F-Words

Bigotry Sells

2012-01-25T12:08:00.000-08:00

So, Washington state is set to make marriage equality law.

Industry tends to support marriage equality, because it means that they can hire the talented gay people with families away from anti-gay areas, since they can treat them as employees should be treated.

This makes perfect sense, and you'd think it would get supposed free marketeers excited, but it tends not to (See the conservative states that have banned gay marriage over the objections of industry). A lot of times, when a really obviously bigoted ad gets some attention, people argue that it can't be racist because it would alienate potential customers of color. Markets are segmented and targeted all the time, which alienates potential customers, but will create some loyalty in the targeted segment. No one blinks when an ad takes advantage of classism to position its product as one of the good things in life, so why wouldn't one take advantage of sexism or racism or homophobia?

I used to believe this market-based argument against bigotry in advertising, but I've since noticed how attached people are to their -isms. Anti-feminism is important to some people, and they might buy manly Dr. Pepper.

Ron Paul is the least racist member of Congress

2012-01-21T09:41:00.000-08:00

The title of this post is actually a comment I've read from a Paul supporter. Typical Lost Cause bullshit here: Yes, Lincoln's motivation for war was to keep the unity of the country together. The South was in it to keep slavery, or maybe squeeze a few extra dollars out of slavery's demise in a scam like Paul is describing here.

Intersecting Privileges and Oppressions on Facebook

2012-01-12T08:40:00.000-08:00

It's true: the first thing I do when I get going on the computer is open up Facebook. This morning was pretty interesting in terms of intersections of privilege.

The first thing I saw was a photo NPR had posted of amputee and runner Aimee Mullins, captioned "Inspiration, in On Photograph." Mullins, a white, thin woman, is pictured in a bikini running on a beach, with the aid of prosthetic lower legs. The comments turned into a little bit of a fight about how hard it would be for someone who wasn't so sexy to be called inspirational. Mullins is a really attractive woman - it's true. The thing that started to bother me in the comments were a lot of negativity about wheelchairs; Mullins had the good fortune to access the prosthetic technology she did. Not everyone is so lucky. Mullins works with organizations that seek to let everyone access this tech, and educate people in general about disability, so she's no slouch when it comes to, well, anything.

Next up was an item from the Courage Campaign about Pat Buchannan's complaints that he's being forced out of MSNBC by "militant gay groups" and "people of color." What stood out to me about this is the implication that people of color and gay groups (there's likely to be some crossover in the membership here) shouldn't have sway over what goes on at MSNBC. Buchannan has been an embarrassment in American culture for too long, and he knows this was long overdue.

Oh, and what the hell. I wrote a bit yesterday that would not have made a whole post on its own, so I'll just add it here:

Unfortunately, I am not in the regular habit of giving money to causes that need it. In the past year or so, I've run into a few really absurd societal failures (like Topeka, KS stopping prosecution of domestic violence) that have prompted me to find a local program and send a few bucks in. Today, it's transitional housing in Pennsylvania, since if you have enough money on-hand to pay first and last-month's rent (ish, $2,000 in savings is the cutoff), you will no longer be able to get food stamps.

The Economic Butterfly Effect

2011-11-10T11:15:00.000-08:00

"The Market" is a complicated system. The system's rules are often regarded as natural, even if they're arbitrary. People have occasionally proven themselves bad at engineering complicated systems. (Think Jurassic Park.) People have lately proven themselves bad at pulling magical free money out of the market. We've seen a lot of unintended and bad consequences from economic policies and financial innovation.

I don't see why it's obviously stupid to try and cut down on the population of dengue-carrying mosquitoes, but not obviously stupid to use the system of farm subsidies we do. In either situation, there will be unintended consequences, but Paul Wolfowitz wasn't just suffering aphasia when he made up the term, "unknown unknowns."

I don't think either of these things is obviously stupid. You see a lot of caution with regard to economic experimentation in the implementation of the PPACA. On the one hand, it seems like the long phase-in of health care is a very bad electoral strategy. On the other, if something horrible happens with a provision or two, we're not so far into it that we can't think of something else to try.

Oddly, I seem to be on the same page as Sen. James DeMint (R-SC) (Via Ezra Klein) with this issue of letting the system do what it does (when we can afford it). As a statement against weird subsidies, I think that post is over-the-top but basically correct. I just took out all of the unnecessary Obama-bashing, and added an analogy instead of a ridiculous shout-out to the artificial Christmas tree industry.

Language Evolves

2011-11-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

One thing I love about the Internet is that it’s democratized writing, and no longer is it just people with the inclination and talent who wrestle with semantics and spelling. Before chat and texting how often did you hear anyone complain about bad spelling or misused semicolons? Adding more participants to the world of writing in English has improved it. Some conventions we’ve been using are just stupid.

Some common misconceptions have almost completely gone away (like, "kerfluffle.") but others are being accommodated. One can "rifle" through a pile of papers, but that's a really weird word for the activity. A lot of people say "riffle." And I've noticed people writing it that way. While I have never used it, I think riffle is better - it's got a nice onomatopoeia thing going on, whereas the noun meaning of “rifle” is sort of distracting.

Another word I've seen this happen with is "ogle." A lot of people say it like it rhymes with "goggle." I think "oggle" also makes more sense, intuitively. As such, I have more than once seen the word "oggle" used.

Another change that doesn’t seem to have completely broken through is with periods and other sentence-ending punctuation’s placement with regard to quotation marks. When you’re quoting someone, it makes more sense to keep the original punctuation of the quote inside the marks. If you’re asking whether someone made a particular statement, you should be able to add your question mark after the quote with its punctuation included. Did Marci say, “This is not what I wanted!”?

So these were some changes I think needed to be made. I’m not on board with all of the ones I've seen. One I simply cannot support is single-spacing between sentences. It’s strange how much you internalize rules in writing before you can articulate them; I am occasionally very confused by someone using the wrong “their” or “your.”

I’ve also noticed a huge amount of unnecessary comma use, which breaks some aesthetic rules of mine, and seems to break a logical rule that I haven’t pinned down yet. For example, if someone says, “Whatever happens, happens,” I don’t think there should be a comma between the repeated words. A comma should almost separate a question from an answer within a sentence. There needs to be a kind of tension that the comma supports. The aesthetic thing is that a comma interrupts the flow of the sentence, making it seem rambly.

Pee See

2011-10-25T14:39:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about the ability for words to harm lately, and which ones sting and why. I'm hurt if someone calls me fat or a bitch or a slut. There's something at work here with terms that you can't force away from yourself. Slurs that mean, "what you are, which is is obviously a bad thing," stick. I consider "bitch" and "slut" to be slurs that basically mean, "woman." Ditto fat, to a certain extent. (It's kind of hard to explain, and probably very idiosyncratic.)

I'm Fascinated

2011-10-21T11:27:00.000-07:00

I'm a square. I like rules. Oddly, it's taken getting older for me to see how deeply this trait is embedded in me, and how badly I need to work around it. I thought you were supposed to get more conservative as you age.

Anyone reading my blog may be getting sick of the Occupy talk. But I'm hooked on the puzzle. I can't quite figure it out (and I'm putting in the effort), but I can't shake the feeling that there's some "there" there. I think that's a good sign. If I need to rebuild a lot of my ideas about how the world works, I'm not going to put it off until I'm completely fossilized.

I find this pretty exciting, but it's a personal exploration that could easily get very boring to people who are not me. I write this blog because I like to think out loud, and I assume people read it because they like seeing someone do that. I promise to stop the soul-searching, and limit it to the actual revelations.

A thought

2011-10-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

I came across a "hur hur, I go totally NUTS when I have my period" graphic on Facebook today, and those things really bug me. I made a comment about how all people, female or not, are cranky and awful from time to time, but the menstrual cycle's effect on mood is at least predictable.

The Disconnect

2011-10-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

There was something implied in the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Picketing, protesting, marching - you do that until your demands are met. I've been reading about consensus-building, and while it's fascinating and a promising model for organizing, I'm having a hard time getting on board. If the process is the purpose, then I don't see how anyone will get more than participation ribbons within the next five years. The most cynical thought I have had about consensus-building is that it's the terrifying result of Special Snowflake-ism. Occupy is anti-hierarchical, which is not the way we tend to see things handled. Anti-hierarchy seems in this instance to be anti-power, and therefore anti-empowerment. I held out a little hope after reading this interview with Marina Sitrin on historical use of consensus-building, only to have it totally dashed by Ted Rall later on.

There are precedents of consensus-building working out beautifully. But I don't think that will happen at Zuccotti Park. It's the very last thing I want to say "I told you so" about. I'd love to be proven wrong. I've spent hours this week trying to convince myself that I am.

OWS has indeed empowered people to make their pain known. I'll say unequivocally that is an accomplishment. If I may be flip, America has been in need of a pity party. (Tongue in cheek! You can have a pity party about an actual problem.) But it doesn't appear that this is all OWS has set out to do; there are still people camping out on Wall Street.

I read an article by Ted Rall today about how consensus-building is basically useless at making things happen, but super-fun and important anyway I guess. I read this in the latest Boise Weekly, which is running a series on empowering people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities to vote. Hilariously, Rall's article (wherein he made a snide remark about having to listen to the mentally-handicapped during the occupation) was on the opposite page of the first installment of the series.

Domestic Battery Legal in Topeka, KS

2011-10-12T08:18:00.000-07:00

People were circulating a news story warning that the city of Topeka, KS was considering stopping prosecution of misdemeanor domestic violence, but I didn't believe it would ever happen. I guess I'm naive. The story as to why this happened is that there was budgetary fighting between the city and the county over who would prosecute these crimes after a budget cut hit their department. The county declined to take on the task, as did the city. From Politico:

Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor said the 10 percent budget cut forced his hand at a time when his office is bogged down by other cases. In response, he decided in early September that his office would drop its prosecution of misdemeanors - which include domestic violence and battery without a weapon - in Topeka.

If you'd like to donate to a local DV program, the Topeka YWCA can be found here. I just did; their job is going to be awfully hard without the legal backup.

Atomized Inaction

2011-10-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

I went to my first Occupy Boise meeting on Sunday, and left after almost two hours of hemming and hawing. There was emphasis on inclusivity far beyond what is possible. This just doesn't meet the definition of a collective. What I saw was neither collective, nor action. The narrowing and unity that Occupy needs to arrive at will be painful, and a lot of goals will be abandoned to create a front that many can ally themselves behind. As it stands, Occupy appears to be lot of people with legitimate grievances who would like to harness the energy for their own purposes. I went because I was curious, and vaguely supportive.

I can't argue with the fact that marginalized people's priorities tend to be pared off first, and I'll admit I don't know what to do about that. I'll give Occupy the fact that they recognize this problem, but I can't say that they have moved past it.

Unfortunately, I think I'm equally stuck.

I can see how marginalized people see this as an opportunity to get a foothold on the mainstream consciousness, or maybe make some collateral progress.

Direction

2011-10-08T19:21:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking more about Occupy Wall Street, and am feeling generally supportive, but not in any specific way. In fact, I plan on making it to my first Occupy Boise rally tomorrow (I've missed two all ready). When you compare OWS and the Tea Party, you can see the TP folks are more organized since they're just Republicans, who pretty much have their shit together when it comes to organizing. A lot of people say that OWS has really bad timing in waiting so long after the crisis/bailouts/whathaveyou, but the fact that it's an election year, and some campaign* may have a chance to capitalize on the enthusiasm and save OWS from just falling apart.

*Elzabeth Warren? Please? (I do feel some irrational personal loyalty to Obama, but I'd vote for her in a primary over him. Or maybe not. It's very possible that she could do more good in the Senate than as President.)

What do you want, and when do you want it?

2011-09-29T12:06:00.000-07:00

It's too bad I'm not the only one who is befuddled about Occupy Wall Street. I'm pretty darn politically aware, and don't need a lot of hand-holding in approaching social issues, but I'm noticing that I lose interest when it comes to insubstantial ideas. Yes, I want it to be possible to get by in this country. I'm very interested in how exactly that can be made to happen, but stuff that is literally impossible is lucky if it gets a shrug from me. Also, anything with a "Step 2. ?? Step 3. Profit!"

Step 1. Occupy Wall Street. Right on.
Step 2. This is what I am missing
Step 3. Thank God it's over.

I don't think that there are too many people unaware of our huge recession. So it's starting to look like:

Step 1: Underestimate the intelligence of everyone
Step 2: Hey, wtf
Step 3: everyone is mad

What we need awareness of is what we need to do. The problem is pretty damned obvious. Though, I do look forward to Reimagine Work, the upcoming conference that seeks a roadmap to an economy that people can live with. As far as I know, the basic premise is to uncouple income from work. Now that's interesting. It's a bit radical for my blood, but something's gotta give.

It Happened to Me

2011-09-26T09:14:00.000-07:00

Farhad Manjoo has a column discussing the white-collar job functions that may soon be automated. I worked in a molecular biology lab from 2004-2008 and during that time, saw a lot of my duties partially automated.

Extracting DNA and RNA from samples that I had to process is something best done by a robot. It will treat each sample exactly the same, which is almost impossible for a human to do. These robots had some pretty clever mechanisms (sometimes mashing up different methods, like PCR and ELISA), and took some work that had the potential to be dangerous out of human hands.

In the short run, these automation systems have the potential to drive costs up, since you're using some patented materials. Still, as it is, using kits with pre-mixed chemical solutions takes advantage of the economy of scale for quality assurance, where you can farm that work out to the manufacturer of the kit. It often works out to be more cost-efficient and reliable than paying an undergrad to do that work in your lab.

Any of this automation requires a person's judgment call during part of the process, especially with things like medicine. The auto-radiologist may be able to detect subtler patterns than the human one, but I'd still want my MRI results double-checked.

Undue Burden

2011-09-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

Florida passed a law prohibiting a pediatrician from asking a parent if they own a gun. It was later struck down on the basis of it violating a doctor's right to free speech. Supporters of the law said it was a violation of second and fourth amendment rights. You know what actually does violate fourth amendment rights? Restricting abortion. Conservatives will stretch the meaning of the Constitution to embiggen the second amendment, but it's still fine to force women to give up personal information if they want to have an abortion. I almost wish there were actually a wealthy abortion industry which could afford to lobby like the NRA does. We'd be freer.

This is an interesting case of lawmakers saying that people are able to decide when collateral damage is okay (e.g. gun accidents), but women surely can't be trusted to make a similar decision for their own interests or safety. This is assuming equality between already-born people and those on their way to becoming people.

Excuses, excuses

2011-09-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan has been facilitating a discussion on the reasons people don't want women to serve in military combat, and almost all of them have been about their sexuality. Depleted uranium poses a risk of teratogenic effects on a woman's subsequent children* (but apparently this doesn't count for men who make babies after a day of learning how to use the weapons), men will not get over their desire to do the ladies, etc. Now it's getting to the issue of rape.

