Month: October 2013

The Oatmeal Takes On Columbus Day (and Wins)

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2013-10-10 Bartolome de las Casas

When I was in high school, some well-meaning liberal fellow students went around tearing down flyers for Columbus Day as a protest. (Why were there flyers in the first place? I can’t remember.) I viewed this effort with disdain. One of the more prominent of the students had tried to seriously argue that heroin (the drug) was sexist because it was hijacking the word heroine (a female hero). It was awkward to watch our English teacher explain that the words aren’t even spelled the same.

That pretty much set my overall approach to complaints about atrocities from the colonial era. It’s not that I disagree that they exist. Far from it. My annoyance is that the complaints come from a place of lazy complacence. In the first place, none of the people I’ve heard maligning Columbus and other explorers for exploiting the Americas has seriously suggested giving the land back or in any way inconveniencing themselves to make amends whatsoever. In the second place, the complainers demonstrate such a total lack of moral sophistication that I cannot believe their concern is in any sense earnest. For example, they can’t seem to tell the difference between unintended tragedy (most of the fatalities from the introduction of new diseases) and intentional evil (like the Trail of Tears). The numbers are bigger for disease deaths, so that gets a lot of play, when in reality that’s a pretty poor example of human evil. In other words: attacking Columbus (or other colonialists and explorers) comes across as nothing but cheap self-righteousness of people best described as “harmlessly impotent” rather than “ethical”. So, when I saw The Oatmeal was tackling Columbus Day, my suspicions were high.

I was wrong.

The comic starts out predictably enough (the same frustrating conflation of genuine atrocity and inevitable epidemiology), but towards the end takes an incredibly surprising turn that completely won me over. As Matthew Inman writes, “History is full of terrible people and terrible things, so instead of casting a shadow where there is already darkness, I’d much prefer to cast a light.”

And then he does. And it’s incredible. Read the whole thing to find out more about that light.

Michael Yon Photos and Article on Modern Artillery

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2013-10-10 Spitting Cobra

As you can tell, this article has some incredible photographs. It’s an older article–from back in 2010–but I hadn’t seen it until now. It’s worth reading not only for the excellent images (there are a ton), but also because it’s such an informative piece of writing about modern artillery. Yon opens with “Artillery is called “The King of Battle.”  When it comes to the delivery of force, probably nothing outside of nuclear weapons can outmatch the sustained delivery of extreme brutality,” and then it just gets better from there.

Upworthy Stories are Not So Great

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2013-10-09 Upworthy

The left-wing slant of the web’s fastest-growing media company is definitely not hard to detect, but I’m a little surprised that Upworthy’s Wikipedia entry leads off with: “Upworthy is a left-wing website.” That first paragraph ends with: “It is dedicated to publicizing progressive narratives.” Well, OK. I don’t have to bother trying to prove that point, I guess.

Here’s what bothers me about Upworthy: they are tackling a lot of issues that should be universal with a specific partisan slant. Most of the Upworthy stories I’ve seen have been about responses to bullying. I have disagreed with them (as I’ve described), but I’ve also really appreciated that it’s a site dedicated to raising important issues and also that it goes for a positive approach rather than tearing down the opposition.

But there’s something deeply and profoundly wrong about trying to politicize everything. The story that prompted this response is about a young 11-year old kids response to bullying. The headline: This Kid Was Bullied A LOT. He Could Have Told His Teacher Or His Principal. He Had Bigger Plans.

2013-10-09 Cain Smith

So what were his “bigger plans”? What did it look like when he “he stood up and did something about it.” He gave a speech to local politicians and asked them to do something about it. 

