Thoughts from Kansas

Point Counterpoint

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:28:25 -0800

In May, 2008 creationist bigot Martin Cothran complained at the Disco. 'Tute blog about John Derbyshire reviewing a shitty movie without having watched it:

That's right: Derbyshire reviews "Expelled" without actually having seen it. This is a man who has friends he has never met, and who can review movies he has never seen. It is perhaps fortuitous that Bill Buckley, the founder of National Review, recently passed from among us: this is a talent I am not sure he would have fully appreciated.

This ability to judge a movie without having to suffer the indignity of actually watching it surely sets Derbyshire apart. Who else could accomplish the task with so few tools: a little hearsay, a few second hand reports—and perhaps a Ouija board. This is a critical skill at which the rest of us can only marvel.

Most film critics attend screenings; Derbyshire conducts a séance.

Creationist bigot Martin Cothran complains about Ayn Rand's shitty books at his own blog without having read them:

I tried The Fountainhead, and after several chapters just put the sorry thing down, wondering what it was that had so transfixed so many of my friends.

I would have tried harder, but I had already read Whitaker Chambers famous literary take-down of her books written more than 50 years ago now in his review of Atlas Shrugged…

Now a Randian could argue that I have not read the books, and that therefore I cannot judge them, to which I can only say that I am not judging them. I am only explaining why I have not read them: because I have never yet encountered anyone whose literary tastes I respected say they were worth reading--and plenty whose tastes I did respect who assured me I needn't bother.

Now I could say that it's hypocritical of Cothran to now defend reviewing things without having read them, but he is, in some narrow sense, right. I haven't read Ayn Rand's books, and I know they're shitty, and I don't plan to read them. I know it the same way I knew Expelled: No Intelligence would be a shitty movie before I saw it. Then I saw it, and it was a shitty movie. John Derbyshire made the right choice to avoid seeing it. And Martin Cothran owes him (and National Review) an apology. Read the comments on this post...

Headline of the day

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:34:45 -0800

From Nature's news section, Philip Ball reports on research showing Dog bites man Morals don't come from God:

[In] a new paper by psychologists Ilkka Pyysiäinen of the University of Helsinki and Marc Hauser of Harvard University … individuals presented with unfamiliar moral dilemmas show no difference in their responses if they have a religious background or not.

The study draws on tests of moral judgements using versions of the web-based Moral Sense Test … These tests present dilemmas ranging from how to handle freeloaders at 'bring a dish' dinner parties to the justification of killing someone to save others. Few, if any, of the answers can be looked up in holy books.

Thousands of people — varying widely in social background, age, education, religious affiliation and ethnicity — have taken the tests. Pyysiäinen and Hauser say the results (mainly still in the publication pipeline) indicate that "moral intuitions operate independently of religious background", although religion may influence responses in a few highly specific cases.

In other words, morality is independent of religion or religiosity. Religion may be a means to pass down certain cultural norms about moral behavior, but there are plenty of other ways to do the same thing. As one theologian of my acquaintance put it, there are many paths to the top of the mountain.

Theists can take comfort in that notion, secure in the thought that their god(s) shaped the world so that everyone was led to moral behavior. Atheists can take this finding as further proof against the refrain of certain religious people that erosion of religious faith will result in erosion of morality. And the rest of us can take comfort in the notion that we're behaving well, and the reasons why we behave well aren't that important.

Read the comments on this post...

The devil you know

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:30:39 -0800

A few weeks ago, televangelist Pat Robertson got in some righteous trouble for claiming that Haiti deserved its earthquake devastation because Haitians two hundred years ago "sw[ore] a pact with the devil."

Turns out, Robertson knows something about making deals with the devil:

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor, testifying in his war crimes trial in The Hague on Thursday, said that his government had awarded American televangelist Pat Robertson a gold mining concession in 1999 and that Robertson later offered to lobby the Bush administration on the government's behalf.

