Naïveté

I am so sick of this debate!

2008-10-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

You know what? Screw it. I say we overturn Roe v. Wade and let the states decide if they want to outlaw abortion.

Of course, the mother has the right to self-defense in every state. So that means that if there is a risk to her, she has the right to defend herself against an attacker. Now, one can probably say that the basic, healthy pregnancy does not involve risk to the mother; of course, healthy can become unhealthy very quickly, but I digress. Let's just look at the factors that can increase the risk to the mother, and say that if she had such a factor, she would have the right to abort, because she COULD be in danger, even if she wasn't already. After all, I can shoot someone coming at me with a gun, even if they haven't already shot at me, if I am threatened by them.

So that means that any increased risk would be a reason for the woman to feel threatened. Increased risks like having ever had cancer or an abnormal PAP, having diabetes or a family history of it, pulmonary, thyroid, heart, or kidney disease; sickle cell anemia, a blood clotting disorder, epilepsy... Or women who have had more than 3 live births, or women who need to take category C, D, or X drugs, or women who have a previous infant who weighed more than 10 pounds, or women with any kind of uterine or cervical abnormality...

Since once could EASILY say a C-section or very long labor poses a risk to the mother, anything that might cause a large baby, difficulty giving birth, or fetal distress would be a threat to the mother. Plus there's smoking and drug use, which can complicate pregnancies for the mother as well as the fetus. In fact, anyone who drinks in early pregnancy is at risk for the fetus having fetal distress, which means that they could wind up having to have a C-section, which means they are at risk. Plus anyone under 20 and over 35 is high-risk, and anyone who has a BMI less than 18.5 or greater than 30, they're high-risk, too. All of those women are at risk for serious complications and would be defending themselves by preventing a birth.

So yes, let the states ban abortion. They are perfectly free to ban it for very healthy women between age 20 and 35, with a BMI between 18.6 and 29.9, a normal uterus and cervix, no family history of diabetes or childbirth complications, less than 4 births (all of which infants were less than 10 pounds, delivered vaginally without serious tearing, none of which were past 42 weeks and none of which involved preeclampsia or post partum depression), have not had any trauma to the pelvis or abdomen in the pregnancy, have not been exposed to and agree to avoid dangerous chemicals, and who agree to abstain from drugs or alcohol. Meanwhile you can't actually restrict any of their other rights, as long as what they're doing is legal for adults their age, because that would be discrimination considering that there is no way to remove the fetus without killing it.

Good luck with that. I'm sure the five women who have had absolutely no risk to themselves in their pregnancy will be very sad to learn that they will now have to go drink a few beers if they want an abortion.

Palin and Abortion: A Part of the Debate I Just Don't Get

2008-09-05T08:49:00.000-07:00

I don't understand Sarah Palin. I really don't. Because she claims she is pro-woman, and yet, she wishes to deny women the right to defend themselves from an attacker.

What am I talking about? Of course, she supports gun ownership. Anyone who can shoot a person attacking them, they can defend themselves.

And yet, she says: "I am pro-life. With the exception of a doctor's determination that the mother's life would end if the pregnancy continued."

Yes. If the mother's life would end. If it would END. Not, mind you, if she would wind up brain-dead or on a ventilator. Not, mind you, if she was left permanently and debilitatingly physically injured. No, the woman's life has to END.

Which means that if a man stabs me in the arm, well, I can shoot him, because he's threatening my health and safety. But if I'm pregnant and I discover I have cancer, and if I wait nine months, I'll live but I will have to get a double masectomy that I could avoid by earlier treatment, I can't be rid of the being that is threatening my health and safety. In fact, I could kill a man-- or even a child, really, it's still self defense-- because he cut off my breasts but I can't kill the child inside me that is preventing me from being able to get treatment.

Or if I have a condition that means I can't go under anesthesia or that I am allergic to an epidural, and I have placenta previa and need a C-section, well, I would survive a C-section without anesthesia, but at what cost?

Or maybe I am severely bipolar, and I wind up hurting myself or someone else because to take my medications would result in the death of my fetus?

