Society

Should all medical procedures be safe?

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George Weigel has an excellent piece over at First Things, On Really Not Getting it.  In it, Weigel discusses media and abortion advocate’s disgust at having any safety regulations on abortion procedures, responds to a WaPo piece that claims, after Gosnell, the evidence of a need for any such safety regulations “is weak,” and makes a few other great points surrounding the debate.

It’s all good (please read it!!), but one of my favorite parts is this:

Marcus noted that, irrespective of what was happening in state capitols, a 1973 Gallup Poll “found 64 percent agreeing ‘that the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.’” And here is another of the canards of Those Who Really Don’t Get It.  The abortion decision is most frequently made, not by a woman and “her physician,” but by a frightened woman talking with a “counselor” in a clinic run by an agency like Planned Parenthood, which has a deep financial interest in abortion. That frightened woman, who has often been abandoned by an irresponsible man, is then remanded to an abortion “provider” who is no more “her physician” than he or she is “her hairdresser.”

Bam.  Here’s the link again, so you can check the whole thing out.

abortion_on_demand
& without sanitary conditions!

Race Relations: Global Edition

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RealClearWorld has a recent post that should be instructive to Americans in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case and the racism claims that accompanied it. Though racism certainly exists in America (I’m willing to bet it will always exist everywhere to some extent), to obsessively focus of America’s past and present sins while ignoring the rest of the world is problematic. Here are a few points the RCW article makes:

  • A large number of Hungarian parents will not allow their children to be friends with Jews (46%), Africans (58%), or Roma/Gypsies (68%).
  • Italy’s first black government minister was openly compared to an orangutan by a senator and had bananas thrown at her by a citizen.
  • Dutch politicians exploit racial tensions to advance a particularly anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant agenda.
  • Mexican navy cadets were attacked by some 300 “soccer fans” on a Polish beach.
  • The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party caught 7% of the Greek popular vote in June.
  • The National Front caught nearly 18% of the French vote in the April 2012 first-round presidential elections.
  • The Freedom Party in the Netherlands caused the government to collapse in April 2012.
  • Extremist parties were part of government coalitions in Italy, Switzerland, Austria until recently.
  • Similar parties are gaining momentum in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland and were met with electoral success in the 2009 European Parliament elections in Hungary, the UK, etc.

As the article concludes, “Perhaps those who continue to obsess over American race relations should try reading global news every once in a while.”

Should Women Be Allowed to Go to College? Feminists Unsure

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2013-08-21 o-alma-mater

This headline is much more provocative than the blog post that inspired it (O, Alma Mater), so let me explain why I think it’s warranted. In the post, Anne-Marie Maginnis responds to the idea that women who earn Ivy League degrees and choose to be stay-at-home moms are wasting their degrees. She cites a recent article in The Guardian:

Any Harvard Law School degree obtained by a woman who then chooses not to use it in any sort of professional capacity throughout most of her life is a wasted opportunity. That degree could have gone to a woman who does want to spend her entire life using it to advance the cause of women—or others in need of advancement—not simply advancing the lives of her own family at home, which is a noble cause, but not one requiring an elite degree.

The quote is ostensibly about advanced degrees at elite schools (not “college”) and specifically about stay-at-home moms (not “women”), but the truly alarming thing about the argument–which Maginnis exposes immediately–is that it assumes that women aren’t worth educating for their own sake. If you take it seriously, this brand of feminism says that a woman’s value–her right to be educated–is dependent on her usefulness to the capitalist machine. So much for liberalism, in pretty much every sense of the word.

Little Boys Like Guns

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Don’t be afraid. It’s just a poptart. Also, your son is not a sociopath.

Time recently published a compelling article on how zero tolerance policies and teacher and parent aversion to action-packed boy play is hindering the social, verbal and academic (and possibly other) development of little boys.

At the same time that more and more research has shown that creative play is essential to childhood development, policies have been decreasing the amount of acceptable pretend play.  From redirecting superhero play (but not princess play for girls) to draconian policies that suspend or expel very young children for merely making a gun with their hands or other harmless object, we are robbing boys of essential growth.

If you’re one of those parents who doesn’t allow toy guns at home, maybe the next time you think “Oh no! Are my boys too violent?” because they want to play cops and robbers you should instead rethink “Oh yes! My boys are so creative.”

NSA: We can’t because we can’t

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documents

The NSA hires a lot of smart people, and smart people tend to think they’re smarter than other people because they’re smarter than other people. So it’s not surprising that when Kevin Collier of the Daily Dot asked the NSA under the Freedom of Information Act for his “file,” he was answered that because the “adversaries” of the security of the nation would inevitably monitor any “public request” for data, and the compilation of any and all such requests could result in “grave damage” to national security, they were unable to honor his request.

Catch that?

The NSA has concocted a defensible rationale for why they can’t honor FIA requests for personal data, based upon the fact of their own existence and the existence of their surveillance programs. They are saying, in essence, “we cannot exchange information because the exchange of information alerts enemies which will use the exchange of information to do harm.” The implicit premise is that their information gathering is necessary and justified in the first place, which of course begs the question. We are forced to wonder, if the information didn’t exist, would we be in more or less danger from the enemies of national security? It amounts to a rhetorical tautology, and it’s nonsense.

These are the people we’ve put in charge of our military, our money and our future, folks. Take a good look.