Read the post - I keep starting to write something and finding that what I wanted to say has already been said there. And anything else I've come up with have just been half-assed theories about male psychology.

*This is a problem when it comes to American women, but civilians in Iraq just have to deal.

Looking at the right things

2011-09-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

I was really impressed by this study that showed that laws requiring guided driving practice to get a license have reduced car crash fatalities amongst the people who actually participated, but the number of people who waited to apply for a license until they aged out of the requirement (usually at 18) almost cancel out the number of lives saved by introducing the program. Interestingly, in New Jersey, where the requirement applies to all people under 21, there's a consistent reduction in traffic deaths.

I like this study because it has a broad perspective on what we can say actually "works." It's hard to get excited about the effects of the program in its current form if basically the same number of people are dying before they get to drinking age. Dying when you're 19 in't much worse than dying when you're 16. (I have to imagine; I've never died.)

So, the upshot is that guided practice improves the safety of drivers. I would not have expected such clear-cut results, but then I don't know any teenaged car accident victims. Thinking about this made me wonder how much it affects fatality rates that young drivers tend to inherit older and less-safe cars.

Sacrifice for Beauty

2011-09-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

I like pretty shoes, but being mostly a pedestrian leaves me with few viable options in that regard. I went to a wedding this weekend, and wore a new pair of promising-looking heels. I try to go with old-lady brands, and these were Rockports, so you'd think I'd be doing pretty good. You'd be wrong. I walked about a total of two miles in the shoes, and my heels are torn up like you wouldn't believe. Here's a picture of the carnage that I discovered when I got to my destination. Double that, and you'll be able to imagine what it looked like after I got home.

I've never figured out what to do about this. It's too bad the world has decided you can't wear socks with a skirt any more. Until this heals, I'll be wearing sandals every day. I noticed that Band-Aid makes a foot lubricant to put on your feet so the shoes won't rub. I wonder if that just means your shoes fall off all the time. People talk about uncomfortable shoes, but don't really mention that they are out for your blood. How in the world are people supposed to stand this?

Contagion

2011-09-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

I saw Contagion over the weekend, and there were a lot of things that were 100% right about the movie, and a few that were questionable.

Who doesn't like a movie that glamorizes their stinky and nerdy profession? I really appreciated how the cinematography saw the world through the eyes of an epidemiologist or microbiologist. That menacing doorknob is just covered in deadly germs! Why won't you people stop touching your faces all the time*? It was jarring in the places where the movie slipped out of assuming that you know most of what's going on to explain some basic stuff to the audience (I'll admit that I didn't know what fomites meant). And as someone who's done public health work outside of the CDC, I was a little insulted when the state health departments were portrayed as full of idiots. Still, I appreciate that it was a detour that allowed the movie to talk to the audience like it's not watching the movie as part of a college course.

Speaking of the movie's respect for its audience, there was a strong undercurrent in the writing of someone who thinks people who haven't studied his specialty are dangerously stupid. Still, the bad guy profiting off of a bogus homeopathic remedy (but I repeat myself) had educated himself just enough to lie well by the time he was able to influence the public. In the beginning, he was just lucky to have guessed that the first few deaths were the beginning of a major outbreak, and still pretty paranoid. His conspiratorial thinking wasn't entirely wrong, even if it was corrupt.

I also had a hard time believing that none of the health professionals read blogs about their area of work. If you're charged with keeping the public healthy, it's a good idea to know how they're thinking. And of course, there are those written by professionals for each other. There was an absolute divide between the crazies who don't have degrees and certification but do read blogs and the trained professionals who only talk to each other. For an attempt to humanize health professionals, there was quite a lot of paternalistic ivory-tower moralizing.

*As a feminist who rarely gets excited about makeup, I recently decided that the "don't touch your face so you don't ruin your makeup" thing is probably a force against the spread of disease. On the one hand, it seems like you're sacrificing your freedom to rub sleepy eyes to the patriarchy, but on the other hand, don't touch your face so much.

These tampons will accommodate your fattie vag

2011-09-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

Playtex has an ad campaign for a new design of tampon that uses a few silhouettes to illustrate the differing body types that may want to look in to their new tampon, including "empowered," "bubbly," and "chill." The current iteration of the ad has the fattest of the ladies labeled as empowered, but I swear to god I saw an earlier one where she was labeled as "laid-back." Of course that caused me to do a wtf and look for their website to catch a screenshot, but I couldn't find it. Looking at the ad now, the labeling makes more sense, since the fat lady's posture is a lot more active than anyone else's. Plus, it doesn't imply that your lazy, fat vagina needs a super-special tampon.

I have to add that the horizontal expansion model has been the principle behind o.b. tampons since forever. I can't help but be an o.b. cheerleader, even if I kind of have given up menstruation*. They make a superior product whose design all the other companies are finally catching up to. And may I say, their startling redesign was an improvement on the previous product.

*Yes, I do in fact think I am too cool for it.

Some one-liners, since Reublican debates don't make me feel very serious

2011-09-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

I just had a minor brainstorm: Republicans only favor fewer government restrictions on some people. You're thinking, "Duh." Somehow, this is a new way of thinking about it for me. A single, disabled, low-income transwoman in America sure has some liberties at stake under a President Perry.

Also, if property is theft, how do you have theft without the concept of property? I assume that the point of the "property is theft" idea is to abolish/question the idea of private property.

Not again

2011-09-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

I got my first notification of the immature innuendo being used to raise breast cancer "awareness" on Facebook today. I had to respond with a link to Barbara Ehrenrich's essay about the saccharine and insulting world of breast cancer advocacy. This year, it's also a "try to make boys think you're talking about something sexy" thing that makes absolutely no sense. You post your shoe size and the amount of time it takes you to do your hair. By the way, it's 6.5, 15-20 minutes. And my bra is cream-colored.

Idaho can't seem to write laws regarding abortion

2011-09-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've only read about this from national wire reports (and blogs who picked it up), but apparently a Pocatello woman is challenging Idaho's new ban on abortion past 20 weeks, as well as a law that's been on the books for decades. You'd think a state with a budget shortfall would learn its lesson after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars defending laws they're told are unconstitutional upon writing.

I'll give them the fact that it's hard to ban things which are found to be constitutionally-protected. Lots of other states have been successful in regulating abortion out of accessibility, but Planned Parenthood of the Inland Northwest appears to have a crack team of attorneys that outmaneuvers that.

Nurturing gender differences

2011-08-30T18:37:00.000-07:00

Supposedly men are naturally better at spatial reasoning than women are. However, someone recently conducted a study comparing the spatial reasoning skills of men and women raised in patrilineal vs. matrilineal societies, and found that women in the patrilineal society were less-good at solving a shape puzzle than men were. The women raised and educated in a matrilineal society solved the puzzle at the same speed that men from their society did.

I have a few concerns about the experiment. For example, the patrilineal* society compared against the matrilineal* society is described as simply educating their men for more years than they do their women. I wonder how the results would shake out if the patriarchy's women benefitted from the same education as their men did.

There's a pretty good example of a patrilineal society where women are educated in roughly the same way men are: American/Western schools educate men and women in the same classrooms, and for the same number of years. In some ways, American education benefits women more than men, yet we still see a differential between men and women in the spatial-reasoning skill. What was that? Did somebody say stereotype threat?

Taking all of this together, I think the conclusion is that living/being educated in a patrilineal society negatively affects the spatial reasoning skills of women. Unfortunately, there are no matriarchies where we could test the effect of patriarchy itself, which I'd find a lot more interesting than the effect of lineage patterns. The article linked above from The Scientist simply substitutes -lineal for -archal, which I think is rather dishonest (and not something I'd expect from the publication, which I like quite a lot).

*These terms refer to whether family relationships are defined through mothers or fathers. If children are named with their father's names, it's a patrilineal society. It may seem like a non-sequitur of a variable to test across, but whichever pattern of lineage a society follows can predict some things about power and family structure.

Brave New Food

2011-08-30T17:55:00.000-07:00

It seems obvious to me that in-vitro meat is a more-ethical way to build a burger. Lots of people are working on making a commercially-viable system for in-vitro meat. I have a really really hard time believing that the huge amount of resources needed to maintain tissue culture could ever compare favorably with cows cycling the energy from grass into meat that other animals can eat. As it turns out, in-vitro muscle tissue needs to be "exercised" to avoid atrophy. This presents a huge problem for those wishing to culture the tissue. Instead of letting a cow's native metabolism exercise the muscle, we have to provide that energy.

I'm also perplexed by common attitudes toward cultured meat or protein products. In fact, I would suggest you try Quorn, a mycoprotein chicken substitute, before it loses its commercial viability. A few years ago, on short-lived sitcom Better off Ted, the company that all the characters work for developed an in-vitro steak, which turned out not to be delicious and beefy, but to taste of "despair." It was implied that such an artificial process for creating a steak would have to be depressing. I would agree that it's "soulless," but here that's only a good thing. There aren't any potential animal souls harmed in the making of this dinner.

But if the energy demands of the process can be surmounted, I'd really love to see something like this at my supermarket. Also, I'm sure investigating the ins and outs of growing actual tissues in vitro will advance the technology for creating replacement organs or tissues for humans who need them.

And because I was apparently the only person who really dug Better off Ted, I'm going include a few of the awesome advertisements for the fictional corporation Veridian Dynamics.

Our moral failure

2011-08-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

You sometimes have to wonder what currently-accepted practice will be looked back on with horror by future generations. I've read a lot of people who think it will be the way that we treat animals, but I think the more likely and obvious one is how we treat our prisoners. We give their labor to giant corporations, keep them in unsafe conditions, and aren't selective enough about who ends up in the system.

No one wants to extradite criminals to our courts because of our capital punishment habits. Getting our criminals back after they flee is a lot harder than it needs to be, and I don't think our error-prone death penalty is worth that trouble.

It's almost impossible to envision the moral innovations of the future, and "how we treat our prisoners" may soon sound like, "how we treat our slaves." To modern ears, the "treatment" is trumped by the horror of "our slaves." I'd like to believe that someone can come up with something more useful and less expensive, traumatic, or inhumane than prisons. Imprisoning people for their crimes is hardly an ideal way of reacting to socially-maladaptive behavior. But who knows, maybe there's no ideal way to deal with it.

Scared of the Palouse

2011-08-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

In the past decade or so, the Palouse has been host to some really terrifying violence against women. Deadly domestic violence, and last weekend, a young woman was apparently murdered by a man who'd been stalking her. and we're just now finding out about WSU's lax response to sexual assault within its student body.

I don't really know what conclusion to draw from this information, but the pattern is striking and terrifying.

Poverty is hard work

2011-07-07T09:48:00.000-07:00

....and you'll need training if you're going to do it right. There are a lot of shame-faced Boiseans pleading for money at street corners lately, and I have to wonder how many of these people know what services are available to help them. From some tentative investigation, it seems like not a lot of people know where to go when they can't feed their family. This is absurd. Social services can be the difference between homelessness and permanent housing. Assistance doesn't always work out, but it's an option people should know about.

I think there should be classes in high school about navigating social services. Intervention tends to work better before you're out on the street, panicking about where you'll sleep tonight. And! Services usually need to hire someone to do outreach so that the people who need them know they exist. That's not really the most productive use of their budgets.

Miniblogging

2011-07-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

I've been unhappy about how little I've blogged in the past few years, and am going to try out something new - I post links and some thoughts on Facebook often, and they're not nothing. I'm thinking I'll export that stuff to here. Expect a lot of links, and much shorter entries. Hopefully, this will inspire more frequent long pieces, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them.

Jobs, debt, and resentment

2011-06-14T13:16:00.000-07:00

More than one left-leaner I know has been complaining that Democrats are walking into a trap when it comes to talking about deficit reduction, and that it really should be jobs that they go on about instead. I think there's an intersection of the two issues that is being ignored: all these un- and under-employed people are struggling with their own finances, and giving up a lot to balance their own budgets. It's not fun to do.

When everyone's sore about cutting their own spending, it's easy to (falsely) compare the Federal budget to a household one, and act like it really is that simple. Mr. and Mrs. Public have been cutting back so they can make their student loan payments, and if anyone should be cutting back, it's that wasteful Federal Government. They're throwing away billions every year on the governmental equivalent to daily Starbucks stops! Even I know better than that!

I was disappointed to see that Obama himself is going for the "household budget" frame. We may well go broke underestimating the American public.

My American feelings

2011-05-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

I'm glad Osama bin Laden is dead. I'm not thrilled, not at all. I have been of the opinion for years that he's just a symbol, and not of much strategic importance. Still, symbolism reverberates a lot in geopolitics. My very very very cynical reaction is that the bright side is that no one's going to torture him in my name.

I'd have been disappointed if he hadn't been captured or killed, to be sure. It's something the US military put a high priority on, and they ought to be able to do the things they set out to.

Anyway, on to the speculation. (It would be irresponsible not to)

In Obama's speech last night, I heard hints that the absurd security theater we've been enduring could be stepped up. I'm very concerned that Pakistan will be shown to have been harboring him on purpose. If that's the case, I don't expect to see Af-Pak wind down any time soon. Actually, even if Pakistan is clean, I don't expect it to. A lot of people are concerned about Al Qaeda retaliating, but I think they used up their best idea in 2001. They will continue to be dangerous for at least a decade I'm sure, and do something awful but small in scale pretty soon.

Dear Unilever and Procter& Gamble,

2011-04-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

I'm a woman, age 25-32, and you make many products I'd like to use, except they contain irritating fragrances. What is up with that? Who would notice if their Pantene smelled of nothing in particular?

And, Dear Readers,

I've been in Boise for a little over a month now, and things are going pretty nicely. The move was a little disastrous, as our car DIED in an area without phone service. We knew the car was getting long in the tooth and would need to be replaced soon. With the help of my fantastic in-laws, we were able to get a used Nissan Versa that we've named Vice. Luckily, I was driving a U-Haul, and we were able to get to the new place before the landlord left for the day.

More interestingly, I've been able to start some volunteering stuff at the Idaho Food Bank and the Idaho Discovery Center (a children's science museum). I've always fantasized about being Bill Nye the Science Guy when I grow up (despite the fact that my name rhymes with nothing), and I'm now one step closer!

Being in Boise, I will probably be able to be more politicky than I have lately, so blogging will be more frequent.

Away We Go

2011-03-05T09:27:00.000-08:00

I am leaving my hometown. I love Moscow, but I'm not comfortable with the idea of living here forever. I graduated high school 10 years ago, so it's definitely about time for me to get the heck out. My husband just finished law school and got a job, so we're going to head to Boise next week. I'm still in a career/life limbo, so what exactly I'll do is not really clear to me. I think I'm going to concentrate on studying for the PCAT, and then apply to pharmacy school ASAP. I've gone through a few "what will I be when I grow up" fads while I've been side-tracked, and trying to get in there seems like the best solution. However, I've begun to take writing seriously again, so I'm going to stick with it as much as I can.