The revelations came in the midst of Taylor's U.N.-backed trial on 11 counts of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sierra Leone's 1990s civil war. Taylor is accused of directing a Sierra Leonean rebel group, the United Revolutionary Front, in a campaign aimed at securing access to the country's diamond mines. The rebel movement stands accused of committing mass atrocities in the West African country in the late 1990s, including the mutilation of thousands of civilians.

Prosecutors at the Special Court for Sierra Leone contend that Taylor offered concessions to Westerners in exchange for lobbying work aimed at enhancing his image in the United States.

Taylor is known as one of Africa's more brutal military dictators, a distinction of genuine consequence. His bands of underaged soldiers raped and murdered anyone who stood in Taylor's way. He ate the flesh of his rivals and ordered his army to do the same. Aided by Taylor, Sierra Leonian rebels created their own child army in which soldiers were encouraged to chop off the arms of people in villages, to rape and murder at whim, to cut off the genitals of captured children. All to gain control of local diamond mines.

Sometimes, an incident perfectly captures a moment in history, and this is one such instance. Pat Robertson and Charles Taylor are both monsters. Monsters on a deep and moral level. And they saw some glimmer of similarity in one another. The similarity is not rooted in religion, but in political outlook.

I oppose Pat Robertson because I oppose authoritarianism, and Pat Robertson's theology and politics both lead to authoritarianism. Not necessarily to Charles Taylor's style of authoritarianism, but authoritarianism is authoritarianism. If Pat Robertson wanted to be an asshole in his private life, his friends could choose to ostracize him until he learned a lesson, or he could be a private asshole whose dickery didn't affect anyone else. That's his right, I suppose. The problem comes not when he starts thinking stupid things, but when he tries to impose those things on other people.
This is why I find the whole "it's not about politics, it's about epistemology" argument so frustrating. Fuck epistemology. Pat Robertson and Charles Taylor didn't pair up because of a shared epistemology, they paired up because of politics and money. And Charles Taylor's epistemology didn't cut the genitals off of children, or gamble on the sex of unborn fetuses and then cut them out to test the bet. Charles Taylor's politics did that. A lesser form of that politics drives the creation/evolution fight. It's what drives anti-vaxx. It's what drives global warming denial. It's what drives decisions about how to fund public education, and how to value scientific expertise. If you ignore the politics, you miss the point.

Read the comments on this post...

Denying vaccines, evolution, and … dialog?

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:26:13 -0800

This week put to rest a significant part of the anti-vaccine movement's claim to scientific legitimacy. A paper purporting to show a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism rates was retracted by The Lancet. The journal, which published the 1998 paper, based the decision on a finding by a British medical panel that one author (Andrew Wakefield) had violated certain human experimentation regulations and had misreported how the data was gathered. As Chris Mooney observes, this follows a string of other reviews of the paper which found its conclusions unwarranted by the data and unsupported by attempts to replicate the study. A 2004 review by the Congressionally-chartered Institute of Medicine found that the paper was "uninformative with respect to causality" and that, in general, "the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between MMR vaccine and autism."

This has been clear for some time (just ask Orac), and the continued efforts to discourage vaccination based on the study can clearly not be ascribed to any scientific basis. Like creationism, global warming denial, stem cell opposition, and anti-GMO sentiments, this is a cultural and political battle being confusingly fought on scientific turf. As such, the debunking of this and any other supposed scientific basis for opposing vaccines does not ultimately dissuade anti-vaccine activists from their work. And public health suffers as a result.

This is similar to the situation in the creationism wars. We spend a lot of time on blogs and in books and in the occasional debate arguing about fossils and genes and homologies, but none of that will ever convince someone wholeheartedly committed to creationism. No one becomes that sort of creationist on the basis of the science. They become a creationist of that sort because of how they see religion, and how they think that relates to science.

