It’s nice to be living in a blue state. I just wish that it wasn’t necessary to move halfway across the country to finally acquire a Congressional delegation that actually reflects my values.
Category Archives: politics
Pacifism as the conservative position
Via The Dish, which I haven’t read in ages: Bryan Caplan distills pacifism into a comparison of E[benefits of war] and E[costs of war]. That is, we know wars are expensive and awful, but we have much less assurance that they’re going to be worth it:
Of course, “Fight when it’s a good idea, make peace when it’s a good idea” counts as a philosophy. And you might think that this case-by-case approach has to yield better results than pacifism. But that’s only true with perfect foresight. In the real world of uncertainty, case-by-case optimization is often inferior to simple rules.
Which is why I tend to think of pacifism as a small-c conservative position: simple risk-benefit analysis, and a little honest evaluation of history.
So what does it take to strike Stephen Colbert speechless?
I’m super late to this one, but … holy blithering wow, man.
Dan Savage—nationally syndicated advice columnist, It Gets Better co-founder, serial contributor to This American Life, and all around alpha-gay—was on the Colbert Report to discuss the recent New York Times profile about his views on monogamy, which views may be briefly summed up as why ruin a perfectly good marriage by insisting on complete sexual fidelity? And about midway through said interview, Savage drops a line which, while requiring no censorious bleeping whatsoever, stops Colbert dead in his metaphorical and satirical tracks and had me just about on the floor in laughter and/or amazement. I’m frankly still a mite breathless, and in full-on Wallace-esque run-on mode as a result.
And, well, you probably don’t want to see it if you’re not particularly cool with Savage’s aforementioned feelings about monogamy, but if you are in fact generally on board or at least don’t get the howling fantods after reading my summary or obliquely contemplating what I shall delicately call the mechanics of love, and if you are even later to this than I am* you really ought to right now.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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All of which is a rather long way to go to say, gods (or whoever) bless Dan Savage and Stephen Colbert.
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*Which probably means you didn’t have an internet connection till this evening, in which case let me take this footnote to say, welcome to the World Wide Web!
Testimony from the front lines, Exhibit B.
Via the Hairpin’s sister site The Awl this time: Queer students at the very Christian Harding University have published a ‘zine trying to explain themselves to the rest of the student body. It’s pretty damn’ hard to read, although maybe just because it sounds pretty damn’ familiar to me:
Our voices are muted, our stories go unheard, and we are forced into hiding. We are threatened with re-orientation therapy, social isolation, and expulsion. We are told stories and lies that we are disgusting sinnners who are dammed [sic] to hell, that we are broken individuals and child abusers. We are told we will live miserable lives and are responsible for the collapse of civilization. …. We are good people who are finished being treated as second-class citizens at Harding. We have done nothing wrong and we did not choose this suppression.
From the vantage point of someone for whom it got better, it’s hard not to see a certain amount of cognitive dissonance underlying the attempts to engage the intended audience with Biblical exegesis. But you know what, Harding University queers? Whether or not God hears your “cries for liberation from harsh oppression,” the rest of us do.
Naturally, Harding University has blocked access to the ‘zine website on its campus.
Testimony from the front lines, Exhibit A.
Over at The Hairpin, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs, Dolores P. explains why she is training to become an abortion provider. And, wow. It’s incredible from start to finish, but her accounts of specific patients’ stories will blow you away:
Couple days later one of our patients was a soldier from Afghanistan. Hey, I was just reading about you guys.
No contraception around (she was stationed pretty far out) meant that she got pregnant. “Regulations require that a woman be flown home within two weeks of the time she finds out she’s pregnant, a particular stigma for unmarried women that ends any future career advancement.” Ends any future career advancement. For my patient, that meant that she had to figure out how to make it back to the states on her own. Even if she had chosen to “go straight,” it wouldn’tve been much better: “Servicewomen who make the decision to have an abortion must first seek approval from their commanding officer to take leave from their military duty and return to the United States or a country where abortion is legal.” (Guttmacher.) Ask your boss if you can please take off a while for your abortion. And no matter what, she had to pay for it all herself. So even though she knew she was pregnant almost immediately, it took eight weeks to make arrangements, travel plans and raise all the money. That means by the time she walked in our door, she was beginning her second trimester, which is a way more expensive and invasive procedure. She also had to spend eight more weeks than she had to miserably pregnant. In Afghanistan. [Hyperlink sic.]