Hypocrisy is one thing

2011-03-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

Amanda's post about wingnut urban legends made me think about how gleeful everyone seemed to be to find out that when Ayn Rand came down with lung cancer, she applied for medical benefits from the government. That makes her a hypocrite, and her political positions far stupider, but I still think it's her right. I draw the line at humiliating physical harm as a fair consequence for being a crappy person. This may be melodramatic, but it reminds me too much of how rape is a way to make a woman or other victim sorry that she tried to assert herself.

Amanda discusses her approach to questioning anecdotes about some poor person somewhere not trying to improve their lot in the hardest way possible (apparently a sin to a conservative), e.g. a mother on welfare doing the math and realizing that she can devote her time to raising her kids and come out financially and emotionally better than she would if she worked a minimum-wage job. I feel that it's better to loudly dismiss such things as boring and irrelevant. The same is true of the anecdotes that back my arguments up.

It doesn't change the principle that people deserve some dignity and free will. Systems should be gamed, if they result in an increase of dignity and freedom of choice. Ayn Rand has as much right as anyone else to panic in the face of mortal harm, and take whatever steps are necessary to get on with her life. A homeless guy has a cell phone? Besides the fact that consumer electronics aren't all that expensive anymore, WHO CARES?

If I may add another example of being disappointed when people get too caught up in how other people live their lives:

I once was in a discussion about reparations for slavery in the US. The Chris Rock joke about everyone spending their cash on rims and clothes came up, and I naively suggested something like a scholarship program, which caught on really quickly. I tried to point out that this money was stolen from people who would otherwise have been able to choose how to spend it, and we don't really think twice about our right to occasionally blow a significant part of our paychecks on a round of drinks for everyone at the bar , but everyone was wearing their social engineer hat already, and too stoked about putting today's black youths on the hard road to success to listen.

A drain on society

2011-02-19T12:08:00.000-08:00

The thing that doesn't get mentioned when people whine about the cost of supporting people on disability and paying for Medicaid is that these measures give us more productive people to contribute to our society and economy. All anyone calculates is the cost of the programs. But there are dividends to the investment!

Actively sick people don't work as well or as much as they could. People with stabilized conditions (say, someone who can afford their antidepressants) are going to be a lot more useful in the workplace, and pay taxes in to the system. The same perverse system plays out with social security disability.

You can't get social security for disability unless you're completely unable to do any work. This forces some people to choose between working below their true capacity and not working at all.

If a pianist gets rheumatoid arthritis, she can probably still work some retail, so she's not eligible for any support, even as she gives up the prestige and pay of her old career. Maybe she could be a successful music teacher, but if she loses her status in her profession (along with class status - dressing like the kind of person you'd pay well to teach your kid piano is tough to do on social security), it's going to be hard for her to get a foothold in a business suited to her talents, so she may well end up organizing the sweaters at Old Navy 15 hours a week.

Private-sector disability insurance sometimes works in terms of long- and short-term tiers of disability. If you're disabled for only a little while, you have some support to get back into work. If you are just relying on social security, you have to wait until you're completely disabled to get any income support (and then a couple of years to get through the process of applying). Under-funded Medicaid is hard to rely on to bring you back to your previous capacity, especially if you are out of work while you're under the weather. Living without income is not conducive to recovery.

This system is a lot more sustainable, since it keeps more people in the workplace and paying premiums for those who won't ever get back (e.g. the pianist who has a massive stroke and can't process language anymore).

An added bonus to the tiered system is that it works for parental leave as well. You don't have to just cut ties with the working world if you need a year of maternity leave. American men and women have shown that they're not willing to let work swallow up their entire lives, and the American workforce is fractured into a million dysfunctional pieces when having children means exiting the workforce, or even mommy-tracking your otherwise brilliant career.

But we can't have fakers suckling at the government's teat until they're ready to work again. It's fraud! And theft! Who do these people think they are?

Warm and fuzzy patriotism

2011-02-07T13:23:00.000-08:00

Jacob Weisberg is right that it's pretty understandable to mess up the Star Spangled Banner, even at the Super Bowl. I really thought Christina Aguilera was more talented than that, but I guess I was fooled. This all reminded me of one of the neatest moments of patriotic pride I ever had.

In Summer 2000, just after I graduated high school, I was fortunate enough to be sent to Finland in a Lions Club social exchange. While I was there, I participated in a camp that gathered all of the exchangees in the country that summer, which created a really neat international group of people. At one point, on a hiking trip, there was a sudden, huge rain storm, and we all had to hide out in a little room with no power, but a fire for light. How romantic. This meant we had to actually entertain ourselves, and everyone decided we'd sing our national anthems for each other. Of course, I was terrified to sing ours, but I went ahead and did it, and despite my complete inability to sing, it was very well-received.

Everyone said it was very beautiful, and hearing that made me realize for the first time that it sure is. It has clumsy lyrics and is technically challenging, but to me that embodies a lot of the best qualities of the USA; we're ambitious, and going to do things our own way.

In my little school, I was lucky enough to have some pretty good free, public musical training (I was not really concerned with voice, I played flute.). Mr. Murdock did everything the hard way.

Carry a sign, pat yourself on the back

2011-02-05T16:24:00.000-08:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates featured a bit of Matt Yglesias' observations on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's editorial warning about Islam being a form of fascism, and rightly pointed out that it went a little far. I noted this paragraph in particular:

But surely she must see, I counter, that the majority of British Muslims are moderates? Sitting in her publisher's office in an elegant grey-flannel trouser suit and pearl earrings, she fixes me with her lucid brown eyes. "If the majority are moderates, why did the Muslim community never take to the streets to abhor the 7/7 bombers? Why is it that the only time we see Muslims protesting en masse is when Islam is allegedly insulted, like with the Danish cartoons, or the Pope's comments?"

TNC goes on to say that this isn't a very good test, and I agree with him, but I think it's a challenge white North Idahoans should take up. We're embarrassed and horrified of our white supremacists, but that's not necessarily clear to everyone. If we're so anti-racist, why aren't we making a big stink about the racists? There's a significant stink in the area's press, but that hasn't made much of a difference on the ground.

There is, still, the problem that "taki[ng] the streets to abhor" isn't really a thing, especially when what's abhorred is pretty much officially abhorred. Racist views aren't illegal, though. The discussion at TNC's applied this thinking to Take Back the Night-type rallies, which don't make a lot of sense if they just exist to say, "Stupid rapists, please stop raping me," since rape is already illegal. However, I'd argue that Take Back the Night is more about calling attention to the pervasiveness of violence against women (It's pretty bad if just going outside when it's dark is scary.) than scaring or shaming rapists themselves. The problem that someone pointed out is that the Take Back the Night name implies that the main issue is strange men attacking random women when they're going about their own business.

Applying Take Back the Night logic to GTFO White Supremacists demonstrations requires the recognition that, like with violence against women relying on widespread misogyny, there's something in our particular local culture that allows these outposts of bigotry to remain, when most of the country has avoided it. I feel pretty confident saying that there's little virulent racism in the area*, but subtler problems are really really widespread. I had to give up on a local blog's comment section when someone joking-but-not-jokingly proposed banning the word "racist" instead of "fuck" in the discussions. White people often need a lot of hand-holding when it comes to talking about race, but that's completely ridiculous.

I was awfully disappointed when my clumsy attempt to start a discussion about what more needs to be done was completely and defensively ignored. Admittedly, it was a little of-topic where I attempted. An elevator pitch of, "You're racist, do something about it," isn't a big winner. I started talking about things I've learned in my own struggles with ignorance about race issues, and my personal racism. No one liked that, especially since I'm a ~~bitchy, arrogant~~ confrontational writer even when being diplomatic. I tried some hand-holding in passing on lessons I've learned the hard way.* There's no real legislative solution to the problem, so work needs to be done on a more subtle, social level. A GTFO campaign is more like it, but easily co-opted and pretty toothless. Idaho has been "too great for hate" for probably two decades, but the slogan has done little beyond making people feel less racist-by-association. Apparently some of our best friends are black, but no one wants to look much deeper than that if they're at risk of being called racist in the process.

Racism isn't exactly our fault, but it's a legacy we're obligated to fix, even when it means being embarrassed and feeling guilty.

*The average amount of virulent racism is much higher here than in the rest of the country, but it doesn't take a lot to bring up an average in such a small population. The corollary should be that it doesn't take much to bring it down either.

Can't argue with results or: We're doing something wrong

2011-01-30T15:16:00.000-08:00

I've been awfully disturbed about violent and overt racism flaring up in my region lately, but have only gone beyond "horror and embarrassment" to "So what now?" If this is the place where someone's planting their MLK Day bomb, we're doing something wrong. It's tempting to just say, "Hey, they gotta be somewhere," and rhetorically if not physically distance yourself from our crop of white supremacists, but while the normal public (I'm guilty too) has been throwing up their hands, the white supremacists have been regrouping. Everyone else seems to be able to avoid this, and we should take a lesson. My slacktivism hasn't helped me intuit what exactly it is, but I've seen little in the way of ideas for aggressively facing the problem. In fact, there's the expected pants-wetting occurring when the appropriate word "racist" is applied to the social climate. I think the individualistic bent of the area is keeping people thinking too small. Okay, okay, I get it: you're not racist. That's nice for you. But it's obviously not enough.

It is an inferior people who do not like tacos

2011-01-28T15:15:00.000-08:00

Seriously, a giant almost-bomb wasn't enough shame for them?

Reducing suicide or reducing murder. Six of one...

2011-01-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of weird, ablist stuff in the media about how more access to mental health care may have helped prevent Gabrielle Giffords' shooting. It's ablist because it concentrates on how to empower the already in-control "us" versus the mentally-ill and disempowered "them." Vaughan Bell addressed the assumptions about mental-illness-influenced-violence in Slate pretty well, but some are reacting extremely poorly, calling for it to be easier to involuntarily commit individuals, and not worry too much about individual rights.

A lot of this is couched in terms of how the availability of mental health care could reduce murder rates (It probably wouldn't by any significant measure). I think we could safely predict that a reduction in death by suicide would occur with widespread access to mental health care. And honestly, I think that's just as good. Interpersonal violence is terrifying, but so is mental illness. It's not something you can avoid by keeping your nose clean and keeping to your gated communities, so I think it's really strange that people are drawing clear lines between the nutters and the regular people. The wealthy white people who control the media narrative have a lot more to personally gain by destigmatizing and treating mental illness than they do by writing it off as a problem for the little people. But then again, one of their own was suddenly horribly affected by a crazy plebe, so that's where the fear is currently focused.

The other disability-related issue that I think will be interesting is how the brain-injured Giffords will be received by the general public and her colleagues once she recovers. I predict that she won't be able to serve out the rest of her term, since there will be a lot of recovery to do. But that doesn't mean she's out of the game forever. Some are already preparing to write her off, but from my layperson's knowledge of brain injury (and optimistic medical predictions in the media), I doubt that's necessary. She will have some effects to deal with, but who knows how severe they will be.

Take two martinis and call me in the morning

2011-01-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

Talking about the social costs and benefits of drug use at Ta-Nehisi Coates' place got me thinking about self-medication and how weird it is that substances that don't come from a pharmacy are basically considered bad habits by mental health professionals. If you use alcohol to self-medicate for social anxiety, why shouldn't a therapist advise you in how to do this safely? They'll do it with Xanax, which has its own dangers and potential for addiction.

Now, the obvious answer is corruption (kickbacks from pharma?), as well as American Puritainism, but I think the idea is really promising, since swallowing a glass of wine before diving into the conversation at the office party doesn't really come across as something a crazy person would do. Taking a pill kind of does. Embracing traditional treatments like these could really reduce the impression of the overmedicalization of normal human behavior in psychiatry, and obviate some of the stigma of mental illness.

The same idea could apply to the use of (somehow decriminalized) marijuana.

Ask, Tell

2010-12-18T10:55:00.000-08:00

Today, my country is better than it was yesterday.

Speedy trials please. Without torture!

2010-12-15T16:14:00.000-08:00

Via TNC and a few other places (originally Glenn Greenwald), we learn that Bradley Manning, the Army Private accused of leaking the war documents to Wikileaks has been detained for seven months in truly inhuman conditions (23-hour/day solitary confinement with a few of the "luxuries" normally provided prisoners withheld, like a pillow or sheets) - before he's even been convicted. My personal and irrelevant opinion is that he probably leaked the leak, but regardless, we shouldn't even be treating convicts this way. The US government's embarrassment and desire for revenge about Wikileaks makes me really concerned about a railroading.

Speaking of railroading, I've heard that Julian Assange has been subjected to similar treatment while he awaits trial for a (Ed: I removed the word "much right here because I hadn't done my due diligence and actually read the link.) lesser crime, and what. the. fuck. I don't really want to get into the whole sex crimes are prosecuted when it's convenient thing, so check out Amanda Marcotte's post about it.

I don't know what Jon Stewart is trying to do, but I like it

2010-11-13T17:53:00.001-08:00

This is a long Rachel Maddow interview of Jon Stewart, but it's worth the time. The interview starts with Maddow trying to pin Stewart on his frequent responsibility-dodge that he's "just a comedian," but he successfully starts to pull away from it. I absolutely believe he's trying to avoid reality with the comedy dodge. I don't think he has an obligation to go through the other side of comedy into punditry, but he's there now and ought to acknowledge it. I think his major contribution to politics has been the accepted point that cable news is terrible for everyone - but he's dragging it out a lot further than it will go. I still enjoy TDS (The Daily Show) from time to time, and think hearing Stewart's voice along with other pundits' is valuable. But he is a pundit. He doesn't like it, and I don't blame him, but it's manipulative of him to imply he has no responsibility in news media shenanigans. He makes a good point that comedy is synthesis, and helps resolve what is right in front of you.

The news media should add up the facts and synthesize a description of reality - but they leave it to TDS, pretending that doing the synthesis would be biased. There's a truism that the voice of reason is never funny. TDS disproves that.

There's a second Yes Men film (That's a Netflix streaming link.) where they start to realize that their pranks may be hilarious, but they're not doing anyone any good. Them being funny relies on things being VERY WRONG with the world. So it becomes a question of how to fix things. Stewart seems to be near that point. It's not funny anymore; it has never really been that funny that people are being made miserable; and it's time to stop putting jokes where action is needed. The rally was a little bit of a misfire in that direction. I know I would have gone to it if possible, just because it seemed like a good time.