Mad Skillz

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Over at the American Enterprise Institute, James Pethokoukis has an excellent write-up on a new study by Steven Kaplan (University of Chicago Booth School of Business) and Joshua Rauh (Stanford Graduate School of Business) on income inequality and the “1% vs. 99%” war cry. The findings:

  • The increase in pay at the highest income levels has been broad-based, ranging from public and private company executives to pro athletes.[ref]”[C]omputers and advances in information technology may complement skilled labor and substitute for unskilled labor. This seems likely to provide part, or even much, of the explanation for the increase in pay of professional athletes (technology increases their marginal product by allowing them to reach more consumers), Wall Street investors (technology allows them to acquire information and trade large amounts more easily) and executives, as well as the surge in technology entrepreneurs in the Forbes 400″ (Steven N. Kaplan, Joshua Rauh, “It’s the Market: The Broad-Based Rise in the Return to Top Talent,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27:3. Summer 2013: 53).[/ref]
  • Instead of drastically rising, the afer-tax, after-transfer income share of the top 1% is about the same as it was in 1987-1988, 1996, and 2001 (most inequality alarmists cite pre-tax, pre-transfer income).
  • Top earners come less from inherited wealth (which dropped from 60 to 32% between 1982 and 2011) and more from modest households, access to education (the share of those with no college dropped from 17 to 5 percent, with college grads rising from 77 to 87% between ’82 and ’11), and placing their efforts in tech-based industries.

“We believe,” write Kaplan and Rauh,

that the US evidence on income and wealth shares for the top 1 percent is most consistent with a “superstar”-style explanation rooted in the importance of scale and skill-biased technological change. In particular, we interpret the fact that the top 1 percent is spread broadly across a variety of occupations as most consistent with an important role for skill-biased technological change and increased scale. These facts are less consistent with an argument that the gains to the top 1 percent are rooted in greater managerial power or changes in social norms about what managers should earn.[ref]Ibid.: 36.[/ref]

Though globalization “may have contributed to greater scale,” it “cannot drive the increase in inequality at the top levels given the breadth of the phenomenon across the occupations we study.”[ref]Ibid.: 53.[/ref] Funny enough, increasing globalization has actually decreased global inequality over the last few decades.[ref]See Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Maxim Pinkovskiy, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” VoxEU.org (Jan. 22, 2010); Sala-i-Martin, Pinkovskiy, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” NBER Working Paper 15433 (Oct. 2009).[/ref]

Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Maxim Pinkovskiy, 2010

So, maybe the superrich aren’t all Gordon Gekkos. Maybe they’ve just got mad skillz in the globalized economy.

Malice Towards None: Orson Scott Card, Gay Marriage, and the “Ender’s Game” Film Controversy, Part Two

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Note: This is the second part of this essay. Part one can be found by clicking here.

“It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren’t for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn’t fight with honor… I fought to win.”
–Ender’s Game

“Somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn’t do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood [them] well enough.”
—Ender’s Game

Perhaps one of the most troubling things to me about the whole Ender’s Game boycott is the chill and fear it creates not only for those who, on personal, religious or ethical grounds, oppose gay marriage, but also to those who choose to work and associate with them. In these scenarios, all tainted parties are punished, even those who happen to be supportive with the gay rights movement.  It’s a modern McCarthyism, creating a feeling that all people who do not pass that sociopolitical litmus test must be shunned and, if you do not shun them as well, you’re suspect as well. Thus, in the case Ender’s Game, Lionsgate, Harrison Ford, Gavin Hood, Asa Butterfield, and the rest of the cast and crew of the film would be punished by this kind of attitude, even though they have all come out staunchly in the favor of gay rights, and insist the story of Ender’s Game is a story about compassion and empathy, so has nothing to do with Card’s stance on gay marriage.

Fortunately, a lot of the more level headed members of the liberal community see the implications of such actions. Juliet Lapados at the New York Times, even though she hardly agrees with Card’s more extreme views, called out this sort of action:

Generally, boycotts are used to pressure companies or governments to end objectionable activities; consider the boycott of Chick-fil-A to protest the chain’s financial support of antigay organizations. What Geeks Out has in mind is closer to blacklisting. The group wants to “send a clear and serious message to Card and those that do business with his brand of antigay activism — whatever he’s selling, we’re not buying.” This isn’t about stopping the dissemination of antigay sentiments; it’s about isolating Mr. Card and shaming his business partners, thus cutting into their profits.

If Mr. Card belongs in quarantine, who’s next?

Read more

Science of Smiling

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2013-08-15 Smiling

This is an interesting article about the science behind smiling, and most importantly the beneficial effects of smiling:

Smiling stimulates our brain’s reward mechanisms in a way that even chocolate, a well-regarded pleasure-inducer, cannot match.

The article even includes directions on how to practice your smile. That sounds off-putting initially (to me, at least), but it’s interesting that it’s specifically teaching you to practice your genuine smile. Fake smiles, apparently, just don’t give the same benefit.

Honest Company vs. Honest Toddler

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2013-08-14 Honest Toddler

Something that sucks about the US legal system: sometimes it doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong. It matters who is funded and who is not. I hope that’s not how the feud between The Honest Toddler (which is a hilarious and independent mom blog) and The Honest Company (which is backed by celebrity Jessica Alba and the guy behind LegalZoom) ends up. Read about it at the aptly named blog: People I Want to Punch in the Throat, but here’s the gist:

The Honest Company appears to think that any company with the word “Honest” in the title infringes on their trademark. (Except for Honest Tea, of course, because that’s owned by Coca-Cola and The Honest Company only picks on companies smaller than itself.)

So far Honest Toddler has refused to give in, and I hope she never does and that she ends up kicking ass.