This is why I think Orac is right to object to the conclusion to Chris's article on the vaccine result. He notes that the anti-vaxxers have already integrated this paper's retraction into their paranoid worldview, but then he writes:

I believe we need some real attempts at bridge-building between medical institutions—which, let’s admit it, can often seem remote and haughty—and the leaders of the anti-vaccination movement. We need to get people in a room and try to get them to agree about something—anything. We need to encourage moderation, and break down a polarized situation in which the anti-vaccine crowd essentially rejects modern medical research based on the equivalent of conspiracy theory thinking, even as mainstream doctors just shake their heads at these advocates’ scientific cluelessness. Vaccine skepticism is turning into one of the largest and most threatening anti-science movements of modern times. Watching it grow, we should be very, very worried—and should not assume for a moment that the voice of scientific reason, in the form of new studies or the debunking of old, misleading ones, will make it go away.

As Orac observes, "scientists have been trying to reach out and build bridges to leaders of the anti-vaccine movement for years, if not decades. It hasn't worked." He cites several examples where anti-vaxxers were even invited to take part in the design of experiments, only to turn around and attack the studies when they failed to reach the pre-determined conclusion.

But Orac goes wrong when he writes, "Chris is profoundly misguided in his apparent belief that any amount of 'bridge building' will bring anti-vaccine activists around." Just as there are gradations within creationism, anti-vaxx has its gradations. Duane Gish will never change his mind. Changing Glenn Morton's mind took intense effort, and was not resolved by his awareness of evolutionary science, but his discovery of a suitable theology which could accommodate evolution.

But Duane Gish isn't the target of pro-evolution messages, and neither was the young Glenn Morton. The target is that third of the public which simply isn't aware of what evolution is, and of the range of theological responses to evolution. So the goal is to build bridges through the religious institutions they trust, so that they'll even be ready to hear the scientific message, and then to build bridges through science education, so they see that evolution is good and reliable science and isn't threatening in the ways they've been told. Some of the groups one builds bridges to in that process are creationist in some sense. They might be a Methodist church group which believes God created the world, but is open to the idea that science can explain the way God's plan unfolded. That openness is what allows a bridge to be built, and commerce across that bridge ultimately yields dividends to the community of scientists and to the group being reached out to.

I haven't studied the anti-vaxx movement carefully enough to know what the sticking point is for anti-vaxxers, but I can guess. It's not (entirely) a Luddite movement, any more than creationists are Luddites. They want to control technology and science because science and technology are taking on an ever greater role in our society, and people feel like they are losing control of their lives as a result. Creationism grew out of that same tension in the late 19th century, and came back with a vengeance in the 1960s for similar reasons. Anti-vaxx, anti-global warming, and anti-evolution movements today are rooted in the same fears of anonymous scientists in lab coats (and mounted on ivory towers) controlling our bodies, our economies, and other aspects of social policy.

The solution is surely outreach. But not outreach to the committed opponents. Such outreach rarely serves any benefit, in part because both sides are talking past one another. That's a recipe for a shouting match, but not for dialog. The target for dialog is the middle ground, and that's where the bridges need to be built. The fear driving anti-vaxx and other denialist movements is bigger than those movements, and it can be addressed through an open and thoughtful interaction between scientists and the public. I think the long-term effect of CRUhack will be beneficial in that sense, as it will force scientists to abandon some of their traditional insularity.

(I wrote this on somewhat of the fly, and may return to it and add links inter alia and revise some of this. Suggestions on where those links should be placed, and which passages are ambiguous are, as always, welcome.)

Read the comments on this post...

Headline of the Day

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:42:51 -0800

Argument over cigarette led to Antioch slaying:

Police have arrested a suspect in the Antioch slaying of a man who was shot after he refused to give a cigarette to the alleged killer's friend, investigators said Friday.

Stagolee has nothing on him.

Read the comments on this post...

Tom Tancredo takes over for Jesse Helms

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:42:30 -0800

Shorter Tom Tancredo at the Teabagger convention:

Things would be better if we elected Strom Thurmond president brought back Jim Crow.