Feminism's collateral benefit

2010-09-23T11:59:00.001-07:00

I made a comment on Jezebel/Gawker the other day that got a kind of touchy reception, and I was a little surprised. Saying "feminism is for women" doesn't mean that all feminists must be women - it's just that feminism exists to benefit women. Cool? If some collateral benefit comes to men, that''s fantastic, and not entirely unintentional. Feminism has obviated a lot of the restrictions of patriarchy, and patriarchs are stuck in the past, and seem to expect a revolution to be handled for them.

This came up in response to the crop of media discussing the ascendency of women in the professional world, and all the subsequent whining about the way that models of masculinity haven't prepared men to deal with a world where women matter. Well, duh. Fix your masculinity then. Feminists have made some inroads on this work, but it's really not up to women to change men.

Anyway, that's all I was trying to get at. I was a little blunt in my original comment, but it seems to have gotten across to people who weren't busy protecting their male feminist bona fides. (You know, by threatening to stop defending me from the mean old patriarchy. Some allies.)

UPDATE: The Good Men Project is an example of men seeing that they have plenty of catching up to do.

That's better

2010-05-29T16:17:00.001-07:00

I fell out of love with my hot-mess homemade template, and thought it was time for a change.

You Know...

2010-05-29T16:11:00.000-07:00

The phrase "sexual health" has largely been replaced with the more conservative-friendly "reproductive health." We're still too embarrassed to admit that women have sexual organs that need care even when they're not making babies.

The empowerfulment concern troll

2010-04-22T16:29:00.000-07:00

Pleasure is not a zero-sum pursuit. The skeptical reaction to the Boobquake has centered a lot on the fact (and I'm paraphrasing) that men like looking at scantily clad women, so obviously this simply perpetuates patriarchy. I see this attitude a lot when it comes to ladies who wanna be naked: Erykah Badu shouldn't have gotten naked in her video because men are titillated by her nudity. That's not her fault, and it doesn't mean she can't use her body to express herself. Not everyone will get it, but when does that ever happen? Especially with boundary-pushing?

It's a concern trolling technique that really gets to people. Oddly enough, it tends to put a lid on female sexual expression in the end. The collective clitoris will never be avenged. I just don't believe in revenge (especially when the score is spread across generations. *I* have not been oppressed for tens of thousands of years - just 27). An age of matriarchy would give women a boost, but male oppression wouldn't. Schemes of supremacy do not liberate or avenge, when all it takes to "win" is to come out the least badly.

Where Have You Been All My Life Pea Soup

2010-04-12T18:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I made one of those recipes that makes me feel stupid for not having invented it or even heard of. I'm not a practical cook. My repertoire of go-tos is very small. Pesto pea soup is going in that mental file. It's easy, cheap, healthy, and delicious. The recipe is so simple I hardly need to write anything. It's exactly what you think it will be: carrot, onion and celery are simmered in stock until tender, add a pound or two of frozen peas and simmer a few more minutes until it seems done, then blend the hell out of it.

I used one onion, one carrot, and one rib of celery, plus 2 lbs of frozen peas, and a quart of chicken stock (the final product had a thick texture, about the consistency of heavy cream). To this I added a quarter cup of basil pesto. The recipe calls for using more pesto to garnish the soup when you eat it, but I found the pesto I stirred in to be almost more than enough. The sweetness of the basil and peas needs to be tempered with a little salt. I prefer to leave fine-tuning like that to the diner, so keep a salt shaker handy when you sit down to eat this.

Push-polling the medical literature

2010-04-07T12:32:00.000-07:00

I'm a person with many medical problems, none of which are doctors. As a feminist and sometimes invalid, I'm supposed to feel mistreated by the medical system. While I do have the being a freakish lady thing working against me, I also have a background in science working for me. In general, I'm a well-informed consumer of medical services, and my doctors know it. Being sick makes medicine as a subject pretty compelling, so I read a few medical blogs, including Kevin, MD. The mood around Kevin's is pretty darn anti-patient, and this post was the last straw for me. Take out the words you'd skip on a google search, and you get a title that says chronic pain patients are disobedient children. Patients with weird conditions: threat or menace? The quote from the article that really got me was

“The study of life-course influences on chronic pain is still in its infancy,” the researchers said.

This layperson is not surprised at the results, nor is she suspicious of their validity. I'll bet the researchers had a similar perspective when they put the study together. If a field is still in its infancy, why start with something you are pretty sure will make patients look bad*?

I'll give practitioners and researchers the fact that chronic pain is a sticky wicket; there are addicts out there seeking drugs from you just cuz they want 'em, and the process of sifting them out insults the people you're really trying to help. An objective diagnosis is a hard sell without blood tests or x-rays. Things get a lot simpler when you can say that the distinction isn't important to make because it's all in the "real patients'" heads. So you look for some data that support that conclusion. I respect the fact that many docs take up this challenge and treat sufferers of chronic pain, but I still feel pretty betrayed seeing this hostility laid so bare.

I don't really go in for "a few bad apples" explanations, mostly because of this talk by Dan Ariely [He talks about how almost everyone cheats a little, but there are only a few Lynndie Englands out there, so the aggregate adds up to a lot of cheating. Subtitles are available for the video]. I want a reasonably skeptical doctor. In case all this waffling doesn't make it clear, I am not willing to unequivocally condemn a whole group of medical professionals.

[I got rid of a bunch of equivocating stuff down here, because it was boring the hell out of me. Ambivalence: who cares?]

It's a murder trial, not an abortion trial

2010-01-14T13:01:00.000-08:00

I didn't really know what to think about Scott Roeder being allowed to go ahead with a really really stupid defense in his upcoming murder trial, but I think Emily Bazelon does a great job of articulating why it's going to be a horror show. She says:

Surely the Kansas appeals courts will set the judge straight if he doesn't fix this himself by the trial's end. But by then, harm will have been done. Scott Roeder will get to put on testimony about why he thought he was justified in killing Tiller. He will have a show trial in which he can present himself as a martyr to the cause of the unborn. Judge Wilbert has repeatedly insisted that he won't let this trial become a trial about abortion. But that's exactly where his ruling is taking us

I've already seen headlines referring to the upcoming trial as an "abortion trial." Abortion is LEGAL. George Tiller performed legal medical procedures and someone took his life for that.

New Year, Still Me

2010-01-08T10:41:00.000-08:00

For some reason, I had it in my head that I wasn't going to post anything until my triumphant return to work (which I think is impending, but at a somewhat-less-triumphant level than I was hoping for). I started several posts fuming about kill-the-bill-ers, but they were just more ranting that the debate didn't need. Suffice it to say that I prefer a bill to no bill at all, and don't actually care if insurance companies remain intact and profitable. I'd prefer they crash and burn, but it's just not going to happen any time soon (and especially wasn't going to with that weak-ass excuse for a public option that was floating around).

Re: food, my spouse has been making split-pea pasties (not the kind that go on nipples), and I've been eating them before getting a photo. Ever wanted to put split-pea soup in a pie? Pasties are your chance! Plus, the Palouse is the dry pea and lentil capital of the world, so we would thank you for your support. If I can get him to write down the recipe, I'll post it ASAP. If you're not a split-pea type of person, there are a lot of variations out there.

Hunting the great white elephant

2009-12-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

Given that I am not especially employed at the moment, I haven't had to deal with a lot of Christmas formalities and "fun." But I still have some ranting to do. I hate hate hate white-elephant gift exchanges. I can't help but think of the schmuck working for slave-wages that made that silly widget, and I can't have fun at his/her expense.

Just too far

2009-12-15T19:29:00.000-08:00

"James Chartrand" seems like a huge jerk. There's been a story circulating the web about blogger "James Chartrand" coming out as a woman, complete with a sob story about how it was just the glass ceiling keeping her stuck at the level of mediocrity, and all of a sudden, she changed the name under which she published and found great success. She's been called an Uncle Tom for stepping atop the glass ceiling and watching the women milling around below her - and it's true. I don't necessarily think it's a big deal to access privilege without making sure it goes to everyone else who was wrongly robbed of it. It's slimy, but a girl's gotta eat.

Being wronged doesn't obligate you to protect everyone else from the same fate (Of course, it's not that simple. The classic example of this dilemma is women who don't report sexual assault. But lots of rapists are successfull prosecuted, and we still have an epidemic of rape.), but regardless of whether or not you've been wronged, you don't make thing worse for people (other than by perpetuating the original problem). It's a classic case of "Just because I'm black, it doesn't mean I have to fix your racism.)

As Amanda Hess of the sexist has reported, "Chartrand" engaged in some active misogyny with her online persona. Hess speculates that misogynistic jokes Chartrand made were in fact tongue-in-cheek jokes, given that the blogger herself is female.

Even in that case, the damage has already been done. Minstrelsy is as damaging to a group's reputation when they're the performers.

The thing that really twists the knife is that she made a coy attempt to come out without taking responsibility for the damage that James Chartrand inflicted against female writers.

Even when the story is extra-tidy and she's just a lady trying to get around the glass ceiling, people don't believe her, and loudly proclaim that discrimination against female writers is a myth.

Then take a left just before the old Patterson place...

2009-12-08T12:38:00.000-08:00

I just got a press release from some Swedish sex-ed group (the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education) presenting a new term for the hymen, in the hopes that it will help dispel some myths about female sexual purity. In English, they are going for "vaginal corona." I'm small-town enough to refer to places by old names, so I have a hard time seeing people really accept the change in nomenclature. Plus, the myths are part of an active agenda - like the press release says:

“The myths surrounding the hymen were created to control women's freedom and sexuality.

For more info, see Jessica Valenti's book The Purity Myth.

I'm pessimistic about this term's future, but I appreciate the effort. Also, check out the link above: there were a lot of things I didn't know about the "vaginal corona."

There's no point in fighting biology

2009-12-01T11:36:00.000-08:00

A study recently showed people who agree with a biracial candidate (who could that be?) as perceiving his skin to be lighter in color than those who disagree with him in general. If you were going to follow the general thrust of sexist evolutionary psychology, you could only conclude that it's just not fair to ask people to accept leadership from a dark-skinned person. But whaddya know, you haven't seen that kind of conclusion trumpeted in bad science writing.

Funny how it sounds totally ridiculous when applied to racial destiny, but people are all over biological/sociological destiny being directed by sex.

I'm just going off of that little blurb and my recollection of a story on the radio the other day, but I'm pretty sure the study didn't control for the race of the participants, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. Also, it's being published in PNAS, which is hardly prestigious.

A false-positive is as false as a false-negative.

2009-11-18T10:21:00.000-08:00

The horrified reaction to the new guidelines for less-frequent mammograms in women over 50 has been driving me nuts. The way it's being sold is just terrible (as in they just don't want people to worry over nothing), but that doesn't mean that it's a bad recommendation. If we're going to complain so much about doctors overtesting and practicing "defensive medicine," I'd expect this kind of thing to get a better reception. The last straw for me was when I saw a Newsweek article saying that the real problem with mammograms is that they tell us too much stuff that we don't understand, and that hey, it's just a matter of figuring that stuff out, so irradiate away for the sake of the few that actually benefit from yearly mammograms starting at 40, regardless of the risks that everyone else are taking on. It's really misleading to say that mammograms give us a lot of info we're not using. If we don't know what it means, it's not information. I have a hard time understanding how the method made it into everyday practice, for its rather pathetic track record.

The article says:

Many cancer groups opposed the decision, and it's easy to see why: their job is to ensure that no one, no matter how slim the odds, dies of cancer that could have been prevented. Proponents of evidence-based medicine say that mammograms lead to too many unnecessary tests and the detection of too many tumors that may not really need treatment. But as it turns out, mammograms themselves aren’t the problem.

I can understand the impulse to dismiss the harm of a false-positive, but everyone assumes that the mammogram isn't susceptible to false-negatives. Everyone brings up their friend who was the exception to a rule as evidence that the rule is useless, but weird stuff confounds even very accurate tests (which the mammogram is not). It took me a long time to recognize that I am a vanishingly rare exception, so my experience with medical misadventures isn't really relevant to basically anyone.

I think I have emotional standing to assert that exceptions aren't what we should base standard practices around, so I don't want to hear about your grandmother who caught her breast cancer early with a mammogram before the age of 50. It is pretty nice when people luck out and get useful information from a mammogram in their 40s, but most of the time, all you get from a mammogram is a confirmation of what you knew to begin with. Plus, a patient undergoing mammography is exposed to radiation, and that's best avoided.

On a barely-related and sort of silly note, I always think of how the children in A Series of Unfortunate Events were subjected to unnecessary surgery, which has caused me to associate unnecessary medical procedures with melodrama more strongly than I should. Plus, I should admit that I have probably had an unnecessary MRI or two over the past few years, but I'm not about to argue with my neurologist as he tries to feel his way around the unlit area where my health hangs in the balance. If anyone has a good chance as guessing right, it's him. My somewhat-educated feeling is that I'll probably be okay, and if I go four or five years like I have been, I'm probably out of the woods.

Why not abortion insurance?

2009-11-09T09:43:00.000-08:00

I'm as peeved about the Stupak amendment as anyone else, but with the paranoid political climate out there, I expected nothing else. It makes me wonder why I've never seen supplementary coverage for abortion available for sale. There is the self-selection thing, where people philosophically opposed to abortion wouldn't buy a policy, but the procedure itself usually isn't very expensive, so I imagine a pool of pro-choice policy-holders who may never find themselves needing to access their abortion coverage would be able to support the cost of the procedures undertaken.

I'm at a stage in my life where if a pregnancy comes, I'll go with it, but a D&C is something even some planned pregnancies end with, so I couldn't honestly skip buying a cheapish policy out of self-interest. Then again, the cost of a simple abortion is probably the kind of cash I could scare up at a time when I needed it, so I would be a lot better off just donating to an abortion fund, rather than building a policy where some of my money would have to be skimmed off the top of the pool to line the pockets of some insurance broker.

Maintaining access to abortion is something that a not-explicitly-feminist organization can't really do at the moment, so as always, it's up to the explicitly feminist organizations to make it happen.

Everyone loves a tomboy

2009-11-01T18:47:00.000-08:00

I was never big on girl-culture as a child (that is, I don't remember much interest in dolls or makeup or family-type games), but I didn't fit any description of a tomboy (I am a total weakling and uninterested in sports), so I didn't really feel that I had a gender-mold to fit into, but I found that I tended to identify a lot with tomboy characters in books, and loved the idea of a girl having a boy's name. My name is most definitely a girl's name. I was so disappointed when I found out that it had such a lamely-patriarchal meaning (it's often just defined as "Abraham's wife," but "princess" comes up a lot.) I thought about this when I came across this article about androgynous names trending toward girls, and how parents who prefer androgynous names usually go for more-masculine ones, regardless of their child's gender. The author uses the example of the name Leslie as one that began as a boy's name, and once it became popular for girls, boys' parents dropped it like a hot rock. Hello, ambient misogyny. Girls who act like boys are cool, but boys who act like girls are fags.