I do understand when people argue that Roe vs. Wade should not include social and economic concerns to the woman's well-being. I get that, I really do. I don't agree with it because I believe the baby's soul enters the baby much later in pregnancy, but I do understand the concern, and would probably feel the same way if I believed the baby got their soul earlier.

But you can't limit it to life or death. There are so many things that are actual, real, physical or mental concerns (and by mental I mean psychiatric) that would mean a woman's safety and sometimes the safety of those around her would be in danger if she continued the pregnancy. Even if her life wouldn't end, she could suffer permanent disability, or kill someone else.

As long as there is a self-defense charge, a woman must have the right to abort if her health is in danger, even if her life is not. To do otherwise is to deny women the right to protect themselves from harm. We allow people to use the self-defense charge when they kill someone even if the person was psychotic, not aware they were harming someone, or did so on accident, so the argument that a baby is not being malevolent does not hold up. If the woman's health or safety is in any danger, it is self defense and must be legal. And if you think otherwise, you really can't call yourself pro-woman.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Fails

2008-08-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we will focus all our energies on the lowest level of needs that are not met. For example, if we aren't breathing, we will not care about anything else but breathing again.

The thing is, though, besides breathing, homeostasis and excretion, it doesn't really work that way in certain people. Once we get past the lower levels, we will always care about the highest level we've achieved even if we start to fail on lower levels, but we're supposed to still put the lower levels first. For example, we will care about having friends even if our health is very bad and we lack health security, but we're still supposed to put our health first.

And yet, so many people today don't function like that. I know a girl who lacks security of health, of resources, and of property and at times even the physiological need for food. And yet she still cares more about self-esteem, respect of others, and spontaneity. She's focused at the top of the pyramid when she should be focused at the bottom.

Anorexics lack food and homeostasis and still care more about self esteem and respect of others. Many, many people today forgo sleep for security of employment and of property, or even just for friends. Many others forgo sex and sexual intimacy for confidence and respect of others; indeed, respect and achievement in out culture surpass almost all other needs. Why? Are we a culture of the mentally unbalanced? What drives us to forgo our basic needs for higher needs? If one actually acheives self-actualization and enlightenment, I can understand losing the need for all but the most basic needs, and of those they could even lose the need for sex. But the people I spoke of above, they aren't Buddhist monks. They're ordinary people who get their priorities screwed up. How does a person get to that point? What wiring in their brain comes undone?

My father always told me my priorities needed to be as follows: My health (physiological and security of health and body needs), my schoolwork (to provide, eventually, security of employment, resources, and property), then my friends and family. Is it so hard to follow?

The girl I mentioned above is allowing herself to suffer and potentially either cause irreparable harm or die (though I suspect when the need to breathe and maintain homeostasis kicks in she will reconsider how much the respect of others matters to her) because of pride. Pride has ruined more lives than any other emotion. I don't object to pride on principle, there's nothing wrong with being proud of yourself, but when we let it get away from us... The results are devastating.

Priorities. Come on people.

A little followup...

2008-08-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

...to this post on circumcision.

A new study has shown that male circumcision has a even higher rate of protection against STDs and HIV than expected, at 59%. It was previously thought to be about 50%. Of course, the argument about this meaning that circumcised men will not use condoms, thinking they are safe, has been trotted out again. Obviously condoms are much more effective than circumcision at preventing the spread of HIV and other STDs. They have about a 10% failure rate for HIV transmission in normal use-- meaning there's a 10% chance that a man who uses a condom every time and has sex with an HIV-positive woman will get HIV anyway. But a circumcised man who doesn't use condoms has a 41% chance of getting HIV from an HIV-positive woman. In addition, condoms protect women from HIV-positive men and circumcision does nothing for them.

This clearly means that circumcision shouldn't be touted as an answer to HIV, right?