No… really:

The opening-night speaker at first ever National Tea Party Convention ripped into President Obama, Sen. John McCain and "the cult of multiculturalism," asserting that Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."
The political activist group holds its first party convention in Nashville. The speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., told about 600 delegates in a Nashville, Tenn., ballroom that in the 2008 election, America "put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House ... Barack Hussein Obama."

A literacy test like this one?

Read the comments on this post...

Ben Stein waxes nostalgic

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:29:06 -0800

Ben Stein, for those of you who have forgotten, played a bit role in the classic '80s movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He played the annoying economics teacher, a role he was uniquely qualified for by being boring and having been bored by his father, an accomplished economist. Stein parlayed his fame into a few books on financial planning and a regular column for the New York Times which was canceled when he became a spokesman for a scammy credit check service. Along the way he made what many regard as "one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a long time." In making Expelled, Stein tricked various scientists into being interviewed, using false pretenses to gain consent.

Stein is no stranger to secretive recordings, being a former speechwriter for the Nixon White House (a job obtained thanks to his father's service on Nixon's Council of Economic Advisors). Nixon, of course, loved to record his office conversations, including those where he and his aides discussed their plans to secretly bug the offices of the DNC and other critics.

It is perhaps because of nostalgia for those good old days that Stein wants to "Free James O'Keefe." O'Keefe is a young conservative activist known for somewhat flashier roles than Stein's. Most famously, O'Keefe went to ACORN offices to ask for advice about creating a bordello, then editing in footage of himself and an underage woman dressed as a stereotypical pimp and prostitute. A review of the tapes and transcripts by a retired state Attorney General concluded that the editing had changed the questions being asked of ACORN staff to make it seem that they were answering questions about creating a bordello rather than about protecting themselves from an abusive pimp.

O'Keefe returned to the headlines by trying to tap or tamper with the telephones at a district office for Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA). O'Keefe and three friends posed as telephone repairmen and tried to access the wiring cabinet in one of Landrieu's district offices. Police arrested the crew of young plumbers and they were sent to live in their parents' houses until trial. They don't deny attempting to gain access to federal property under false pretenses for purposes of vandalism, and it's possible that they were trying to bug the phones.

Ben Stein, perhaps recalling his own salad days, thinks that they shouldn't be prosecuted. Why? "These men were journalists trying to get a story." What story? Not clear. "The First Amendment!" Stein replies. But the First Amendment protects speech, not criminal actions. They didn't just "go undercover," an act which can and does result in criminal trespass charges. What undercover investigation was needed in the switching trunk at Landrieu's office? What's the journalistic purpose served by gaining access to the wiring?

Ben Stein's real objection, clear because he puts it at the top of his column, is that these conservative activists are being charged with a federal crime while "a gang of men calling themselves Black Panthers showed up at a polling place in Michigan" and didn't get prosecuted by the feds. Other than standing while black, what charges should have been brought? Stein claims that "They threatened any voter who did not vote for Barack Obama. This was witnessed and documented."

Sadly, No! In point of fact, there were no reports of Black Panthers at polling places in Michigan. There were some stories about a group calling itself "the New Black Panthers" which went to a polling place in Philadelphia before being rousted along by police. There is no evidence that they threatened voters. As Joel Mathis writes for Philly Weekly: "What the Panthers did was … stand there. […] The incident was witnessed and documented, but what was witnessed and documented is a bit different from what Stein describes."

And that's why Ferris Bueller's best move was skipping Ben Stein's class. Ben Stein just makes you dumber.

Read the comments on this post...

Footprints in the sand

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:47:09 -0800

Via Lamebook via BoingBoing, an update of the classic beachside homily:

"The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand is when I was off kicking the janitor in the 'nads."

Read the comments on this post...