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Chris Brown, Porn, Rape, and Feminism

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2013-10-09 Chris Brown

This is a fascinating perspective on the infamous Chris Brown. It turns out that Chris, at age 8, had already watched enough porn that he was “hot to trot” and (according to his own account) had sex for the first time. The girl in question was 14 or 15 which, as Olivia Cole (the author) points out, makes the encounter a rape. Cole then says she knows other men who have recounted similar stories, and then drops this pretty profound question:

We know some of the behavioral signals that occur when girls have been raped. Depression, promiscuity, unexplained anger, anxiety. These are words we use when we describe the ways victims behave. It’s interesting that I have seen these same symptoms in young boys—alongside me in class when I was a child, in boyfriends as I got older, in men beside me on the bus in Chicago—yet no one looks at male anger and male promiscuity as symptoms of anything. These are just classic male behaviors. “Boys will be boys,” and boys sleep around. Boys have bad tempers. Right?

Wrong.

What if we have been normalizing male rape victims’ symptoms for centuries?

What if, indeed. The one thing Cole doesn’t mention, that I think is important, is the role of pornography in this story. Would a young, 8-year old boy have been looking for sex without already having imbibed a dangerous amount of porn? Probably not. So I don’t think this is a problem that has been going on “for centuries.” It could be a new problem, however, and one that will only get worse as more and more young men have their minds and souls warped by early exposure to readily accessible porn.

Fiona and Terryl Givens Discuss Uchtdorf in NYT

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2013-10-09 Gen Conf

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has two General Conferences every year (one in spring and one in fall) where the leadership of the Church address the members in a series of 2-hours sessions that are broadcast live around most of the world. In the most recent conference (just last week) Dieter F. Uchtdorf spoke with compassion and honesty about the struggles many Mormons have with doubts about their faith. Uchtdorf is the Second Counselor in the Church’s governing Presidency (sort of like a vice-vice-president), and his conciliatory tone has created a big reaction among the membership of the Church.

This NYT article discusses the impact of Uchtdorf’s words and quotes several Mormon scholars, including my parents Terryl and Fiona. The text of the speech, called “Come, Join Us” is available as here (or watch or listen to it here.)

My own impression: I like Uchtdorf’s comments quite a lot. I think they lend significant credibility (though no official support, of course) to my parents’ efforts at The Temple and Observatory Group, which is a non-profit focused on addressing the doubts and concerns of Mormons. I think it’s a mistake to see any grand change in policy, however. (Dallin H. Oaks’ rather hard-hitting No Other Gods, which was given the next day, makes that pretty clear.)

The tone reflects a response to the expectations and concerns of members, but there wasn’t a single word that was new doctrine. Many people have told me in the past that the Mormonism described by me or by my parents is one they would love, but not one they recognize from their own upbringing or congregation. Uchtdorf’s “talk” (that’s Mormon for “sermon”, basically) makes it much more prominent, but it’s always been there.

The Tea Party Fights The Man

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2013-10-08 Rand Paul

The Tea Party does not have a lot of friends in Washington. Conventional wisdom–the sort of thing you hear on NPR, for example–is that the GOP has redistricted itself to death. By creating solid red districts, they’ve turned over power to the loonies on the fringe. Complementary theories include the notion that the Tea Party consists of a bunch of delusional fools who are shoveling their hard earned life-savings to snake oil selling PACs who have no interest in making real changes, but just want to make a buck off of gullible fools.

Both of these narratives tap into deep political stereotypes, but neither actually make much sense. The problem with the gerrymandering explanation is that it’s the opposite of how gerrymandering actually works. Not that I’m defending redistricting games, but the essence of gerrymandering is called “packing and cracking“, and it means you pack your opposition into dense, homogeneous districts but you crack (spread out) your own supporters as much as possible. Think about it for a minute, if you’ve got 5 districts and the overall population is basically 50/50 Democrat and Republican, do you (as a Republican) want to put all of your voters in one dark red district and leave the Democrats to have 4 very slightly blue districts? No: that’s how you lose an election, not how you win it. The idea that the GOP created a bunch of ultra-conservative districts doesn’t make any sense.