Compounding the disappointment

2009-10-30T14:21:00.000-07:00

The ~~BMJ (British Medical Journal)~~ British Journal of Criminology has declared the widespead use of date-rape drugs to be an urban myth. This depresses Tressugar, but I am GLAD to see it said so clearly. It drives me batty when people get so earnestly grave and serious with their roofie-warnings for young women. When people use oversimplifications/exaggerations like this to pretend to confront a problem as complicated* and serious as rape, it creates a sense of complacency.

Tressugar says:

It's troubling that some experts and the media cannot find a way to remind people about the dangers associated with binge drinking without discrediting women who have been victims of sexual abuse.

I think it's conceding too much to say that this is a discredit to victims of rape. I imagine that blackout-drunk women pushed into sex haven't played out in their minds exactly what all the possible consequences of extreme drunkenness could entail. I don't think that acknowledging that a victim's actions contributed to the situation in which they were vulnerable is a discredit; it's a simple acknowledgement of cause-and-effect. To me, it's like the math that you do when you decide whether or not to buy health insurance. You can do a bunch of things to lessen the likelihood that you will become very very sick, but you can't eliminate the possibility. Shit happens, and blame isn't really the point, especially because the one who actually pays is the victim. I ignored/didn't really notice a constant headache for a couple of months, and if I'd noticed it sooner, I just might have been able to prevent the devastating illness I ended up with. But maybe I couldn't have; I don't know. I'm not in charge of these things. I'm also not in charge of how people around me act, and neither is any other drunk woman of the people she's with. Glossing over the contributing factors to anything works against the possibility of preventing it.

So the roofie lie is dangerous in two ways: it leaves people more vulnerable to rape AND it discredits the anti-rape cause, which its detractors would say collapses without an overcautious but shamelessly deceived victim. There's nothing just-so about the story. The last thing I expect out of the godless, random universe in which I live is fairness. It's up to people to enforce that.

Of course, the number one contributing factor among the things that make rape happen is the action of the rapist. It's really not possible to control all the influences upstream from there; most people who get drunk don't get raped or commit rape. But a lot of people who are raped or commit rape did get drunk beforehand. I mean, how many hundreds of times have you heard the story about the marathon-running only-organic-vegan who died of a heart attack at 55?

Justice is not natural, so we have to consciously choose it. We can and should BLAME THE RAPIST FOR RAPING. It's not a crime (or even really impolite or unwise) to get drunk; It is a crime to rape. You don't just increase the chances that someone will be raped when you rape them - you decide that you will rape. You may get away with smoking cigarettes for a couple of decades without related health problems, but you will definitely have created a problem if you fill your kid's sippy cup with bleach.

It seems pretty simple to me, but a rape culture's self-enforcement doesn't get it, (link via Amanda from Pandagon) and refuses to, so if I'm going to really face facts here I'm not going to hold my breath until our sick culture can acknowledge what the facts mean.

Someone got raped? Let's think of anyone we could blame who is not the rapist! Maybe...the victim! Yeah, she's a total slut!

It's pretty nice when the stars align so that your drunken escapades don't end up with some guy raping you, but that doesn't make you better than the people whose did. I know I've never drunk so much as to black out again for a couple of reasons: a) I don't want that to happen to me again and b) it's just not fun to be falling-down drunk, or to have the falling-down drunk hangover.

*I know that people claim it isn't complicated, but I'm not convinced, and I find it seriously counterproductive to gloss over the complications of the subject. There are a lot of debates about what is and is not rape, and to use some pop-cultural examples, I think it's pretty damn clear that Joan was raped by her fiance, but Pete did not rape the babysitter that lived down the hall. He used some deception and unfair coercion, but he "convinced" her to sleep with him, and in the face of her disadvantage, she relented. That transactional view of sex is icky, sure, but it seems to be an actual way people carry out their sex lives. I'm not willing to define rape down to where it is the primary mode of sexual interaction between two people who are getting a raw deal out of their sex lives, but basically comfortable with it.

A stereotypical woman who "gives" sex to her partner in exchange for love/security/material support may in fact be satisfied with her sex life. It's obviously not a great way to negotiate a sexual relationship - to me it's downright creepy - but if it helps some limp through patriarchal control of their lives, I say let them keep it as long as they want it.

Acceptable Rebellion

2009-10-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

I am a fan of Lady Gaga. Lame provocateurs rely on cliches to upset people - The 90s saw Marilyn Manson "pushing" the same boundaries metal trashed in the 80s. She pushes some of the go-to boundaries like nakedness and gender - to good effect. I was really impressed with Gaga's red lace dress that covered her face. It really helped me understand why I don't buy it when people talk about fashion being artistic. Fashion's completely and voluntarily restricted by the paramaters of prettiness. No one experiments with outfits that make them look fat or like they have a pretty bad case of scoliosis.

I can only imagine that the intersex rumor was started by her, as a part of the attempt to really push boundaries of what people find attractive or interesting. Of course, she still follows a lot of rules: she's thin, she's white, she's American, she's rich, she usually complies straightforwardly to gender norms, and she makes vanilla pop music. It's an unfortunatev truism of boundary pushing that there are always some holds barred.

Another thing I love about her is that it's hard for someone who grew up after the sexual revolution to have any comprehension of what it must have been like to be actually shocked by something a media figure does. My age cohort hasn't had a single cultural shock. I do wonder what it is with the kids these days, though. Nothing seems subversive. Self-deprecating humor is basically the only kind out there, but I think that Liz Lemon is really a subversive character because she embodies Impostor Syndrome. Self-critical people use really melodramatic terms (I'm so STUPID, how could I have done that?) and Liz is what that melodrama describes. She's bad at everything (skills/looks/relatioships) except work. And her mom thinks she's cool.

stepping out of the corner Republican sensationalism has painted us into

2009-10-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

The first thing I heard this morning when my alarm went off was NPR saying that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was kind of a lolwut moment for me. Obama hasn't even been in office for a year, and even for that little amount of time, hasn't done very much. He ran a very emotional campaign, and I think it's resulted in a little confusion. Hope and change are pretty neat things, and it must have been a conscious decision to make him the fun candidate. Like a lot of opinion regarding Barack Obama, I think that hading this prize to him is more about projection than what he's actually done. The rest of the world seems pretty taken with him, and relieved that the US hasn't been permanently poisoned by Bush-brand haterade.

For all the talk about Bush's everyman appeal, I find Barack Obama's no-drama approach to Presidenting to embody common sense in a way I'd never expect out of a national leader. The low-key response to rooting out some potential terrorists has been very impressive, and I just loved how he brushed off the media for the national day of prayer. I don't think he can really fake enthusiasm, or have press-conference tantrums. Also, a little while ago, the DHS came up with an SOP for deciding when to raise or lower the terror-rainbow alert system. Bush didn't have a way to lower it - literally.

I'm not thrilled with Obama, but I think he's engineering his media presence to be as unexciting as possible. If he can succeed in toning the media down, he'll have done something that this country has needed very badly.

But here I am projecting and speculating, almost as badly as a talking head.

Well no kidding

2009-10-08T08:28:00.001-07:00

It turns out that shackling prisoners during childbirth is unconstitutional. Idaho is one of the states where this is practiced, and the ruling came from the 8th circuit, so I don't know how/when this might reach us, but it's sure nice to have a conservative court ruling in favor of women's reproductive freedom. From RHReality Check:

Last week, in Nelson v. Norris, a federal Court of Appeals held for the first time that the U.S. Constitution protects pregnant women in prison from the unnecessary and unsafe practice of shackling during labor and childbirth. Notably, although the American Civil Liberties Union argued the case more than a year ago, the court’s decision comes on the heels of three states (TX, NY, and NM) passing legislation in 2009 to restrict the use of shackles on pregnant inmates. These three join IL, VT, and CA in restricting the practice. Both the outcome and the history of the Nelson case and the recent legislation demonstrate the dramatic shift that has taken place around this issue.

Being a good sick person

2009-10-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

I still am totally fascinated with my brain thing. It's been nearly a year and a half since I had surgery, and most people I meet have no idea what happened to me. I don't have a shaved head or black eye I need to explain away anymore. For a while, I tried to be more vague when it came up that I had ongoing medical issues, but I only ever came up with a more spooky and ominous impression that way. I had a major medical incident which I'm pretty much better from now, even though it completely turned my life upside down - but let's move on to something more interesting. When I saw Rachel Getting Married, I was completely mortified when I recognized Kym's self-absorption in myself. I think it's probably a stage everyone with a huge illness goes through. When your entire world is what medications to take and when, you don't have a lot else to talk about. I have a couple of factors contributing to me being a broken record about my issues - there's the almost died, life changed thing, plus, the technical issues behind it are exactly the kind of thing that tickles my intellectual curiosities.

Both of my younger sisters got engaged to their long-time boyfriends over the past few months, and one of the first things I thought (besides "yay!") was, "Oh thank god -- something exciting is happening to someone in my family and it's not me having a stupid medical problem." I've been grateful to have such a supporting family and set of friends, but being brain surgery lady gets kind of old. Getting a new job where no one knew what happened to me was pretty thrilling - they aren't handicapping my performance with my condition in the backs of their minds. The crowd at Disability Support Services probably has a handle on the etiquitte necessary to have a working relationship knowing about a person's particular difficulties, but I've decided not to really disclose my issues, since it gives me a place not to be Brain Surgery Lady. The mood at DSS is kind of one of don't ask don't tell, where we work hard to let clients keep their privacy in general. I haven't met most of my clients (not that I have a lot), even now that I'm in the classroom providing services.

Rachel at Women's Health News wrote a post about the reception Penelope Trunk has gotten after tweeting something related to her miscarriage: Trunk got a lot of grief about oversharing, and she wrote a great rebuttal about how we do our best to ignore major ~~medical~~ issues women have because they make us uncomfortable. It's even more uncomfortable to have shame heaped upon you for even mentioning your ongoing miscarriage than it is to hear about it. Right on, sister. Miscarriage is often a Big Deal in a woman's life, and everyone tries to ignore it as much as possible. I'm sorry if it's awkward for you to hear about my bizarre medical condition (and I promise you, whatever it was that happened to me really was bizarre). If you had the patience and empathy to deal with other peoples' problems, you would realize that it's not all that bizarre for miscarriage or neurological problems to occur.

Rachel mentions that she has always found Trunk's blog to be off-puttingly self-promoting and sensationalistic. And then once something interesting happens to Trunk, she mentions it, and all of the sensationalism backfires on her. I spent most of my life kind of cultivating an eccentric personality, and all of a sudden it backfires when my neuro-immunity goes bonkers one day. I was weird before, and I'm still strange now. Very soon after I had surgery, one supposed supporter of mine decided to explain away my support for gay rights as a delusional side-effect of my condition. So if I'm going to have a different outlook on things, I have to conform in every other possible way to get anyone to take me seriously.

Terrorism is apparently a poor tool for communicating

2009-09-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

If someone murders an anti-choice activist, it's just not necessary to believe that there's a pro-choice terrorist on a rampage. It's an awful possibility, especially because the victim, Jim Pouillo, was murdered while engaging in a protest against abortion, but I think it's a remote one, especially since he was not the only victim of murder in his town today, and there's really no pattern of this kind of thing happening before. Police have connected a suspect with both Pouillon's murder and the second victim's.

I extend my condolences to the victims and their families. Should there have been a political motive to the killings, it's the responsibility of the pro-choice movement to decisively and immediately stamp that kind of thinking out. Everyone is still shocked and horrified about the murder of Dr. George Tiller, but fighting terrorism with terrorism is not only bad tactics, it's evil.

Jezebel found the response of

Fr. Pavone of Priests for Life told LifeSiteNews.com that he hoped to see "a strong expression of indignation from the pro-abortion community, just like there was a strong expression of indignation form the pro-life community at the killing of Dr. Tiller."

I don't know about Fr. Pavone, but I recall a pretty anemic expression of indignation from anti-choice activists after the assassination of Dr. Tiller.

Ashley Todd set back the cause of Republican martyrs by decades - she had us going for a good 12 hours, but her mistake was unnecessary melodrama and, of course, that backwards B. Also, it's tough to fabricate your own murder, and really a bad idea. I simply don't think that anti-choice manipulation goes that far.

Something smells fishy about this, especially how media reports immediately seized on the victim's history of activism as an implied motive for murder. I don't need to remind anyone about the tendency of media to take the first sensational idea connected with a story and run with it. A second man was killed in the same city on the same day, and there's no word on who he was or what kind of political enemies he had.

To Hell with Skepticism

2009-09-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

When I got sick, I first tried to tell myself that I should just deal, and I may have felt pretty bad, but that happens from time to time, so whatever. The ironic thing is that I was really getting into what hypochondriacs dream of - a life-stopping, sympathy-garnering, ambiguous medical condition. If I was going to go on living, I had to be a little flexible, and to stop going along with the luddite guilt trips about "overmedicated" Americans. I take at least six medications on any given day, and who knows if they're doing exactly what they're proven to do?

What I have just isn't on a label. I was diagnosed with an advanced case of WTF. There are lots of symptoms that I address variously, and I feel pretty good most of the time. The classics like eating healthy food and exercising tend to do what they're supposed to, but sometimes I'm exhausted and I have to choose if I'm going to go for a walk or do the dishes. Or to just eat the damn burger and stop my tummy from growling. I don't always make the right choice, and I try to learn from it when I do the wrong thing. I was holding out against particular drugs because I didn't really think they were necessary (IANAD), but soon enough I was completely nonfunctional and miserable. I had to do something.

Empirical purity be damned, I'm not going to circle down the drain for the sake of principle. There were possibilities I hadn't fully explored, and things were getting ridiculous. I dropped the wishful thinking and coyness about symptoms and laid it all out for the various doctors I see, and we got down to some brainstorming. When insurance balked a little, I laid out the cash in good faith* until they relented. I'd held out as much as my health could afford. I'm young and have a whole life ahead of me where I'd rather avoid disability and pain. Mistakes I make in recovery could be irreversible if we don't get astounding new medical technology within my lifetime. I'd like to say that I can prove that I need to take all these meds, but I don't think I can. Precision is great and all, but I'm happy if I feel better. My life completely destabilized, and I can't afford to pare down on these drugs until I have more stability. In the meantime, I'm trying to cultivate an environment in which I can thrive, and keep things as simple as possible.

My unified theory of what to do when there isn't anything to do is that you need to know when to break your own rules.

This can also be stated as, "All things in moderation." But that's boring.

Sometimes I become obsessed with the temptation of a guilty pleasure, and it's a lot more of a problem for me than eating a Twinkie will be in the long run. So, whatever. Screw purity. I rarely act out of hedonism, and when I do it's usually pretty harmless.

*Do you have any idea how expensive speech therapy is? I didn't, but I went in for an appointment before insurance would approve it, and they ended up retroactively covering the consultation.