Disco. finds a new way to be wrong

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:51:05 -0800

Bruce Chapman, head of the Discover Institute, has a problem. He objects to Richard Dawkins calling out Pat Robertson as a gigantic blowhard. And also doesn't think Dawkins should do things to help the Haitian people (as evidenced, perhaps, by the fact that Chapman and Disco. have taken no obvious steps to encourage aid to Haiti). After excusing Robertson's remarks, Chapman writes that Dawkins thinks:

Robertson must pay. So by amazing extension must Christianity in general, never mind the extent to which the massive outpouring of aid to Haiti is coming from Christian sources. Even the Red Cross is, after all, about a cross, isn't it?

Robertson may be tone deaf about the such events as the earthquake, but it is left to Dawkins to try to turn tragedy into an evangelizing opportunity. His article, if it were about politics, would be dismissed as propaganda. But the London Times seems to think it fit enough.

Now I've had some modest criticism of the Dawkins-organized fundraising efforts, efforts which themselves go to the Red Cross. But the notion that Dawkins is using this as a chance to evangelize is just pap, and a mean-spirited slur.

More of a slur, though, is the claim that the Red Cross is a religious organization. There is some dispute about the history of the Red Cross's name and chosen symbol, but the group has committed itself to a form of neutrality that prevents it from endorsing any religion at all, and the official story is that the Red Cross symbol is a reversed version of the Swiss flag, not an overt reference to the Christian cross. The Swiss flag is such a reference, of course, but over the last few centuries has also come to stand for a studied neutrality, exactly the image that the Swiss founders of the Red Cross wished to project as they organized a body which could operate freely in the battlefield and move across lines of battle without harm. To suggest that they are a religious group is a lie, and one that would do material harm if repeated too often.

Read the comments on this post...

Anti-abortion terrorist convicted

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:26:29 -0800

Scott Roeder found guilty of first-degree murder in death of George Tiller:

A jury took less than 40 minutes Friday to find Scott Roeder guilty of first-degree murder in the shooting of abortion provider George Tiller in a [Wichita] church […] last May. […]

The murder conviction carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison, though under Kansas law, parole is possible. Mr. Roeder, 51 years old, will be sentenced in March. […]

Defense attorney Mark Rudy acknowledged in his closing statement Friday that there was no question his client had killed Dr. Tiller and had been planning to do so for some time.[…]

"The state…has proved that Scott Roeder killed George Tiller. But only you, collectively, can determine if he murdered George Tiller," Mr. Rudy told the jury of five women and seven men. He then compared his client to Martin Luther King Jr. and other heroes who fought injustice around the world, saying: "We celebrate individuals who stood up and made the world a better place."

Mr. Rudy asked the jurors to show courage in their deliberations and told them: "No defendant can be convicted based on his convictions."

But Judge Warren Wilbert ruled Thursday evening that the jury could not consider lesser charges; its only choice was to convict or acquit on first-degree murder. Mr. Roeder's lawyers had argued that their client's actions might better be described as "voluntary manslaughter," which Kansas law defines as using deadly force in the honest, even if unreasonable, belief that doing so is necessary to protect others from an imminent threat of unlawful violence. …

Judge Wilbert said that didn't apply in this case, because Dr. Tiller posed no imminent threat to anyone as he stood in his church, and because his abortion practice was legal.

Mr. Rudy, the defense attorney, said in a news conference after the verdict, that … his client plans to appeal the judge's decision to limit the jury to only two options—a first-degree murder conviction or outright acquittal.

It's only just that Roeder was convicted. He lynched an innocent man on a Sunday morning, and deserves nothing less than life in prison.

The conviction of Roeder does not put George Tiller's murder to rest, though. In response to Roeder's plea of necessity, supporters issued a statement urging that juries be allowed to excuse murder of abortion providers. The signers insist that "What Scott Roeder did is more legal than what judges do who keep juries ignorant of that fact question ['when life begins']. And that if judges will let juries weigh that sole contested issue of most abortion prevention trials, no one will ever again have to do what Scott Roeder had to do."

