’s the Republicans.

The 20- or 30-point advantage the Democratic Party has among educated young people pretty much matches what the Pew Center found for scientists as a whole — even though Pew’s sample was drawn from AAAS members, who are mostly middle-aged or older.

I’m not going to say that I know for sure what drove this historical process, but I can talk about what it was like.

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by Doctor Science

On Monday, zunguzungu posted a widely-linked and ground-breaking analysis of Julian Assange’s stated philosophy behind Wikileaks:

to summarize, [Assange] begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. [bold mine]

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by Doctor Science

Rupert Murdoch, that is, not Beelzebub. Well, not literally Beelzebub.

It’s clear from our discussion that Sarah Palin’s charisma is highly polarizing, but this is also true for other very charismatic politicians, such as Bill Clinton.

What would make a Palin campaign truly different is Fox News.

Jonathan Bernstein at The New Republic tries to reassure those of us fearful about a Palin candidacy:

Presidential nominations are … I need a word not quite as strong as “controlled,” but much stronger than “influenced” … by political party leaders. […] If Republican leaders don’t want Palin, you’ll start hearing negative stories about her on Fox News, and from leading conservative talk shows and blogs, and enthusiastic conservatives will turn elsewhere.

I just want to pinch his cheeks, he’s so cutely naive. Bernstein thinks Republican leaders tell Fox News what to do! That’s so last century — or at least last decade.

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by Doctor Science

I am thankful for the usual: family, friends (both RL and e-), reasonable health, a cat who loves me, and PIE.

This year, I’m thankful for: managing to sell our old house, staying in the school district yet moving to a place we can afford, a walkable community, enough money to give people presents this year, and this blog. And good grief, a LOT of pie.

Today in special surprise thankfulness, U.S. to Drop Color-Coded Terror Alerts.

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by Doctor Science

This will be your mandatory Sarah Palin post. Every political blog has to have one, it’s the law (like gravity). And, like gravity, it’s pretty hard to get away from hearing about Sarah Palin.

This week, the big question being kicked around the blogosphere is, Will Sarah Run? (for President in 2012, that is.) And if she does, can she win the Republican Nomination? And if she’s nominated, can she beat Barack Obama?

Frank Rich says: You Betcha

Daniel Larison says: are you kidding? it would be a slow-motion car wreck

Frum reports on an important trend: the Republican establishment’s increasingly frantic search for ways to stop the Palin for President campaign.

Nate Silver says: she dominates the news.

I say: what none of these horse-race analyses take into consideration is Sarah Palin’s superpower. She has charisma, the genuine article (not available in stores, much less online). In our household, we call it “charisma buckets” — where the person is so charismatic that it overflows, so they have to carry figurative buckets everywhere to hold the excess. If US electoral politics were a role-playing game (and are you going to argue that it’s not?), her Charisma would be +4: a perfect 18 out of 18.

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by Doctor Science

Like many people, I played the New York Times’ You Fix the Budget puzzle. My personal solution can be succinctly described as “stop war; tax the rich”.

Of course, the whole game is based on assumptions about what we can or can’t do: there are options for “Obama’s plan” versus “Clinton-era taxes”, for instance, but none for my favored Eisenhower-era taxes. And then we also get to consider:

Tighten eligibility for disability

The costs of the disability insurance program, which is administrated by the Social Security Administration, have been rising rapidly. This option would cut disability spending by 5 percent by focusing on states with the loosest standards. Supporters note that growing numbers of workers are classified as disabled, though the average job is less physically taxing. Opponents worry that injured or ill workers with few good job prospects would be harmed.But hey! It could save up to $17 billion dollars! Out of a trillion! So really, how much could it hurt?

It happens that I’ve spent some time this past week finding resources for a friend who IMHO needs to go on disability, and from my personal observation: it could hurt a *lot*. And the people it would hurt are, pretty much by definition, already hurting — it is a targeted intervention to afflict the afflicted.