Blue Dog Betrayal

2009-09-03T10:46:00.000-07:00

It seemed like a miracle to elect a Democratic representative in the first district of Idaho. The guy who previously held the seat was a disgrace, and his failures were Walt Minnick's success. An Idaho blogger by the blogonym of Mountain Goat has a bone to pick with Minnick's manipulative and dishonest campaign that stood in support of sCHIP on principle. But health care for everyone else? No way! His constituents don't want that kind of socialized craziness! Take it away, MountainGoat!

On Halloween day last year, in an interview with University of Idaho's KUOI radio in Moscow, you scolded your opponent for voting against expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program, saying, incredulously, "Who could be opposed to providing health care to single moms who don't have jobs?"

Bill Sali said we couldn't afford it and voted against it—four times.

You said, "There are some places this country has to invest," and called the votes shortsighted.

Read the whole thing n weep, folks.

Hard-working Idahoans like Tom and Karen sent you to Washington because you gave them hope. Hope that you could and would convince their country to see them as an investment. People of the 1st District had enough of the rigid ideology that told them they weren't worth the price and sent you to represent them instead. They didn't expect to get a more finely honed rigid ideologist. They didn't expect, nor did they deserve to get their lives turned into political footballs—least of all by you.

Yet that is exactly what you've done. You joined the chorus of townhall crazies and fear mongering ideologues who turned Tom and Karen and every other Idahoan who can't afford medical care into political footballs.

Instead of coming home and working to convince Idahoans that they had nothing to fear and much to gain from health care reform (something many of us were prepared to help you do), you and your advisors (with their legendarily acute grasp of messaging) sent out misinformation-laden press-releases playing up the fears of Idahoans using triggers like "socialized medicine," "big government" and "raising taxes."

Naively, I thought that getting an Idahoan into the Democratic majority could give the progressive agenda some kick to it. But those damn dirty blue dogs rolled right over when they saw blood in the water and donations to their re-election funds. I'm disappointed by Obama in a lot of ways, but I may in fact regret my vote for Walk Minnick.

I just wanted to highlight this fantastic post and give it a push, plus add my own frustrated feelings. WTF, Walt? You're not as silly as Sali, but you're about as useful.

Hey, didja hear she was faking?

2009-08-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

I posted about a report of an assault on the WSU campus, and since then there have been two more reports. I not only got two e-mails about how the third report was later recanted, but I also got a text message on my phone. Has some unsafe campus got a guilty conscience?

The cankle default

2009-08-24T17:57:00.001-07:00

It pains me to use the term "cankle," but I had the poor judgement to click on a link to a news article about the triviality of the size of one's ankle. I noticed something interesting in the wording of one paragraph:

According to podiatrists, the average ankle size is about 10 to 11 inches around; men's ankles may be a little larger. The American Podiatric Medical Association does not recognize cankles as a medical problem, but according to Dr. Kathya Zinszer, a physician at Temple University's School of Podiatric Medicine, cankles can be caused by all types of medical issues.

If we're going to keep to a simple gender binary, the "average" ankle being written about is a woman's, and it's the size of a man's ankle that's the tacked-on side note. Well, bare minority of human beings, look who's "average" now.

Amazing, brilliant magazine editor lets up on body-fascism for one photo, is lionized

2009-08-20T15:31:00.000-07:00

Fair warning: every link I'm using in this post has pictures of naked ladies on it.

Via Jezebel, Glamour magazine is making waves with a photo of a naked lady with a tummy. (Maybe NSFW) It's really a lovely photo, and I've never seen anything like it in a women's/fashion mag. The editor's blog entry about all of the glowing praise she's gotten for including the photo is overly-self-congratulatory. Include one photo of a happy naked lady, and we'll forget all about the decades of body-image-assassination that your industry thrives on. She asks rhetorically:

With all the six-packs out there, do you even know what a normal belly looks like anymore—other than the one you see in the mirror?

I'd like to answer that question. I never really knew what a fat woman's body looks like until I had one, which made it a continual disappointment until I wised up. Plus-sized models are carefully arranged so as not to create the rolls of fat that everyone acts like are so unsightly. Sure I've been in locker rooms and stuff, but there's almost no media representation of what actual fat(esque) female bodies look like. The diversity of female bodies is completely steamrolled in media; Things like this really don't need to be a revelation.

Photography projects like Shape of a Mother, Adipositivity, the "normal breasts gallery" were a real shock to me in my early twenties. I really didn't know what stretch marks were. I vividly remember my horror as a teenager when I actually tried out a few yoga poses in the nude, and decided it was thoroughly unerotic.

To conclude: this all pisses me off quite a lot, like when feminists are supposed to fall all over themselves thanking men for understanding that women are people. Stopping active harm is good, but it's not exactly charity.

Public Service Announcement

2009-08-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

I got an email about a reported assault on a woman on WSU's Glen Terrell Mall, and wanted to reproduce some useful information (in a manner I am stealing directly from one Penny Dreadful, via Shakesville):

[WSU Police] remind potential perpetrators of assault to be vigilant [and polite] at all times; don't walk alone; stay in well-lighted areas and to use safe transportation whenever possible.

Anyone with information about the assailant is urged to call WSU Police at 335-8548 or 9-1-1 in an emergency.

This information is released as a service to the WSU Community and in compliance with Clery Act requirements.

The original sign that Penny found is a lot more amusing and to-the-point. The release WSU sent out wasn't all that malleable, but I think it would be perfectly appropriate to hang up copies of it at wazzu.

'Regrettably, due to a number of recent incidents, it is necessary to remind men walking alone through the park not to rob, rape, threaten or assault anyone. Thank you in advance for behaving like decent human beings. Signed, single women who refuse to live in fear'.

You have to admit it's getting better

2009-08-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

When Obama backs off, he really backs off, but I think I need to recognize that I should take what I can get for now. No public option!? This will do the opposite of reducing health care costs in this country, and just get more premium-payers contributing to Aetna (or whoever)'s massive bloat. I wish I knew more about nonprofit health insurance companies/co-ops, but as someone who's paying a massive premium to stay on Group Health's rolls, I know remarkably little. I will say this, though: the people praising Group Health are basically on the money. It doesn't come cheap, but this is American medicine here. I've run into only a few people who complain about GH, but most docs I've been to have been delighted when they found out the entity with which I am insured. I have a lot of half-baked theories as to why I've had such a good experience with them, but it can't hurt that they approve almost anything a doctor orders. When they reject it, they reject it, so I have spent almost no time fighting with them. I've had to show some rather expensive good-faith, but they've been pretty go-along get-along.

Talking about health care is getting extremely old, but it's kind of like looking at a car crash (or, really, the bills from the ER after a car crash).

The major failing in the "dialog" has been almost no serious proposals for reducing costs. And those that I've seen, like a general policy to skip ineffective treatments, have caused Republicans to scream bloody murder.

In other news, I've started working a part-time job at the U of Idaho - I'm training to caption classes for students who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing, and even the training is kind of fun. I recently got serious about a job hunt again, and scored two interviews. One was for this job and the other for one at a local biotech, basically doing the exact things I disliked about my previous job; I don't think I was really in the running for that one, though, and I think I'd have really hated it. This is a completely new direction for me, and takes better advantage of my natural talents.

As it is, I'm working just less than half-time, and I am a gajillion times more productive regarding things like housework when I am working outside the home at least a little. This is a new thing for me - I don't think I've had a part-time job while not doing anything else since I was 19 - and I'm going to take advantage of the fact that I can pretty much afford it. (I think the new "We'll live on love" is "We'll live on loans.").

Satire begins to Resemble Stenography

2009-08-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

I went to see District 9 last night and went in with kind of a bad attitude, but came out having seen a movie I liked. I was prepared for the worst after the first twenty minutes of dull, earnest satire. There was no way I could sit through two hours of that with the volume set at 11. Somehow, Daniel Engber of Slate was disappointed that the political agenda of the movie never went anywhere, but even after reading his entire article, and especially after seeing the movie, I have no idea why. After the overly-political setup, the movie completely veers off into a narrative about a dude stuck behind enemy lines. Every review's comparison of Wikus Van der Merwe to Michael Scott is perfect.

Wikus is ambitious, desperate for everyone to love him, and basically a pretty nice guy. But he's incompetent. There's a really strong George W. vibe with Wikus. He seems to think he should go ahead and try to do this humanitarian intervention thing, since he really wants things to work out and to be a part of that, and maybe he'll make a few friends along the way. As he bungles his way through evicting the residents of the District 9 slum, he accidentally steals a key piece of alien technology that infects him and begins a process that begins metamorphosizing his biology into that of the "prawn." The process is revolting, painful, and scary.

Between prawn and man Wikus loses some of his illusions about his mission at MNU, and allies with an alien named Christopher Johnson that may be able to a) get the prawns off of this godawful planet and b) reverse Wikus' prawnification process.

This isn't because Wikus is a good person. He's basically acting out of self-interest, and giving a hand up to the prawns in the process is a lucky coincidence. If his life didn't depend on working with Christopher, there's no indication that he'd be able to pull off the crazy moves it took to further the cause of the prawn. Essentially, The Man is what's keeping the prawn down, and people and prawn alike needed this coincidence to save them all. If the prawn technology had been completely lost, MNU would have gone merrily on its way to genocide, and the prawns would have missed their chance at fixing this whole disaster.

If you go, be aware that it's incredibly gory and long. Plus, the prawn language sounds to me a lot like burping or vomiting.

You got a better idea?

2009-07-29T15:31:00.000-07:00

Woo! Progress on health reform! How much of a difference it will make remains to be seen, but unlike those of us whose insurance denied to fund the use of our iron lungs, I'm not holding my breath until I find out.

I got a press release from Walt Minnick today that included the following remarks:

Like most Americans and like the President, I believe that health care reform must reduce costs, rely on the private sector, prevent restrictions based on age or employment status or preconditions, and must ensure coverage for all Americans. However, this bill simply will not get us there.

Mr. Minnick, you're the congressman here - you have some kind of power to change things, and just saying "nope, not good enough" is a little half-assed in my mind. I thought the Democratic majority was supposed to do away with the "party of no" nonsense. But I was naive.

In my estimation, just about anything would be a step up from what we've got. As an uninsurable Idahoan, I'll take what I can get. The above list of things Minnick wants out of a health plan aren't necessarily feasible or desirable. I don't care what happens with "the private sector," since we've been relying on that to get the same level of care as anyone else at twice the cost. We don't owe them anything (except our huge medical debts).

Making an exception

2009-07-15T18:00:00.000-07:00

At the feministing community blog, an author "rmanning" has an infuriating post about her difficulty obtaining a hysterectomy as a woman under the age of 21, even though she's got UTERINE CANCER. It just goes to show that regulating reproductive health decisions tends to be a "one-size-fits-many" thing that leaves some people totally screwed.

I thought it was kind of precious when Andrew Sullivan was astounded that people have late-term abortions for REASONS. He seemed to think he was the only person to ever figure this out. And he's thinking of compiling stories into a book! Never mind how exploitative it is for an outspoken anti-choice pundit to use other people's tragedies to publicly congratulte himself for being able to change his mind. Also, the book has been written many times.

I used to be a little apathetic about reproductive health regulations, but the bizarre and horrible things that can happen to people continually amaze me and have made it clear that such regulation can't be enacted humanely. rmanning mentions text in state law that explicitly says that doctors shouldn't perform hysterectomies on women younger than 21 so they won't make decisions they will later regret. She prudently doesn't mention which state she's contending with, but I suspect that working through the specifics would reveal that the reluctant doctors are being hypersensitive about things that are really more guidelines than laws. And anyway, how could an effort to preserve fertility apply to her killer uterus? I'm no doctor, but it's kind of hard to conceive when you've died of an operable and treatable cancer.

I'm sure that if she was 9, she could get this operation. But it's squickier to the doctors she's run into to yank reproductive organs out of a woman who is nearing what would otherwise be her childbearing years.

I was pretty well convinced that I wouldn't ever have kids when I was 18, 19 and 20, but it turns out I've changed my mind in the interim.

I only say this to illustrate the fact that an 18-year-old can make decisions about her reproductive capacities that she will later regret. But that takes living to "later," which is the primary purpose of her medical care.

Convenience food triage

2009-07-07T16:24:00.000-07:00

I like fancy-schmancy food, but I also like junk food. I really like it. Day-glo cheese powder still feels like a fun treat no matter how much I eat it. Both Jezebel and Amanda Marcotte have addressed the issue of how people eat when they're alone, and I think it's a fun topic, but seems incredibly obvious to me. I've never developed a good cooking/cleaning habit, and have frequently opted to go grab some fast food instead of digging out my kitchen. Being hungry tends to make me panic: "I'll never get dinner done before I starve to death!" Knowing that I have this tendency, I've taken a triage approach to feeding myself. If I would otherwise eat a Big Mac for lunch, I figure it's cheaper and probably better for me/the environment to make some convenience food at home, regardless of how junk-foody and excessivley-packaged it is. When I was trying to shake a bad going out for lunch habit, I turned to frozen dinners to bring to work for lunch, and got hooked on the Ethnic Gourmet palak paneer. I load up whenever it's on sale at the co-op. It's all wrapped in plastic, but it's less packaging than you get at a drive-through window. It's also significantly less expensive. It may be yuppier than Lean Cuisine, but I eat it and I like it. Plus, who can argue with brown rice and spinach? My other lazy-food crutch is the avocado. Smoosh it up with some salsa, eat on chips, and there's lunch! It's also just good with salt and a spoon (but it doesn't quite add up to a whole meal). People always warn you about the high fat content and calorie-density in avocados, but they usually aren't taking two drugs that suppress appetite.

I know in my heart of cheap hearts that making the palak paneer myself would be healthier and less expensive and tastier (and more fun), but that's when I have to go back to the triage concept. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good has filled my belly with a lot of cheeseburgers over the years. Oddly, this has become a much more-functional operating principle since I've lost a lot of appetite and not had to contend with the hunger panic. I usually have to remind myself that I need to eat three meals a day, and I don't have my animal instincts to tell me to put that thing in my mouth NOW. If I am not likely to eat anything of substance during the day, I might as well put on some mac and cheese and knock down a few hundred calories so when I do get hungry in the evening I don't turn to quick, yummy things like popcorn and cookies.

Don't worry that I'm dying of a vitamin deficiency: I'm overstating the severity of my food-stupidity to make a point/joke.

YOUR body - be afraid of it!

2009-06-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

If all media were like women's magazines, it would be as confusing as these two headlines caught on CNN's homepage today:

If Kermie doesn't think I'm cool, I'll kill myself

2009-06-11T10:09:00.000-07:00

I've got a post brewing on the subject of moral panics, and figured this terrible early-90s anti-drug film would be a good lead-in.