In other words, the signers, who include Roeder and murderous abortion terrorists Paul Kopp and Eric Rudolph, justify murder. This statement is much more relevant than the latest communiques from Osama bin Laden. If the signers of this and previous such statements are not on the "No Fly" list already, and forbidden from buying firearms, there's really no excuse. These are people who have pledged themselves to committing murder, to the absurd and extreme view that the actual lives of women are less important than the potential lives of fetuses, even fetuses which are dead or nearly dead.

There's a lot we can't do to predict which people might undertake terrorist acts, but these people have publicly and vocally signed on to a murderous ideology, and deserve the intense scrutiny that rightly follows such a decision.

Read the comments on this post...

Campaign finance, corruption, and elected judges

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:45:57 -0800

As the Times puts it: Former Justice O’Connor Sees Ill in Election Finance Ruling:

“Gosh,” she said, “I step away for a couple of years and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”

Justice O’Connor criticized the recent decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, only obliquely, reminding the audience that she had been among the authors of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision that was overruled in large part on Thursday. …

She has become increasingly vocal in recent years about doing away with judicial elections. Most states elect at least some of their judges; federal judges are appointed.

“Judicial elections are just difficult to justify in a constitutional democracy in which even the majority is bound by the law’s restraints,” Justice O’Connor said Tuesday.

She added that last week’s decision was likely to create “an increasing problem for maintaining an independent judiciary.”

“In invalidating some of the existing checks on campaign spending,” Justice O’Connor said, “the majority in Citizens United has signaled that the problem of campaign contributions in judicial elections might get considerably worse and quite soon.”

Here's an example of the dangers:

The judge overseeing the trial of the man accused of gunning down a Kansas abortion doctor … once courted the endorsement of an anti-abortion group - but … has insisted the case won't be about abortion.
State District Judge Warren Wilbert galvanized both sides of the nation's abortion debate this week when he refused on the eve of Scott Roeder's murder trial to block the defense from trying to build a voluntary-manslaughter case by arguing that Roeder believed the killing of Dr. George Tiller was necessary to save unborn children.

Legal experts said the judge's decision was a proper attempt to protect the defendant's rights. But the move has put Wilbert and his background under the microscope heading into one of the nation's most sensational abortion-related cases. …

Wilbert, a Republican who earned his bachelor's and law degrees from Washburn University in Topeka, was appointed to the bench in 1995 and faced no opposition the first three times he stood election. The most recent race was a different story: Wilbert won re-election in 2008 by a mere 471 votes out of nearly 166,000 cast.

Kansans for Life's political action committee endorsed Wilbert in that race, though it did not contribute to his campaign directly. …

Finance records show that Wilbert paid the group $75 in September 2008 to have his name listed in an ad in its quarterly newsletter, a 6-by-11-inch booklet of 24 pages that included articles such as "Update on Tiller charges" and "Planned Parenthood - a Snake in the Grass!" The judge also spent more than $16,000 on radio spots on seven stations.

The ad in the newsletter took up most of the bottom of page 16. It said: "The Kansans for Life PAC urges you to vote for, work for and pray for the following pro-life candidates."

The "Tiller charges" referred to in the issue endorsing Wilbert involve the victim, George Tiller, who was acquitted of wrongdoing in that case. His chief persecutor, Phill (the extra 'l' is for 'litigious') Kline, was to be a witness in this case. So is Planned Parenthood, the group attacked as "a snake in the grass" in the newsletter where Wilbert advertised his KFL endorsement.

Now, KFL insists that they endorsed him because he is a good judge who doesn't legislate from the bench, an assessment that local lawyers seem to agree with. His ruling allowing Roeder to claim the homicide was justifiable is probably the right choice, assuming Wilbert keeps a tight rein on the arguments Roeder makes.