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by Doctor Science

When people started talking about the TSA offering passengers a choice of “nude pix or enhanced pat-down”, I was at first kind of confused about why there was so much fuss. You see, I remember getting the old “enhanced security examination” years ago, and no-one then took real umbrage.

The different circumstances, though, shed light on why the TSA’s policies have really crossed a line (James Fallows, *very* frequent flier and occasional pilot, is a good source for background).

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by Doctor Science

Andrew Sullivan linked to Morgan Meis’ review of George W. Bush’s official portrait:

That can’t be serious, I thought to myself when I turned a corner at the Gallery and saw the portrait. The mundane kitsch of the thing was shocking. There are standards. By God there are standards. Aren’t there? A vase of flowers sits on the table of a dining room set behind him. The set is more middlebrow than anything you could find even at a mainstream outfit like IKEA. It is a set you’d find, I suppose, at Jennifer Convertibles. The whole scene is resolutely suburban. Aggressively suburban.

Meis is shocked at how much the portrait looks like “a Sears portrait” in quality, but what shocks *me* is how resolutely unpresidential it is.

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by Doctor Science

Last week, the voters of Oklahoma overwhelmingly approved a state Constitutional amendment to prohibit judges from considering international or Shariah law. As Marcia Hamilton said on Findlaw (I believe sarcastically), this
seems to be Oklahomans’ reaction to the demonic Taliban and al-Qaeda forces that are pledged to end our way of life and America itself [ominous music].

As has become customary, much of the rhetoric about “Shariah Law”[1] focuses on the legal status and treatment of women. In this case, one of the standard talking points is that “Shariah Law” mandates unjust wills, because it prescribes that, in dividing an estate each son should inherit twice as much as each daughter. The Muslim who has filed the initial lawsuit against the amendment is doing so on the basis that his will states “that his possessions be divided ‘in accordance with the guidance contained in the prophetic teachings’ of Islam” — which pretty much makes the point for his opponents.

Echidne of the snakes said

I’m not certain if there is anything “especially nefarious” about the shariah laws when compared to other religious laws created during the middle ages, and that’s when most of them seem to have been created. They all tend to give women fewer rights than men, though.

I’m more knowledgeable about Islam than Echidne, and I’ll go further: before the Enlightenment, Islamic inheritance law, in particular, was in many ways *more* just and equitable than that current in Europe, and some Islamic legal creations have become part of the structure of Western law.

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posted by Doctor Science

The following was published in a different venue by an e-friend who’d like to be known here as “Lizzie”. I’m posting a slightly-edited (by her) version here with her permission, because I think she says some important and frequently-overlooked things particularly well.

I used to work in politics.

I started local, running GOTV for my county, and I ended local, running a successful county-wide campaign. In between I worked two presidential cycles and a congressional campaign, which meant for four years I ate, breathed, slept, and thought about very little but votes, votes, votes.

When I worked in politics there was nothing worse than the day after the election. Everything you'd worked for, sometimes for two whole years, came down to the votes people cast, and sometimes, despite everything you did, how they voted was mind-boggling. You were exhausted; you'd eaten nothing but junk food for weeks and you drove and canvassed and planned and organized events; you'd worked 18 hours on election day and stayed up to watch every last return from every corner of the country come in.

There was nothing left for you to do. Everything was over. It was depressing as hell.

But now . . .

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by Doctor Science

Greetings, fellow Citizens of the Republic of Science!

Galaxy Zoo began more than 3 years ago. It’s a crowdsource project to have regular people — citizen scientists, as they say — do image-processing for large-scale projects. I worked with them for a while — especially on what are now called pea galaxies — then dropped back as I did more political work and blogging.

Now I’m going through one of my periodic realizations that I’m wasting a lot of time doing mindless games (sudoku, fer chrise sake), and thinking maybe I could use those brain cycles — FOR SCIENCE!