Well, no. But those who are against circumcision aren't really looking at the real information here. Of course you can't tell a person who is circumcised that they are fully protected, they aren't. BUT. An uncircumcised man using a condom has a 10% chance of getting HIV from a positive woman. A circumcised man using a condom has a 4.1% chance. So an uncircumcised man is more than twice as likely to get HIV from a woman who is positive. That's pretty significant, and it could be used to argue that much the same way as people should use condoms AND hormonal birth control if they want to protect against pregnancy, because the risk is so decreased (condoms have a 14% failure rate, the pill has a 5% failure rate, so when you use them together there's only a 0.7% failure rate), men should both be circumcised and use condoms to prevent HIV.

However, even that's not the full story. Let's say you live in the United States, where 0.6% of adults (which we are assuming is your dating pool) are HIV positive. That means there's probably about a 0.6% chance that any given partner of yours would be HIV positive, if you don't know their status and you don't know if they have any risk factors, obviously the numbers would change if they were a drug user or something and obviously they would change in the other direction if they were a virgin.

Now, the risk of infection for an uncircumcised man from one exposure to an HIV positive woman without using a condom is 3%. So the risk for an uncircumcised man of getting HIV from a woman of unknown HIV status, without using a condom, would be 0.018%. The risk when using a condom would be 0.0018%. The risk for a circumcised man, using a condom, with a woman of unknown status, would be 0.000738%. Both are pretty low rates and the difference is actually only 0.001062%.

I'm kind of the opinion that the benefits in preventing HIV and other STDs is sufficient to outweigh the risks of any complications from the procedure itself, but probably not enough to warrant doctors encouraging patients to do so, so ultimately, it should neither be considered necessary nor harmful and should be up to the parents and their cultural and religious needs, until more evidence is in. Still, I find it interesting how the studies are being manipulated to support one side or another.

Also, if you are going to post comments, please be aware that I don't really care to hear middle-aged men blame their lack of sexual prowess on their circumcision. If your significant other hates your sex life, then however convenient it might be to blame something you had no control over, your time and energy would probably be better spent giving her a massage and engaging in some roleplay.

And if you think HIV doesn't cause AIDS, I'll probably laugh in your face.

2008-07-24T18:11:00.000-07:00

Apparently the HIV virus is most effective in people of African descent due to genetics.

Add to that the fact that a parasitic worm common in contaminated water sources, like in third-world countries, can increase the effects of AIDS and I am beginning to see why so many people in Africa, and African-Americans, think that HIV was engineered to kill black people.

Think about it-- it targets one race, a race that has a long history of being subjugated simply because they were unlucky enough to live in a region of the world that can't support agriculture and domestication of animals well enough to give them a competitive edge. The people who are most affected by it are Africans/African-Americans, poor people, people who have multiple partners, drug users and homosexuals. It's incurable, only treatable with expensive and complicated drug regimins, and can even pass to children from mothers. Basically, if there was a designer illness made up by right-wing mad scientists (right wing because it targets promiscuity and homosexuals), HIV sounds like a pretty good bet.

Of course, I don't actually beleive it is, for two reasons-- first of all, we already figured out that the original HIV was in monkeys and passed to humans through hunters in Africa handling monkey blood. Second of all, there are major flaws in the design from a mad-scientist perspective. First of all, it's got such a long dormant period. While a certain dormant period is required for a disease to be successful, 10 years just to have the first symptoms is pretty excessive, and in that time people can successfully reproduce, and there's a chance that their kids won't get it-- not a super chance, but a chance. Also, it can ONLY pass through blood or semen, so it's limited to people who are exposed to those things coming from multiple people. Doctors and nurses who handle open wounds and needles are a high-risk group, which doesn't make much sense from a mad eugenicist's perspective because we need doctors and nurses. And because of rapes, many people who the eugenicist probably wouldn't want to wipe out have been dying.

Basically, it's too slow to transmit, too slow to kill, and too easy to affect people you actually want to keep around. Besides, if any government or organization was actually racist enough to commit such a heinous crime they'd probably have it attack Native Americans, Asians, Indians, Arabs, etc as well. Or some up with a different disease to do that.