Meanwhile, in Topeka:

Look out, justice system! Kansans for Life is coming to get you! Or, at least, they want people to believe that. You see, when marching on the Kansas Judicial Center … to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the organization announced that they would be opposing the retention election of state Supreme Court Justice Carol Beier. This is in retaliation for a couple of majority opinions she has authored over the last few years in hearings involving former Kansas Attorney General and all-around anti-choice superstar Phill Kline.
… Beier is the target, presumably because KfL is excited to break out their new “Fire Beier” slogan (this isn’t a joke, read the link at the bottom of this post). She also makes an easy target for being the one who specifically accused Phill Kline if displaying “little, if any, respect” for the Supreme Court in a ruling.

This may or may not affect Beier (one hopes not, as she was absolutely right), but fear of angering KFL is sure to influence how she and other judges (including Wilbert, perhaps) rule on and describe the actions of anti-abortion terrorists. So long as judges know they have to contend with re-election (or a retention election), they will have to pander to interest groups, and the more politically powerful the interest group, the harder it will be for judges to enforce the law.

And that creates an appearance of corruption, even if no judge ever acts corruptly.

Similarly, the way we elect our leaders creates a pall of corruption, even if no vote is ever exchanged as a quid pro quo. We can only hope Congress acts quickly to change things, and that one of the five justices who reversed over a century of precedent to open the loophole will step down and be replaced by a justice who thinks that corporate executives only deserve one vote.

Read the comments on this post...

Headline of the day

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:24:25 -0800

Courtesy of the San Mateo County Times: Police find cache of weapons, alligators and suspected explosives in South San Francisco home:

Lazaro Ismael Leon Jr., who is allegedly a Norteno gang member, entered his [not guilty] plea Monday in San Mateo County Superior Court and Commissioner Stephanie Garratt set the man's bail at $1.2 million, said Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe.

This is only slightly better than the headline a couple weeks ago in the Contra Costa Times: Man shot over mouth jewelry in Richmond. Yes, according to police the young man's grill got jacked, and he then had to drive himself (or be driven) to the hospital after being shot in the leg.

Read the comments on this post...

Creation vs. Expelled

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:26:35 -0800

Darwin biopic Creation premiered in seven movie theaters across the country last weekend, earning $53,073, an average of $7,582. That's not a lot of money, but at roughly $10/ticket, this works out to 760 viewers per theater, a solid showing. I know the theater I saw it at was full for their 7 pm showing.

Compare that to creationist schlockumentary Expelled: No Intelligence…, released two springs ago. Part of its promotional strategy was a big opening weekend; coordinating with the owners of Regal movie theaters, they opened in 1,052 theaters, earning $2,970,848, or $2,824 per theater (roughly 280 viewers).

By my math, Creation did more than 3 times better than Expelled, and with a much smaller promotional budget. Which makes sense: it's a much better movie.

Read the comments on this post...

On denying reality

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:28:08 -0800

I've had my disagreements with Martin Cothran over the years. He's a bigoted man, proud of teaching logic at a private school, yet utterly dependent on logical fallacies in his actual argumentation. He wants creationism taught in public schools. He dislikes gay people and anyone else who challenges his notions of how sex and gender should work. He enjoys quoting Holocaust-denying racists like Pat Buchanan and cross-burning racists like Charles Murray. He celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday by listing the blog posts from 2009 he's most proud of. Sometimes he's basically harmless, as when he berates local universities for allowing students to undertake a sex education week, and claiming that fuzzy pink handcuffs are evidence of sexual abuse.

Other times, his bigotry is less adorable. Consider his recent post mocking the notion of transgender, and mocking the transgendered. He also seems to think he's the first to coin the notion of transhumanism.

Cothran has presumably been living under a rock for a while, having missed cultural phenomena like Jeffrey Eugenides' 2003 novel Middlesex, a meditation on the fuzzy cultural and physical boundaries around sex and gender. He's also apparently missed the debate surrounding Caster Semenya, the South African runner who has always thought of herself as a woman, and who has normal external female genitalia, but who turns out to have internal testes, and no ovaries or uterus.