At this point, Galaxy Zoo has expanded to a zooniverse of projects, some by the original team and some using the Galaxy Zoo API. This is what I think of the current projects:

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by Doctor Science

Well, tell *some* of the truth. But the slant part they can do.

I walked to the convenience store to get milk. I saw the sign for the “Naanwich” of the day — tandoori chicken and pepper strips with chutney, wrapped in a naan. The convenience store in this teeny semi-rural NJ town is now run by Gujaritis, and the results are *delicious*.

While I was waiting for my naanwich, I read the headlines in the stacks of newspapers. The NY Times was there, next to the Wall Street Journal. The lead story in the Times: Top Corporations Aid U.S. Chamber of Commerce Campaign. The lead story in the WSJ: Campaign’s Big Spender: Public-Employees Union Now Leads All Groups in Independent Election Outlays.

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by Doctor Science

Some interesting points and question have come up in the comments to Of Stink Bugs and Men. First, I’m going to round up the ones that are principally about Africa.

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.. and Africa.

by Doctor Science

Like many people in the mid-Atlantic US, I’ve been noticing a lot of stink bugs this summer. I figured there was some kind of weather-related stink bug boom until a story about them popped up on the NY Times. It turns out that these are actually new and different stink bugs, a recent accidental arrival from China. Most species that are introduced to a new continent don’t make it, but when they do they can run wild, run free! and be extremely destructive away from their home-grown predators and parasites. Researchers are looking into introducing stink-bug-specialist parasitic wasps to control them, but that will take several years — and it looks as though the wasps are killed by agricultural insecticides to which stink bugs are naturally resistant. Oops.

But what does this have to do with Africa?

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by Doctor Science

One of the things that doesn’t really get examined enough in discussions of US economic inequality is inherited wealth. It’s obvious to me, at least, that inherited wealth can be expected to be an *enormous* problem with any “level playing field” expectation — after all, historically the rich have been aristocrats, who by definition inherit their positions.

But how much of an effect does it really have in the US? Don’t most rich people get that way from money they collect during their careers?

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by Doctor Science

At Crooked Timber, John Holbo asked Should We Fight For ‘Social Justice’?

If someone tells me they need ‘social justice’ to mark some crucial distinction, I’m happy to entertain the possibility. Analytically, my complaint is that the term is vaguely redundant; redundancy never killed anyone dead. But why burden yourself with redundancy that seems mostly to provide Glenn Beck and co. with fodder for dismissals that are lazy even by their standards?

Much of the ensuing discussion got into details about Hayek, Rawls, etc. that are above (or something) my head.

But I was reminded of something I wrote in the comments of a discussion at ObiWi in June 2006:

My gut reaction to discussion of the “patterned view” of justice versus the “process view” is to go all Jewish-prophet-y and say, “Justice will come when you pay less attention to your damned stuff, and more to other people!”

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by Doctor Science

It turns out that Marty Peretz is pretty much a bigot

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

A lot of people are upset about it, but as far as I’m concerned it’s news like “Water, Continued Wet.”

Meanwhile, science fiction writer Elizabeth Moon thinks

Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they’ve had …I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they’re demanding of me and others–how much more they’re asking than giving.

This is, frankly, considerably more surprising and upsetting than Marty Peretz being a jerk (water, wet), for me and for a bunch of other people.

I hope that David Moles is right, and that Moon — who I would have described as a writer of great insight and sensitivity — is

only repeating what the media’s been telling her — what our climate of bigotry and willful ignorance has been telling her.

I had been planning to make a pre-Yom Kippur post about the Book of Jonah, which is read during the afternoon services, but I’ve changed my mind. A major part of the several services throughout the more-than-24-hours of Yom Kippur is spent listing and regretting sins, especially those that are collective (everything is in the plural, what *we* have done) and that are sins of speech: lies, gossip, deadly silence. To atone, we have to speak rightly; I will do some small part now.

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