Still, it's really no wonder why so many conspiracy theorists and even normal people believe HIV is man-made. Oregon State University did a study in 2002-2003 that said 48% of African-Americans believed HIV was a man-made virus, 27% thought it was made by the US government and 15% thought it was designed as a form of genocide. I'm sure this new research will probably only fuel those opinions, and I can understand why they persist, no matter how detrimental they are to public-health campaigns.

I'll go put on my tinfoil hat now...

Delicious, nutritious frankenfruit

2008-07-08T19:37:00.000-07:00

And in continuation of my last post... GMOs.

Genetically modified organisms. For consumption. The HORROR!

Actually, I strongly support GMOs for several reasons. First of all, I have no squick factor about eating something that's not "natural," in fact, I hope they come up with lab-grown meat soon. After all, pretty much nothing we eat is remotely close to it's original state unless you are a hunter, or a naturalist. Corn was originally a tiny grain, teosinte. Tomatoes? Bred to be bigger, meatier, and redder. In fact, most of the food we put in our mouths has about as much in common with their untampered ancestors as a pug has with a wolf.

But surely genetic modification is different!

Plant breeding is genetic modification. The only difference with GMO vs. heavy selective breeding is that GMO allows us to introduce gene combinations that we want, rather than waiting for them to appear at random. So if we want a papaya that won't get attacked by a certain fungal infection, and the fungal infection doesn't attack pineapples because the pineapples have a certain chemical in their skins, we don't have to wait for a random mutation in the papaya to protect it, we can simply make the papaya produce the pineapple chemical. Then, we can test the fruit and make sure it's safe and still tastes the same, and if it does, voila, problem solved.

We can genetically modify food so there's much less unusable waste, so it takes up less space, and so it has less impact on the environment. We can make it so it doesn't need pesticides or fungicides. We can even make it more nutritious and grow in poor soils or where there's not much water, so people in third world countries can grow them and thus fight famines.

The only reason we aren't already doing such wonderful things with GMOs is that they are all patented by the corporations that designed them, and what's more, those corporations program their plants with a "kill" gene that makes them die after a year and their seeds useless. As a result, farmers keep having to go back and buy more, which is good for the company but sucky for the farmers, and impossible for poor subsistence farmers.

So I love GMOs in theory, and I certainly wouldn't hesitate to eat a GMO crop-- they're pretty heavily tested before going to market. But what I think needs to change is the following:

1. Some government funding going from international food aid to developing GMOs that are nutritious, safe, and grow in extremely poor conditions-- and have no kill gene.

2. Require companies that develop kill gene GMOs to pay taxes to go to the above.

3. Regulate, regulate, regulate. Test everything. Not that they don't do this already, but it's still a good idea.

4. Encourage GMO companies to contribute to a pro-GMO public awareness campaign talking about safety etc. They'd do it in a heartbeat, I'm sure.

5. AS much as I hate to admit it... require GMO labeling. If there's GMOs in it, the consumer should know. It's only fair and it makes it look less sneaky and dishonest.

But regardless of the issues, I don't get the anti-GMO crowd. It's not going to kill you. In fact, it might be healthier for you. Get over it.

The organic problem...

2008-07-07T17:34:00.000-07:00

There are few things I understand less than people who buy organic food when they can't really afford food, period.

Nonaestima is like that. She's currently unemployed and ran through most of her savings, and since she's fresh out of college she wouldn't qualify for unemployment. Ryter is paying her part of the rent, a fairly hefty financial burden, and she can't get on the lease yet because she's not employed. And yet, she insists on eating organic foods only.

Let me clear something up first of all. For people who do not have a history of bad reactions or allergic reactions to pesticide traces, who wash their foods before they eat them, there is NOTHING WRONG with non-organic fruits, vegetables, and grains. There is NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE in health benefits or quality; the environmental impact is slightly better but you're even better off sticking to local and seasonal foods.