The Pill Thrills

2009-06-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

Today is "The Pill Kills Women" Day, which is so absurd I can't even believe it, and I wanted to add one of my favorite one-liners I've ever come up with to the chorus of "WTF?" I've always said that the birth control pill is my favorite recreational drug. The very small risk of dangerous complications really outweighs the extremely high risk of unwanted pregnancy, to me (as a non-smoker). I have effused to everyone I know about how much I love the particular pill I take, so if you're looking for that perfect pill, I'd be happy to pass along my advice/experience. I have taken a couple different kinds over the years, and stuck with this one for nearly a decade now.

Regret

2009-06-05T08:20:00.000-07:00

A lot of pro-life rhetoric is spent on warning women that they may regret abortion for their entire lives. I'm sure this is at least sometimes true, but it is not always true. The scare-tactics about abortion decreasing fertility don't have anything to do with killing a particular embryo - just that it might be harder to raise another one in the future. This might seem like an easy argument that avoids a few abortions, but it only works on principles that affect the would-be mother (and father). I think you can regret an abortion for entirely selfish reasons. For that matter, when you have to make a decision between only bad options, I think you're proably going to regret it no matter what you do. I don't think "regret" is necessarily tied to guilt.

My malpractice is your problem

2009-06-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

I ran across a strange comment thread at Kevin, MD's blog about whether a plaintiff in a medical malpractice case deserves any right to privacy regarding the particular complaint. The comments very aggressively argue that they do not. One comment really jumped out at me:

I also agree that once you file that malpractice lawsuit you are saying two (maybe three) things.

1) I think I was wronged
2) I think I deserve some cash
3) I will fight PUBLICLY for my rights

You can guarantee that the lawsuit will be registered as a complaint against the physician and freely searchable for all to see that it occurred. It should NEVER be allowed for a plaintiff in a malpractice lawsuit to be anonymous for this reason. They have to assume a “profile risk” that is commensurate with the physician’s, in my opinion.

If the patient actually was wronged, he or she still deserves their medical privacy. Probably even if they weren't. Patients seek doctors (who sometimes make mistakes) because they are human beings and therefore need medical care. Just because some doctor botched your procedure/care, you shouldn't have to publicly disclose information that is usually protected. The post above assumes that a malpractice suit is generally filed in bad faith. Also, the poster is clearly more worried about the black mark on a physician's record than the possibility that the plaintiff was wronged and the court will rightly decide the case. Most people aren't equipped to make a better decision about a malpractice case than the original judge and jury, or even the quack who got himself charged with malpractice.

I understand that cases are sometimes wrongly decided and people not at fault are punished, but I don't think that a chain of events caused by being alive should be grounds for a patient to lose privacy rights (such rights are something people agree to afford each other - it's not like we can blame fate for a policy of disclosing medical information. People make policies, but they don't get to decide whether they'll ever get sick.). In any case, who the patient is really isn't important to the question of whether they were harmed. Malpractice is malpractice even when it's visited upon someone who has a personal beef with their physician. The commenter's reasoning only applies to those who harass physicians for no good goddamn reason. It's not outside the realm of possibility that Joe Q. Patient hates a doctor's guts and will stop at nothing to see the doctor's career ruined, If a significant number of people had the inclination AND wealth to harass a physician with lawsuits such that it runs their career into the ground, I would be extremely surprised. It's rare that anyone, mean or not, has that kind of wealth, or a Punisher-like desire to ruin someone who also happens to be a doctor. The number of contingencies adds up to make a pretty small population. The reason that all medical facts need to be connected with a person's name in a malpractice suit is some number of people who A) have lots and lots of money and B) hate someone enough that they are willing to sacrifice that money and their time, plus C) the hated person is a doctor.

It also creates a disincentive for victims of malpractice regarding embarassing conditions to seek redress. So, specialize in the treatment of sexually-transmitted diseases and you don't have to worry about lawsuits.

I can't see it adding up to a good effect.

Bipartisan agreement on rape

2009-06-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

Via Andrew Sullivan, Playboy magazine knows what unites the red and the blue Americas.

"Obama promised us the dream of post-partisanship—a cuckoo land where party affiliation and factional animosity were forgotten. Turn on cable news or open any newspaper, however, and you’ll quickly discover that the dream has yet to materialize. But there is a way to reach across the aisle without letting principles fall by the wayside. We speak, naturally, of the hate-fuck. We may despise everything these [conservative] women represent, but goddammit they’re hot. Let the healing begin,"

I can't even conceive of how anyone thinks the term "hate-fuck" euphemises anything. It does pretty handily illustrate the concept of rape not being about sex but power. Those conservative ladies think they can oppose my political views? I'll show them that they're still nothing but women, even in their fancy pantsuits.

Hey, it's all in good fun?

Bloodthirsty me

2009-05-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

In general, I think the death penalty is stupid. That psycho who ate his murder victim's brain is creepy, but he's just one terrible man that everyone avoids anyway. When it comes to extremely influential war criminals (ahem Dick Cheney) I think the death penalty is good policy. Cheney's PR junket has been exactly my worst nightmare of what would happen when he got out of office in the event he weren't put on Death Row somewhere. Everyone's pooh-poohing the way he insisted lies about Iraq be tortured out of detainees in Guantanamo, and humoring his delusions about protecting the country by terrorizing a few guys the military picked up in Afghanistan. He does not belong in polite society. He's still powerful enough that he can fuck up American policy and thinking from beyond the grave that is the ex-vice-presidency.

Frankly, I think Osama bin Laden has done all he can for Al Qaeda, and him walking freely around in the US would be less dangerous to the American people than leaving the Bush administration officials to die rich and happy.

Orchestrating and completely blowing bloody, unnecessary wars should be reason for a person to feel physically threatened by his constituency. Instead, he gets to talk up his "hard decisions" on national television, while wearing a sharp suit that cost more than my car. He had to make "hard decisions" all right, but that doesn't mean he made the right ones. They're "hard" because the consequences are great, and the risk of error is extraordinarily high.

The Obama-shouldn't-have-shaken-Hugo-Chaves' hand scandal seemed pretty ridiculous - and it was - but I can sympathize, even though I don't know what wingnuts think he's done to deserve the world's cold shoulder. I don't think Cheney deserves the cold shoulder, I think he deserves to be put to death. Or, everyone else deserves him meeting that fate. Residual respect for the office that he stole will keep him empowered to influence the national dialog as long as he's alive.

Winning hearts and minds, losing medical coverage

2009-05-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

Judy Berman has a post on Broadsheet summarizing the fight to keep "gender identity disorder" from being listed in the newest version of the DSM. The title of her article makes clear what opponents of GIS' listing in the DSM are upset about. The article is called "Are transgender people mentally ill?" gidreform.com's title bar reads "because our identities are not disordered," which I can certainly support in spirit, but not recoginizing gender dysmorphia as a pathology has already had nasty consequences for people needing sexual reassignment surgery in Manitoba, in that the surgery is categorized as being "cosmetic" and therefore ineligble for government subsidy.

If gender dysmorphia is a non-problem, it doesn't need to be treated with expensive surgery. Categorizing transexuals as suffering a pathology should be morally meaningless. If a transexual individual needs surgery to correct a mismatch between their gender and their sex, they have a problem with their original body that can be treated with surgery/medication/counseling - as far as I can tell, what advocates for sexual diversity are objecting to with GIS' listing is the ablist stigma that comes with mental illness. In the real world where transsexuals are subjected to violence and discrimination, it's probably asking a little too much to strike a blow against ablism and homophobia all in one fell swoop. SRS is not a one-size-fits-all solution to gender dysmorphia; plenty of transsexual individuals don't want to physically modify their bodies, so surgery is not indicated in every case. This detail would be crucial to GIS' listing in the DSM

When straight-and-narrow types want to tell transsexuals that they are disordered and should go to hell/the doctor for it, it takes some guts and nuance to say that re-education doesn't "work," but in many situations, gender reassignment does treat the suffering/pathology. This is where the comparison to delisting homosexuality in the 70s departs from the situation with gender identity disorder and the DSM. Homosexuality doesn't need to be/can't be treated with anything whatsoever. Transsexuals who pursue sexual reassignment surgery are meeting physical needs that cissexuals don't have.

You can never be too careful

2009-05-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, my younger sister was telling me that she was looking into getting the HPV vaccine, and said I should too. I was pretty proud of myself when I resisted saying, "Oh, but I'm married, " (not that I suspect anything of Andy or think he has an adulterous bone in his body - no pun intended) because we all know that you don't plan on getting cheated on, so if your lover brings home an STD you assume you don't need protection from, you're getting twice the raw deal: broken trust and some kind of infection that could hurt you pretty bad down the road.

If I'm going to do it, I should hurry up, since in about a month I'll be beyond the age range the FDA has approved the vaccine for (9-26) and I doubt insurance will cover it for off-label use.

I've spent enough/too much time with doctors lately, and even my GP only thinks a pap is necessary every few years once you're pretty comfortably monogamous.

A screed about people who do not breed

2009-05-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

Feministing detailed the Supreme Court's new ruling that found pregnancy pay discrimination to be legal until the date it was found illegal, (That sounds dumb, but it seems like a pretty straightforward ruling to me.) It sparked some surprisingly anti-mother comments.

Commenter Alice says:

This isn't discrimination against women, it's discrimination against people who become pregnant.* Isn't the idea that those two groups are the same thing something we're fighting against?!

Yes, amongst others like paying women less money for their work.

The replies go back and forth over whether discrimination against women who go through pregnancy is discrimination against women in general, and the very same Alice says

If you oppose infringing the rights of the childfree, then presumably you would oppose ant[i]-discrimination efforts such as this, as mandatory maternity benefits make it illegal to negotiate such benefits away. It consists of the government imposing itself between parties of a voluntary exchange and dictating what they are and are not allowed to agree to. No such similar thing happens to the childbearing in the converse situation. There is no loss of rights, only the loss of social privileging of decisions that society has deemed more valid than others.

The beneficiary of this right is the child who, as a human being, is deserving of the same parental care that anyone who chooses not to have children presumably enjoyed in childhood.

I can appreciate and understand not wanting to have children or go through a pregnancy. I do not, though, think that affording children and their relatives the right not to be punished for their very existence creates a social privilege that those who do not go through pregnancy are denied. I think Bitch Ph.D. said it best when she said,

children are not "goods." They are--are you sitting down? They are human beings. Actual members of society.

I think of that post whenever I hear childfree whinging about being denied a privilege parents are provided. You may be working very hard to practice impeccable birth control for your entire life, but you are still a member of the human race that reproduces itself. Sorry. Just like we have a social obligation to spread costs of healthcare among our fellows, it isn't fair to push the costs of raising children onto the people who do it and still reap the benefits of a growing population's social security program. There are choices you can make to avoid some of the responsibilities/burdens of childrearing (don't get pregnant if you don't want to give birth or care for a child), but the phenomenon of pregnancy and child-bearing isn't going to go away because you avoid doing it yourself.

Men do not get pregnant and therefore never have to contend with pregnancy discrimination in their own pay and career paths, but they benefit from the efforts women expend toward raising their children. They cannot negotiate away maternity leave because they can't get it. Living as a childfree woman doesn't entitle one to a bargaining chip that no one else can use. We see through the wage gap that men use the bargaining chip of not being at risk of pregnancy to negotiate higher salaries, but the conditions in which salaries are negotiated are something we choose as a society according to what we want and what we need. A huge proportion of people want to have children, and everyone needs someone to do it, and we supposedly choose not to punish women for doing the necessary work of maternity.

Not even the world's tiniest violin...

2009-05-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

I don't really think I can work up any sympathy for this guy after his homicidal rampage.

"You probably think I'm a monster."
Former U.S. soldier Steven Green has been convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl.

That's what FBI agents said former U.S. soldier Steven Green told them nearly three years ago about accusations that he had raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killed her and her family.
Green was found guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court in Paducah of the crimes and could face the death penalty.

Not only did he rape and kill a 14-year-old girl plus her family, he burned the girl's body to destroy the evidence of his crime. I can't even express my disgust.

2009-05-08T14:03:00.000-07:00

When the robots rise up and rebel against those who enslaved them

2009-05-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

I'm hardly a luddite, but I don't know about letting a robot take care of my feminine hygiene.

The unbearable tastiness of eating

2009-05-04T06:26:00.000-07:00

I heard an interview with David Kessler MD, former FDA commissioner, author of the new book The End of Overeating, last night, and it was really bizarre. The man is clearly disgusted by the fact that people get pleasure out of eating and therefore eat a lot of junk food. I would pull a quote or two, but that's a little tough with radio programs. The way he described the neurobiological picture of appetite and desire for food captured what for me has become the most irritating trend in science writing; the "neural circuitry" as separate from self. I'll paraphrase his description of what happens when you see or think of something yummy: your idiotic brain tells you to eat it. It's not you that wants it; it's your brain. If I have a memory of ice cream being delicious, the memory of it giving me pleasure is surely going to be reflected in the "neural circuitry" of my brain. That doesn't make the pleasure any less real or important to my experience of eating. Eating is much more emotionally and experientially complex than simply meeting needs for energy and nutrients. Kessler seems to think this is a problem. I'm glad, and yeah, not a religious eater of healthy food - if I need to eat several times a day, I'd like it to be pleasant. This isn't some kind of creepy mind control, it's a natural desire for tasty food that is reflected in a physical process in my brain. The things I do, feel, want, think, arise from physical processes in my brain. Is that such a bad thing? If we're going to get all excited about "the neuroscience behind" everything, we might as well appreciate and accept the unconscious processes in our brains that contribute to making a personality. Having experience with these processes being manipulated and out-and-out breaking down, I think I have a unique and useful perspective on the issue. From a BoingBoing post about the book:

Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will stimulate that diner's brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the come-on offered by Lay's Potato Chips -- "Betcha can't eat just one" -- is scientifically accurate. And the food industry manipulates this neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than they should or even want, Kessler found...

I think this is a pretty disingenuous thing to write in a book nominally about overeating (which isn't about liking food, exactly, but appetite). The implication of this statement is that if you eat sugar and salt and fat, your hunger will never feel sated. I haven't read the book, but the press about it implies that what this means is that eating food and liking it creates a horrible and unforgettable memory of enjoying it.

The food industry faces a unique problem in our growth-dependent economy: there's only so much people can eat. In that respect, it's not in their interest to pack as many calories as they can into a food product that will have little effect on satiety. They're not trying to sell us calories, they're trying to sell us bags of Doritos.

If I'm still hungry after I finish one bag of Doritos (and if they're light and calorically insubstantial, I am likely to be) I might buy another and eat it too. A good example would probably be diet soda, which they can sell at the same price as regular, but get me to drink a lot more of. I drink quite a lot, myself, but would get a tummy ache if I drank two regular Cokes a day. The problem with making up the nutritional defecit in volume is that there are lots of low-cal foods out there we could be burning through at an enormous rate, but we don't like them very much and in the case of fresh fruit and vegetables, they don't offer much in the way of branding.