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is trying to eliminate Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, 100 percent of which goes towards services that help avoid abortions. You should go do something about that right now.
Public Broadcasting: worth every penny
Following the House’s vote to defund Public Broadcasting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting posted this video of Fred Rogers testifying before Congress in support of some of the earliest Federal funding for public television.
That do-it-yourself determination to harness modern media for the public good is still alive and well in shows like Frontline—which just released the best report I’ve seen on the Egyptian revolution of 25 January. It’s alive and well in NPR’s Planet Money podcast, which started in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and is now the reason I (mostly) understand mortgage-backed securities. It’s alive and well in Radiolab, which is producing the best popular science reporting in any medium. And it’s alive and well in On the Media, where even the question of Federal funding for Public Broadcasting is up for debate.
Want to keep Public Broadcasting alive and well? The Senate hasn’t voted yet. And there’s a website to get you started.
Stop a proposed oil pipeline by … kayaking?
That’s the idea behind the Pipedreams Project. Concerned about a proposed pipeline that would connect Alberta tar sands oil fields to the British Columbia coast, a trio of British Columbians paddled the region that would be in danger in the event of a spill. Now they’re working on a documentary about the proposed pipeline, the trip, and the people they met along the way.
The Qu’osby Show
Every time I start to think The Daily Show might be losing its edge (admittedly, this usually happens whenever the show goes on hiatus for a couple weeks) along comes something like this: Aasif Mandvi’s take on the Cosby Show. Wow.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Exclusive – The Qu’osby Show – The Pilot | ||||
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Is dilution the solution to information pollution?
Chris Smith, my good friend and longtime collaborator on all things relating to Joshua trees, pulled into the gas station well after dark. He was on his way back to our field site in the Nevada desert, and this was the last stop before cell phone signals disappeared for good and you had watch the highway ahead for free-range cattle.
It was also the last stop for fresh water, gasoline, and propane. Chris fueled up the van, then went inside for help refilling the spare propane tank. The unshaven, sun-darkened night clerk gave Chris’s flip-flops and tee shirt a sidelong look—they might’ve been perfect back in Vegas around midday, but now it was a freezing high desert night. Clearly unpleased to have to go outside himself, the clerk zipped up his parka and followed Chris out to fill up the tank.
Why do scorpions fluoresce under UV light, anyway? Photo by Furryscaly.Refilling the propane tank entailed much adjusting of valves and connecting of pipes, which the clerk accomplished with a large wrench. Somewhere a valve misconnected to a pipe, and Chris’s jeans were suddenly soaked in liquid propane. The clerk swore elaborately at the valve, blamed the lazy bastards on the day shift, and took out his frustration on the propane tank with the wrench.
When this miraculously failed to engulf the two of them in fiery death, the clerk straightened out the connection and started filling the spare tank, then turned to Chris and said, “So what’re you doing out here, anyway?”
Evolutionary biologists learn to be vague about their profession in rural areas, so Chris said he was a biologist. No, he wasn’t working for the Air Force base over at Groom Lake. He was studying Joshua trees.
“You must know something about evolution, right?” said the clerk. “I’ve got a question for you.”
Oh, brother, thought Chris. Here we go. How long till this tank fills up?
“You know how scorpions glow under ultraviolet light,” they clerk asked.
Why yes, I do, said Chris.
“How come? I mean, what possible adaptive value does that have?”
Well, you know, said Chris, I don’t have any idea.
“I hear,” said the clerk, “that fossil scorpions millions of years old will glow if you shine a UV light on them. That’s pretty wild, isn’t it?”
You’re right, said Chris. That’s pretty wild.