Pesticides on fruits and vegetables shipped to or used within the US are tested for safety. The only time non-organic pesticides should be a concern is if you have a small pet, like a rodent or a lizard, that eats the veggies or fruits, because such a small animal might have a theoretical problem from eating foods with pesticides. Do I agree with pesticide use? Not entirely. I don't like many pesticides, as an ecologist. But I also know they won't hurt ME, and that the current organic labeling system is bullshit. So I'd buy organic meats, maybe, and certainly organic liver; organic farmed fish are preferable as well; but for fruits and veggies, I'll buy what looks freshest, what's local, and what's in season (because that means it's not shipped from the Southern Hemisphere).

But I don't fault people who buy organic food in general. It's not my problem if you want to spend more for the same thing with a pesticide derived directly from plants instead of from a chemical derived from a plant or mineral extract. My beef is with people who insist on buying it when they could barely afford the non-organic version.

A can of regular beans is what, 40 cents? Organic beans are closer to a dollar, and almost never on sale. So basically people are deciding to take in half as many calories, but they're "better" calories somehow? Despite the fact they come from the same species of bean, canned in the same way? Sure, many people are overweight and can benefit from eating fewer calories, but in my experience, the poor young professionals who insist on organic-only are also the skinny types who really can't afford to be skipping meals. And in the case of Nonaestima, she's also recovering from abdominal surgery and a recent hemorrhage. Not the time to lower caloric intake.

I've even read about people complaining that the WIC offices don't allow organic foods. Now, I have a few issues with the WIC food lists, namely that as far as I can tell they only seem to include crappy, sugary, heavily packaged foods and a person living on them probably wouldn't get anything near proper nutrition, which is supposedly the point. But ORGANIC foods?

Know the term "beggars can't be choosers?" Call it un-PC, but if you can barely feed yourself normal food, you don't get to be picky. I want to see things like seasonal, inexpensive fresh fruits and veggies included on WIC lists, but it's completely irrational to expect them to let people who clearly need food aid desperately enough to qualify for WIC (and it's not just based on income level, there's a bunch of qualifiers) buy expensive organic foods that really have no difference. And people will refuse food that isn't organic! FREE food! Call me a penny-pincher but I always like free food, even if it tastes like crap. Oy.

Ultimately, I guess if you want to starve yourself rather than eat perfectly good non-organic foods, that's your right. But don't refuse gifts of food, or ask that gifts be organic only, or demand that the government help you pay for your fancy organic food. Because non-organic food won't kill you, and to be honest, most of the time it tastes just as good or better.

Free Range Kids

2008-04-28T06:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a promising blog by Lenore Skenazy, author of “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Take The Subway Alone,” a controversial New York Sun article.

She raises an interesting point. I grew up doing all manner of nasty things, eating snow, playing in the dirt and the woods, etc. I think that's part of why I'm so healthy. And I did "dangerous" things sometimes too-- played in the street and the woods, went for walked by myself... At the same time, there are things that I think get progressively more dangerous each year. For example, my mom rode in a car without a seatbelt and was fine as a kid. However, at the time there were fewer cars on the road, fewer instances of drunk driving, and thus, fewer accidents.

The same is true of certain health concerns. I probably wouldn't want my kids to share toothbrushes or anything. That's not because I think there is anything inherently dangerous about sharing toothbrushes, and I did it sometimes as a kid. However, thanks to antibacterials, the germs today are a lot nastier than they were back then.

Cars are faster and drivers are stupider; I wouldn't want my kid crossing busy streets without me at least watching until I was VERY confident in their judgment. The same thing is true for letting them ride a subway or bike to school. I would want to be very confident that they knew what to do if something went wrong. As for snow and playing in the woods, eh, if the snow is new and I know where the kid is it's probably gonna be fine. It's a question of the world changing. More people close together means more danger. Nastier germs means more danger.

Would I bubble-wrap my kids? Hell no. Especially not as pertains to germs. If my kid eats food that fell on the floor, good for them for not wasting it. If they drink from the toilet, well, I might want to intervene. Washing hands after pooping, clearly a good idea. Drinking from the garden hose? My mom's rule was, don't put your mouth on the actual spout and you're fine.

