Month: April 2013

Gosnell and Abortion, Part 3 of 3

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In the first post, I introduced the theme that pro-choice journalists are unconsciously avoiding directly covering the Gosnell case because it would cause cognitive dissonance and provided the first example: the Gosnell case would reveal just how liberal and out-of-touch the abortion status quo is in this country. In the second post I got to the heart of the issue: the extreme laws on abortion make it impossible to distinguish between abortion and infanticide, leading not just Gosnell but also pro-choice leaders (including President Obama) to openly call for infanticide. Gosnell’s problem: he followed through on the logic.

There’s one last myth that cannot survive the Gosnell story, and in some ways its the hardest for the pro-choice lobby to accept but also the most important to understanding the pro-life perspective. So here goes.

3. Abortion is not good for women 

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Gosnell and Abortion, Part 2 of 3

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Yesterday I wrote the first in a series of 3 posts discussing why the mainstream media has been reluctant to cover the Kermit Gosnell case. Rather than suggest that there’s some kind of conspiracy or willful deception, my belief is that journalists (who are overwhelmingly pro-choice) are simply unable to confront a case that threatens to upend the misconceptions and doublethink required to support the status quo of abortion in America. For example, most people do not realize how radical the current laws are. The vast majority of abortions are for birth control. They are elective. And, while late term abortions are rare, they are effectively unregulated. Only in the most extreme circumstances–where a doctor injures or kills a pregnant woman–is there any really legal danger to the abortionist.

But there’s a simpler and much more dangerous truth that the Gosnell case would threaten to drag into the limelight. Before I introduce it, however, I ought to include a warning that I will be quoting from some very graphic accounts of abortion. There are no photos or videos or audio, and my source is an abortion doctor who remains adamantly pro-choice to this day and was writing in defense of her career, but that doesn’t make it any easier to read. Having thus warned you, let’s get right to the simple reality:

2. Abortion is a violent way of killing human beings 

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Austrian Economist: Income Inequality Matters

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I’ve been slow to get onto the income inequality bandwagon, but I try hard to let new information shape my beliefs, and since watching Richard Wilkinson’s TED talk on the issue I’ve started to change my opinion. And then along comes this interesting piece from self-described Austrian economist Roger Koppl hammering the point home: income inequality matters. (Austrian economists are the libertarian guys, by the way.)

2013-04-17 Income Inequality

I think Koppl makes good arguments, but I’m not holding my breath for the American right to take the lead on the issue any time soon. Momenutm can be a terrible thing, and in this case doubly-so. The rather uninformed, populist vision of income inequality from the American left will not be supplanted any time soon, and the knee-jerk antipathy of those on the right to the entire topic isn’t going away either.

Google Puts Traditional ISPs On Notice

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Hothardware has a great piece about Google fiber and the future of the Internet. Google Fiber, for those who missed it, is the Google initiative to roll out their own internet service in one lucky American city. In the end, they picked Kansas City, and they’ve been rolling out gigabit Internet there. (That’s a lot faster than current braodband.) They aren’t stopping there, however, and have recently announced that Austin is going to be the next city to get the Google treatment.

2013-04-17 Google Fiber

Obviously this is good news for everyone (competitors in Kansas City dropped prices to try and compete, and AT&T is racing to roll out a gigabit service of their own in Austin to stay afloat). The fact that Google is flush with cash to afford infrastructure expansion means that this threat won’t go away, and the fact that they are charging for their service means it’s more than a side-project.

But the real excitement isn’t just cheaper and faster Internet. It’s that dramatically faster speeds will mean a qualitatively different experience. The Hothardware piece mentions video conferencing (but in hi-def and without the constant stuttering), but then wisely points out that the really exciting use of truly high-speed Internet is the use nobody has thought of yet.

I don’t know how long it will take for this revolution to reach where I live (Virginia), but it can’t come fast enough.

Super High-Speed Cameras Capture Snowflakes in Freefall

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Using a special camera that captures images in 1-40,000th of a second (vs. about 1-200th for normal cameras), scientists have captured images of snowflakes as they fall, revealing fascinating images quite unlike what we’re used to seeing.

2013-04-17 Snowflakes

My favorite thing about these images is that you can see the three-dimensional structure of some of the flakes. I caught the story from a short article on ScienceMag.org, but the University of Utah also has a gallery.

Gosnell and Abortion, Part 1 of 3

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Less than a week after Kirsten Powers’ USA Today piece, the concerted pro-life effort to get the Gosnell trial the media attention it tragically deserves has succeeded. Sort of.