I like rice cakes*, but I hardly see the point. I like them, but not enough to justify buying them and getting crumbs all over myself for so little energy payoff. We like fatty, salty, and sugary foods. Convincing me I want to buy and eat more calories than I need or really want is not so hard with truly yummy foods. With other goods, merchants are only limited in their sales by how much of their product people want - which they work a lot to manipulate - or can afford. I have x number pairs of shoes, but I could stand to have more. Like food marketers exploit our natural desire for rich foods, manufacturers of shoes manipulate my desire to look pretty and prestigious. Both of these desires are real, but they don't really tie directly in to the purchase of these goods. My collection of shoes doesn't include any that I like currently, but buying more won't have much effect on my standing in society. Having a nice pair that I liked would, however, make me feel like I looked better. These tactics work with foods, too, so a winemaker can say that you're living the good life when you drink his wine in an attempt to get you to buy it, but Kessler seems more offended by the appeals to taste than any other method of convincing you to put food in your mouth. If these baser motivations bother Kessler so much, you'd think he'd be worried a little about Axe brand hygiene products, the safety of which are dubious, that market themselves by appealing to young men's desire for sex. If Kessler is motivated purely out of concern for the health of poor widdow Americans that like french fries, the moral crusade he's on is equally applicable to the Axe products. We're prisoners to our desire for junk food and sex! How dare these companies exploit our weaknesses like this?!

*How did this iconic diet food lose its place in the pantry of the dieter? When was the last time you saw someone eating one?

Oh my god I'm hungry - time for breakfast.

Everyone's always blaming the free market for its failures, but joke's on them - it doesn't exist!

2009-04-30T16:26:00.001-07:00

Consumerist has been pushing the Arbitration Fairness Act, which addresses the problem of mandatory arbitration clauses effectively voiding the very contracts and in which they are situated (except that part about mandatory arbitration), as well as the contract's relation to the laws of the United States, where most contracts contain these clauses.

Today they tell the story of a guy who lost his job when his prosthetic leg started giving him blisters and he started using crutches instead. Bullshit, right? He says that using crutches had hardly any impact on his job performance, but that he was told over and over that he had to use his painful prosthetic. Under the ADA, an employer is required to reasonably accomodate a worker's disability, and it sounds quite reasonable to me that a guy use his crutches when other options for mobility cause him pain and infection.

The running joke at Consumerist all week as they've been highlighting this act is, "Don't blame the free market for this - you don't have to sign that contract." This holds some water regarding purchases, but is totally bankrupt when it applies to getting or keeping a job with a discriminatory employer. My favorite so far has been:

To those saying that this is an example of the failure of free markets, no one has ever been forced to sign an MBA. Just as capital is free to move in a free market, so is labor. The OP could have taken his labor elsewhere or not signed a contract with an MBA. Now I am in no way in favor of MBA's, but this is not a failure of the free market because we, as laborers, have the ability to take our labor elsewhere if we don't like the policies of our employers.

What I don't get is why free-market capitalists get so upset when anyone impugns the honor of the free market. Who the hell cares about your poor widdow free market when it doesn't exist? Physically moving to where you can get work with a reasonable contract is a cost that a laborer can't necessarily bear. When supply moves to accommodate demand, there's some friction. This is perfectly obvious to anyone who lives in the real world, but apparently irrelevant to dogmatic free-market capitalists who think their tautology has relevance to anyone at all. If the market were perfectly efficient and free, then it would be perfectly efficient and free. Well, okay, but let's talk about the market in which this guy is trying to find a job - where MBA clauses are ubiquetous and good luck getting that negotiated out of your employment contract.

Screw the incrementalism

2009-04-28T18:03:00.000-07:00

The obviously calculated position that Democratic politicians take in opposing gay marriage but favoring civil unions just isn't getting anyone anywhere. I'll admit that I can sometimes be too staid and unambitious in my hopes for political progress, but I think Iowa and Maine and New Hampshire have shown the folly of concentrating on the boring stops along the way to progress. Who can get excited enough about civil unions to advocate for them anyway? Apparently hardly anyone. (Graphic lifted from Andrew Sullivan)

If they're so smart, why do they fall for that?

2009-04-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

Medical-type-people will claim that the Ambien pen they're using doesn't influence their prescribing habits, but that's a pretty hard claim to believe when your doctor's office is so full of the plastic crap with logos all over it.

When I first got to know the workings of a lab, and had to think about inventories and what kind of microtubes I wanted to use, I was a little horrified at the stupid gimmicks supply and instrumentation companies use to advertise their wares. Naively, I thought, "Psh, we scientists aren't dumb enough to fall for that - we buy based on performance." And then, "If it didn't work, they wouldn't sink so much money into marketing."

The best lesson in the potency of branding I've learned lately is looking up brands of bath products I've long associated with wholesomeness with the Environmental Working Group's database of product safety ratings. The most counterintuitive thing I found was that Neutrogena's body oil with fragrance in it is rated as safer than the fragrance-free type. WTF. I actually like the somewhat patchouli-ish scent of the scented kind and would use it if it didn't make me sneeze all day. Also, a lot of my personal associations between brands and safety or wholesomeness were WAY off. Apparently I'm courting some pretty nasty reproductive cancers with my daily routine. My philosophy on the stuff is that if it's a cleansing product, its very purpose is to wash away, so if the few moments it spends on my skin don't bother me, I'm pretty much in the clear. Anything meant to stick to me, like a moisturizer or makeup or deodorant, I'm a bit pickier about. I tend to figure that if it doesn't bug my sensitive skin, it's pretty inert and boring.

So go ahead and terrify yourself with that search engine. Knock yourself out. It's kind of like the weird masochistic thrill everyone's been getting from the cognitive dissonance their admiration for Susan Boyle provokes in them. We knew we were superficial, but that we were this bad?

For a while in 2008, I was mildly obsessed with finding an eye cream that would reduce the puffiness around my eyes that I think will be a lifelong side-effect of the surgery I had last year. It was a fool's errand, but now I know what not to buy. For my money, nothing actually reduces puffiness except an ice pack, but the creams will make dark circles look better after a while. It was only after spending huge amounts of time scouring the shelves of drugstores that I realized how extensive the product-placement in 30 Rock actually is. I don't care if it's sarcastic - it's still product placement and kind of gross. I did think it was truly funny when Jenna got fat and Liz said of the fat-hatred directed at her, "It's like those Dove commercials never even happened."

In recognition of denying the bill of good we're constantly buying, I wanted to highlight Kevin, MD's take on doctors accepting promotional items but hiding the brands emblazoned on them. I agree that it's plain old corruption to take the perks but pretend to be above them. You hear that, Tina Fey? I'm talking to you - your "joking" product placement is no more dignified than the normal kind.

Yes, "We" can

2009-04-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan objects to the idea that our government isn't able to deal with more than one problem at once, but I think it's less a problem that the government can't work on enforcing the rule of law at the same time it tries to pick up the pieces of the economy, and more that the media likes one big story that bleeds. And we can hardly expect lawmakers to do anything without a camera recording their heroism, can we?

In the name of Science

2009-04-22T09:14:00.000-07:00

In an effort to stay topical, I'm going to write an Earth Day post about how I was constantly appalled at how much plastic I threw away when I worked in molecular biology. Absolutely everything needs to be treated with bizarre processes to remove any traces of nucleic acids or RNases and DNases, and then properly disposed of after use. It gets really scary when you start on high-throughput processes and have to use a dozen boxes of tips in a couple of hours.

I know I've seen the worst of it because all I did for the last five years was PCR (aka polymerase chain reaction), which is incredibly easy to contaminate and tough if not impossible to sort out once you do get contamination in equipment or workspaces.

In preparation for this post, I impotently Googled around for some info about what people are doing to make high-tech work like this more sustainable, but terrifyingly enough, there's not much out there. It's not proving a negative to say I can't find something on Google, but it's a bit eerie considering how much Googling I do on any given day.

My tendency toward guilt also reared its head when I had surgery 6 hours away and considered the environmental impact of that adventure. I had a million family members there with me (Thank you everyone!), some who flew and some caravanned with Andy and I over to Seattle from Moscow. Between all the sterilization necessary to practice medicine or perform surgery, I don't know why I haven't heard more about this. And it turns out that there are a number of organizations devoted to making hospitals more sustainable. I'm also curious about the environmental impact of manufacturing all the supplies and drugs. We know that drugs people take pass into the supply of water from which we drink, and I've got a pharmacy of leftover pills that I don't know how to dispose of. (But if you're in the mood for Decadron, and trust me, you're not, I can help you out! Just kidding)

Private industry trumps government FAIL

2009-04-19T17:14:00.001-07:00

I was listening to a report on NPR tonight where they let Newt Gingrich whinge about using statistical sampling methods to determine population demographics for the census. His problem is that they're not counting every single head but using time-tested methods of estimation. The reporter says that it really wouldn't be worth sending a census worker to every single doorstop (or very feasible), and Newt replies that private companies like FedEx go to every single address in the nation.

Okay, well, so? If FedEx could keep a satisfied customer base without delivering all of the packages it's paid to, wouldn't market forces obligate them to let a few packages slip through the cracks? Newt can't make a satisfying argument against good sampling methods, so he plays on fears about non-white minorities as an increasing proportion of the American population. The Republican argument against efficient and accurate sampling methods clearly says, "But by God, if you miss one white family, you'll mischaracterize the entire nation!"

I'm pretty sure that Newt's been through high school, and that he damn well knows he's being disingenuous. The wide-eyed Republican who doesn't trust your high-falutin' expertise is getting pretty old, and totally transparent.

McDonald's eaters probably have kitchens in their houses

2009-04-18T17:57:00.000-07:00

I have to disagree with Mark Bittman. I've lately been considering ponying up and getting cable because I'd like to be able to switch on the TV and see a cooking show once in a while. My appetite has been M.I.A. for months, so eating and cooking have become a major chore. For someone who spends almost all of her time at home or the grocery store, I really don't cook or eat much. I was very often inspired by the Food Network's cooking shows when I watched them. I think I could crack this mild anorexia by pushing more ideas about food into my head so asparagus on the brain turns into asparagus on my plate.

In actuality, the reduced appetite is probably related to some of the medication I take, but not every one of my problems comes from a pill or can be solved by one.

Bittman sez:

When you watch most celebrity chefs go to work on TV it is a) baffling and intimidating, and b) a charade. Baffling and intimidating because nearly every ingredient is usually prepared in advance, and what isn’t is selected so that the chef can show off his (almost never “her”) knife skills, which are bound to intimidate nearly all of us who can never aspire (and why would we, really?) to chopping an onion with our eyes closed; his ability to make food fly in the air while cooking it; and/or his skill at presentation, which has absolutely nothing to do with taste.

Watching cooking shows has always activated my "I could do that" desire to meet a challenge. I am never going to forget when I realized that you can make macaroons instead of buying them at a store. Learning to cook is very empowering. I don't believe people when they say they can't cook - all it is is taking foods that taste good, putting them together and making it warm.

I don't actually believe that, but I say it because it's kind of funny and true enough to actually encourage people not to be intimidated. I think the reason I am good at cooking is that I turn food-related principles over in my mind long enough to be creative with them. What's sort of funny about that is how my thinking converges with classic recipes seemingly only influenced by my brilliance at combining flavors. I also really enjoy eating, and have long wondered whether my body rewards me with more/better endorphins than most people get for eating delicious things. I think this for a couple of reasons: when I am sick and eat a good meal, most of my symptoms abate for a little while immediately afterward. Also, my sense of satiety is not very keen so I frequently overeat. Now that my appetite has taken a dive, neither of these things are true and I eat a lot of convenience food so I can get the chore done as quickly as possible.

(Ironically enough, I had to step away here to eat a beautiful dinner my husband made - salad nicoise - when I was feeling too lazy to cook myself.)

Bittman writes from a perspective that appears to assume that most Americans do not cook basically any of the food they eat or have any familiarity with a kitchen or basic cooking techniques. I imagine that this editorial voice overstates the ignorance of American eaters, but stats I've seen on the subject aren't very complimentary. Fast and other prepared foods make up a large portion of the American diet, but everyone has had to dice an onion now and then, so they can judge the relative real labor that goes into one of Rachael Ray's putatively 30-minute meals.

In other words, I'm just not buying that most people are shocked and horrified to find that cooking works differently in their kitchen than in a television studio. I also think that most food writing is appallingly condescending (so it's not just Mark Bittman who's on notice here).

Back on the personal note - if anyone is concerned, I'd like to say that I've had a shakeup (no pun intended) in my medication routine and am seeing my appetite return.

A Girl and her Video Games

2009-04-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

I am terrible at video games. Ever since the advent of the third dimension, I've been hopeless. Give me a Sega Genesis and I'm gold, but the xbox is too much for me. My husband will play any game until he wins it, so I've spent a lot of time watching him play video games. Some days, I'm contended and entertained playing second fiddle like that. I've followed the plots of lots of games he's played, but I've given up trying to play myself since when you suck at games all you get is 30 seconds of being shot and then waiting for the thing to reload. It's demoralizing. I did get a Wii, hoping that its differences would make for games that I would have the ability to play, but I still struggle a little with Super Mario Galaxy.

It's interesting to consider this aspect of myself through a feminist lens, since tech and games are a world where women are often excluded. I'm not used to knowing how well I fit a stereotype, but with this one, it's pretty clear. It kind of feels like an interest in games would be a natural outgrowth of my general interest in science and technology, but here I am with my girl games, watching my spouse kill all the aliens.

There are some games that I can play and enjoy (this is a list that would very quickly be fingered as a list of games girls like). I like:

World of Goo
Katamari Damacy
No More Heroes
The Sims
Portal
The whole Soul Caliber series
The Burnout series

The rest of them feel like work to me. You'd think my period of unemployment* and stint as an invalid** would have bored me enough to put in some practice and learn to enjoy some more games, but even the ones I can handle I find to be exhausting.

*I have a feeling that this part is coming to a close, thank God.
** My health has been mostly cooperative since about September, but things have been shaken up (no pun intended) in the past few weeks. To clarify, I consider being stable on medications to be "cooperative." Back on the med-go-round I go.

You want some representation to go along with your taxation?

2009-04-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

Well, why not elect a few representatives, then?

Our president isn't a dog person

2009-04-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

If he really were, he wouldn't have put the puppy off until after he became President. Watching the video, his body language pretty clearly doesn't express excitement or even comfort - more like, "You're cute but please don't get mud on my new pants." He reminds me of myself when I'm confronted with a baby - they're cute, sure, but what am I supposed to do with it? Guess I'll just keep my hands in my pockets and admire from afar...

Good "Gosh those Obama girls sure are cute" moment, but not really a video for cuteoverload.