Chris told this story to everyone else in the field team as soon as he got back to camp, and I think it’s a great illustration of two points that inform the way I think about science blogging. First, that scientists are maybe a bit quick to assume hostility in their audience; and second, that telling cool stories about the natural world is at least as important as confronting the hostility really is out there.
I’ve been thinking about these points ever since ScienceOnline 2011, which I finished with the “Defending Science Online” session, a discussion of strategies for countering all manner of anti-scientific bunk: climate change denialism, opposition to vaccination, creationism, homeopathy. The panelists discussed specific events and general strategies, but they really only discussed confrontation. I left with the nagging feeling that identifying and refuting non-science, however well it’s done, isn’t enough.
Scientific misinformation needs to be contained, but it also needs to be diluted. Photo by kk+.The trouble with refutation is that once creationists or anti-vaxxers piss in the information pool, it’s nearly impossible to clean up the water. A widely-cited recent study of fact-checking in news articles has shown that corrections often fail to reach people who don’t want to hear them—and the act of correcting a misperception can actually reinforce it [PDF]. Other works shows that even when you convince people that the information they cite in support of political positions is wrong, they hold on to those positions [PDF].
When real-world pollution can’t be extracted from the environment, there’s one final line of attack: dilute it. In the sense that what we call pollution is often a dangerous artificial concentration of some substance that is non-dangerous at much lower, natural levels—carbon dioxide, for instance—the solution to pollution is, indeed, dilution. In the case of information pollution, which we can’t really prevent or contain, we can dilute non-science with, yes, science.
In other words, the best weapon against denialism may not be explicit takedowns of denialism, but good, clear, accessible discussion of science and all the ways it’s awesome. I can speak to this from my own experience growing up in a neutral-on-evolution household in the midst of quite a lot of creationists. I can’t recall that I ever decided evolution was a historical fact because of something I read against creationism. Instead, I came to accept the fact of evolution because I read and watched and listened to a lot of popular science—National Geographic, Ranger Rick, and Nature on PBS—that just took evolution as a given, and showed how it explained the world.
So, while folks like PZ Meyers, NCSE, and Ben Goldacre fight the good fight, I think we shouldn’t forget the value of celebrating science without making it a confrontation. And in the era of Science Online, we’re surrounded by people pointing out things as cool as glow-in-the-dark scorpions. See Scicurious’s Friday Weird science posts, Carl Zimmer’s tale of Vladimir Nabokov’s contributions to entomology, Olivia Judson explaining brood parasitism, or Radiolab’s mind-blowing meditation on stochasticity for just a few great examples selected off the top of my head.
This kind of science communication focuses on the grandeur and fun of the scientific view of life, and it wins supporters to science one story at a time. That’s not necessarily the most exciting part of the struggle against ignorance and denialism. But every time we get someone to say, “That’s pretty wild,” we’re making progress.
References
Bullock, J. (2006). Partisanship and the enduring effects of false political information. Presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. PDF.
Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32 (2), 303-30 DOI: 10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2
Abortion ≠ slavery
Ta-Nehisi Coates explains why equating the ongoing campaign against legal abortion with the abolition movement—a favorite analogy of anti-abortion folks—is not just historically silly, but actually rather racist:
The analogy necessarily holds that the enslaved were the equivalent of embryos–helpless, voiceless beings in need of saviors. In this view of American history, the saviors, much like the pro-life movement, are white. In fact, African-Americans, unlike, say, zygotes, were always quite outspoken on their fitness for self-determination. Indeed, from the Cimaroons to Equiano to Nat Turner to Harriet Tubman to the 54th regiment, slaves were quite vociferous on the matter of their enslavement. It is simply impossible to imagine the end of slavery without the action of slaves themselves.
Coates is eye-opening as always: equating abortion with slavery turns out to be another facet of U.S. conservatives’ bizarre notion that civil rights are bestowed by majority vote, not (in the words of certain historical documents they may have forgotten to read) inalienable. I recommend reading the whole thing.