Meanwhile, the idea of the huckster political operative taking grandma and grandpa’s money to go off on a doomed crusade to end Obamacare taps nicely into images of televangelist faith healers (i.e. negative stereotypes of the religious right) and the influential What’s the Matter With Kansas?, but all it really does is expose liberal arrogance. The idea is that conservatives are just too darn stupid to know what’s good for them (i.e. liberal policies) when the reality is that conservatives have different values than liberals. For example, conservatives believe that passing on staggering amounts of debt to their children is morally reprehensible and are willing to sacrifice their own interests to stop it.

But is this just spin? Nope, it turns out there are some pretty hard numbers behind this. I got tipped off to that fact when a Facebook friend posted this Washington Times opinion piece: Tea Party Loosens K Street’s Stranglehold on the GOP. The thesis of the article is pretty simple: before the Tea Party, Republican candidates depended on cash from big business and lobbyists to run their campaigns. But a proliferation of ideological PACs provided an alternative source of funds separate from the interests of big business. Carney, who wrote the piece, concludes that Tea Party candidates are therefore getting their money from small business owners and retirees: individuals.

I don’t think the article backs this up solidly, but the same friend who posted it followed it up with this: 

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New Same-Sex Marriage Study: Canada Data

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The controversial social scientist Mark Regnerus has a recent post on a new study in the Review of Economics of the Household. The study “reveals that the children of gay and lesbian couples are only about 65 percent as likely to have graduated from high school as the children of married, opposite-sex couples. And gender matters, too: girls are more apt to struggle than boys, with daughters of gay parents displaying dramatically low graduation rates.

Unlike US-based studies, this one evaluates a 20 percent sample of the Canadian census, where same-sex couples have had access to all taxation and government benefits since 1997 and to marriage since 2005.”

Check out the full article. And, as was the case with Regnerus’ studies, let’s not be hasty. As one journalist wrote, “But before we all go get our stones, pitchforks, and kerosene, may I suggest an alternative? Trust science. Don’t bury this study. Embrace it. The evidence Regnerus collected can help all of us rethink our ideas about sexuality and marriage. It can enlighten the right as well as the left.”

Indeed.

Pornography, Children, Vaccines, and Libertarianism

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I used to hang out on Slashdot a lot. (That’s a popular news aggregation site for techies.) I remember one signature from a user that said something like “the root password for the Constitution is ‘think of the children’.” The idea was that you could circumvent constitutional protections on free speech by just citing “the children”.

There are two problems with that. The first is the idea that the baseline for free speech is “anything goes”. Freedom of speech has never been absolute, and it’s incredibly frustrating to live in a society where people seem to believe that the primary purpose of one of our most cherished rights is to make porn readily accessible. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Voltaire had in mind.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire didn't actually say this, and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't agree with it as applied to porn either.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” – Voltaire didn’t actually say this, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t agree with it as applied to porn either.

The second is the assumption that “think of the children” is always an unfounded appeal to hysteria. This is far from true, and two recent articles from the Daily Mail make that painfully clear.

In the first Martin Daubney–former editor of softcore porn magazine Loaded–talks about the research that has convinced him “online porn is the most pernicious threat facing children today.” The gist of it is that new research demonstrates the addictive nature of online porn and so, according to Daubney,

If porn does have the insidious power to be addictive, then letting our children consume it freely via the internet is like leaving heroin lying around the house, or handing out vodka at the school gates.

The second describes how a young boy started viewing porn at age 10 and soon developed an uncontrollable addiction to it. Like any addict, he began searching for harder and harder stuff, until at the age of 13 he was found guilty of accessing child porn and, practically a child himself, he found himself on the Sex Offender Registry. 

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Hebrew in the Book of Mormon

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The European academic publisher E.J. Brill recently released the multivolume Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics. What’s interesting about this set is that it features two articles by Mormon scholar John Tvedtnes, both of which are about the Book of Mormon:

“Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon”

“Hebrew Names in the Book of Mormon”

The articles are brief and provide a reading list of entirely LDS resources, including BYU Studies, Ensign, and publications by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS).

Check them out.