Semenya and the 5-alpha-reductase deficient protagonist of Middlesex are not alone in complicating our understanding of gender as a necessary correlate of a specific genetic, biochemical, or anatomical status. Transgender individuals have the anatomy of one sex but identify with another. This identification starts early in life, and seems to be rooted in brain structure, among other things. The lives of transgendered children are incredibly difficult, and get no easier in college or later. The issue of transgender and intersex individuals in sports is especially fraught, as sporting is typically gender-segregated in ways that the rest of society is not.

These are genuine problems, requiring an understanding of biological, emotional, and sociological aspects of the situation. But rather than taking a serious and complex situation seriously, Cothran replies with the same snide dismissal that leads to bullying and that trivializes genuine discussion about complex issues. "So who is it that is mistakenly 'assigning' their gender at birth?," Cothran asks, as if every baby is in a position to explain its own self-identity ("I'm a boy!"), rather than having a gender identity assigned by a doctor ("It's a girl!").

Cothran asks "There's nothing to stop people from denying reality, but are the rest of us really obligated to play along?" If Cothran has his way, the answer would be "no." The reality of transgender individuals is that their gender and their sex are not the same. This may make him uncomfortable, but it is reality, and the transgendered are under no obligation to play along with his denial of reality.

Read the comments on this post...

The stupids, redux

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:32:48 -0800

Having blown an easy win in the Massachusetts Senate race, DC Democrats seem intent on blowing the dreams of millions of Americans, and the best chance of reforming the health insurance industry to make it more equitable – a policy long held up as a major reason to vote Democratic. The Times reports on the search for consensus on how to move forward:

Even as Speaker Nancy Pelosi affirmed her commitment to pass far-reaching health care legislation this year, members of Congress and health policy experts began Thursday to deal with the reality that a smaller bill would have a better chance.

Passage of a comprehensive bill looked impossible after the Democrats’ loss of a Senate seat in Massachusetts. As an alternative, lawmakers in both parties said, some pieces of the bills already passed by the House and the Senate could be pulled out and packaged together in a measure that would command broad support.

The consensus measure would be less ambitious than the bills approved last year. It would extend insurance coverage to perhaps 12 million to 15 million people — and provide political cover to Democrats, who said they could not simply drop the issue after spending so much time and effort on it.

The pared-back approach would cover fewer than half of those who, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would gain coverage under the House and Senate bills. But it would not put the government on the hook for what critics say is a new entitlement, a change that would appeal to some Republicans.

Now, passage of comprehensive reform actually isn't impossible. All it takes is for House Democrats (and Rep. Anh Cao) to vote for the Senate bill, and send it on to the President. Then, pass a separate bill including reforms that fix acknowledged flaws in that bill, and send it to the Senate where it can be passed on a simple majority by invoking the reconciliation process. The only obstacle is Democrats who think the Senate bill is too weak, and who don't trust the Senate to pass the second bill.

Why that's less preferable than the stripped down measure is unclear. After all, the Senate bill extends coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans. It creates a framework for future healthcare reforms that Democrats can build on for generations. It is the largest progressive social program since the Great Society. It is imperfect, but so was Social Security when it first passed. It is complicated, but so is every far-reaching and important reform that touches on 1/6 of the US economy.

The only thing that the stripped down bill offers that's new is the supposed possibility of Republican votes. But fuck them and the horses they rode in on. Republicans got every compromise they asked for in the stimulus bill, and still voted against it en masse. Olympia Snowe got to rewrite the Senate bill however she wanted, and still voted against it, as did every Senate Republican. Republicans want this to fail. They've always wanted it to fail. And they've always wanted it to fail for the same reason. Passage of health insurance reform would bring votes to Democrats, and give no advantage to Republicans. So they will vote against anything and everything just to hurt Democrats, and especially the President.

So screw the Republicans. Force the bill through in the strongest form possible, accept that Democrats must hang together or be hanged separately come November, and move on.

Read the comments on this post...