There are a lot of articles being written about Gosnell, but the vast majority are focusing on the coverage of the trial, not the trial. To be fair, some of these pieces delve into the grim details. Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic pointed out that in addition to dead babies, the story included: “The Exploited Women. The racism. The numerous governmental failures.” And yet Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff still thinks this is a “local crime” story, at least as far as her Twitter feed is concerned.

2013-04-16 Sarah Kliff Tweet

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones concurs, dismissing the pro-life outcry as “working the refs” and “a hustle”. The Daily Caller even covered an attempt to delete Kermit Gosnell’s Wikipedia page because it was just a “local multiple-murder story in Pennsylvania.” (The attempt failed.) According to Drum, the lack of coverage doesn’t even need an explanation. Why wasn’t it covered? “Beats me. I’ve often wondered just what it is that causes some local crime stories to become media sensations and others to molder in obscurity.” Just one of those things, right?

Friedersdorf, also pro-choice but possessed of some journalistic integrity, tried a little harder and came up with 14 theories. The most interesting comes near the end of the list:

13. Horrific as It Is, This Case Doesn’t Speak to Anything Larger About Abortion.

Is Friedersdorf claiming that it was horrific enough to be covered, but that was cancelled out because it says nothing about abortion? Try that logic out on other horrific stories: “Yeah, we were going to cover a school shooting, but then we realized it wasn’t related to abortion so we packed up and went home.” It sticks out on the list because it doesn’t even answer the question. Or make any kind of sense at all.

The reality is that the Gosnell story isn’t ignored because it says nothing about abortion, but because it says a lot about abortion. Friedersdorf had previously dismissed the idea that “Pro-Choice Journalists Are Willfully Ignoring the Story to Avoid Giving an Advantage to Pro-Lifers” (theory #9 on his list), but that’s not how cognitive biases work. Their entire function is to pre-empt the pain of cognitive dissonance by filtering out the uncomfortable evidence before you’re aware of it. They lead people to do and say irrational things like, I don’t know, propound entirely senseless theories just because they are reassuring. Pro-choice journalists (a close synonym for just “journalists”) aren’t willfully ignoring the story, but they were definitely ignoring it, and now that they can’t do that they are mostly changing the subject by going meta.

The Gosnell case isn’t threatening because it’s intrinsically pro-life,but it’s definitely kryptonite to the pro-choice status quo. Starting today and continuing to posts on Thursday and Friday, I’ll do a run-down on how the Gosnell story is a clear and present danger to the myths and doublethink necessary to preserve America’s abortion status quo.

1. America’s Abortion Laws Are Very Extreme 

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Self-Perception and Beauty

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I’ve seen this story on my Facebook news feed for the last day or two, but I just watched it. It was fantastic.

I can’t really describe it without spoiling it, so I won’t try. But I like what it says about beauty. I think our conversations on the topic are often pinned between two extremes: either the pursuit of a very particular and artificial kind of beauty or a rebellion against thinking that beauty should even matter at all, especially for women.

One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is voices. No one seems to think that it’s shallow or superficial to recognize beauty in a human voice, and yet it’s just as much a product of random genetics and superficial body structure as visual beauty. Why is that? I think partially it’s because we know that a beautiful voice is a combination of what you’re lucky enough to be born with, but also of training and effort you take to improving it. We also recognize intuitively that there are wide variety of voices that are all beautiful in their own ways.

But there’s something even deeper. When you see a video or a photo of someone and try to assess whether or not they are beautiful, you’re only seeing a tiny fraction of what I think makes up visual beauty. You’re not seeing motion (not in real 3d, with depth and context), and you’re not seeing live interaction. When you hear a song, however, you’re actually getting a lot of the experience of audio beauty. So our concept of audio beauty is actually pretty robust, but our concept of visual beauty is weirdly warped.

The emphasis on photos and videos as the standard of beauty means that we’re asking men and especially women to conform to a standard that absolutely doesn’t exist. I mean, this is before we even get to the topic of weight and body-image: trying to live “up” to the beauty of a photo or video means trying to be a beautiful picture instead of a beautiful person. It’s impossible, wasteful, and tragic.

Rackspace vs. The Patent Troll

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Encouraging news: Rackspace has responded to a 500% increase in their legal bills by deciding to go after one of the most notorious patent trolls around (Parallel Iron). Looks like the villagers have had enough and it’s time for the pitchforks and torches.

2013-04-16 Patent Troll Sign

Alas, it’s not actually that dramatic. These are court cases, after all, but Rackspace won a major victory against another patent troll just last week, so maybe they’re on a roll. Even earlier, Newegg famously lived up to their “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” approach to patent trolls when they crushed patent troll Soverain Software over shopping-cart patents.

(And if you have no idea what a “patent troll” is or why anyone should care, This American Life recently rebroadcast their 2011 story on them called When Patents Attack. Check it out.)