It's about risk analysis. Fecal-oral transmission is a good way to get a whole mess of nasty illnesses, but the illnesses you get from the kitchen floor, not so much. Antibacterial sprays and soaps are good for daycares (lots of germy kids in one place) and bathrooms; elsewhere they are literally overkill. Helmets are a good idea for biking on hard pavement; they're not so needed for sledding on soft snow. I'm not too worried about abductions, but if my kid is out alone I'm gonna want to give them a cell phone in case they get lost or are out after dark. And yeah, there are a lot of things that were perfectly safe in 1950 that I wouldn't let a kid do today, simply because the world is not as safe. There are more people, thus, more dangers. Playing street hockey on a quiet cul-de-sac is not one of them.

And none of this means "natural" = "good"

2008-04-22T19:04:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot of "natural mothering" sites lately, because crazy people amuse me.

Anyway, there's one thing that's been interesting me. The idea of "child-led weaning." Aka, you don't actively wean, you wait until your kid chooses not to breastfeed any more all on their own. Which usually means mothers nursing 4 and 5 year olds. It also leads to tandem breast feeding when new babies arrive (breast feeding your 5 year old, your 3 year old, and your newborn all at the same time).

Now, I don't see anything wrong with extended breast feeding per se, as long as the kid gets other foods, gains weight at a normal rate, and stops before they start school/daycare/major social interactions with peers who think it's weird so as to prevent social issues. And as long as the mother isn't pressuring the kid to breastfeed, either, which some moms seem to do. And I also don't think a mom should wean to formula, unless of course she has to for some reason. Breast milk's always best until the kid can drink cow's milk, if a mom can nurse sufficiently, formula's pretty much useless.

At the same time, what I object to is the idea that child-led weaning is "natural" mothering. Or "natural" at all. Because let's face it. Mammals wean their young. They do. Actively. At least humans don't kick their babies in the face to wean them, like grazing animals do. Natural mothering involves active weaning when the mom decides it's time to end it. If the kid self-weans before the mom was ready, great! But natural weaning means the mom stops the kid if the kid doesn't stop themselves fast enough to suit them.

What's more, tandem nursing? NOT natural. Not at ALL. I mean, obviously tandem nursing occurs for multiple births, and occasionally for animals-- or humans-- who nurse the offspring of a dead mother. But this idea of continuing to nurse the older child while pregnant and then while nursing a newborn? That's not "natural." Animals don't DO that. Humans in hunter-gatherer societies don't do that. IN fact, as far as I can tell, the only people who do that are modern hippie types.

In nature, animals wean #1 pretty much as soon as they can tell that they are pregnant (aka when they've got , so that they will have the energy and food supply for #2. The first child, at that point, is usually developed enough to survive on normal food. Meanwhile the second child needs all the colostrum and breast milk (and energy) the mother can devote to it. To tandem nurse would create a dangerous situation for the mother and more importantly, the new baby.

Now, obviously first-world humans don't have to worry about limited food supply or predators attacking a child. And honestly, if someone wants to tandem nurse, whatever, it probably won't hurt them. But it's not "natural" parenting. It's about as unnatural as it gets. Just saying.

Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others...

2008-04-17T18:44:00.000-07:00

A Yale student told the press that she intentionally impregnated herself and aborted the fetuses for an art project.

This of course sparked much outrage, until she revealed it was a hoax. She's a performance artist, and the point was to get a rise out of people. It also sparked much debate, because everyone tended to agree that the idea was sick and wrong, and yet, many of them also supported reproductive rights.

My reaction, before I learned it was a hoax, was not quite the same as some-- I was concerned that she was mentally ill and should be detained in much the same way that a person is detained for attempting suicide, because she was taking dangerous herbal abortifacients without a doctor's supervision. Also, I was appalled that any school would allow the display of an "art" exhibit involving dead human tissue, which is a blatant violation of health codes. So yeah, naturally, I thought she should have been stopped, evaluated by a psychiatrist, and the display destroyed.

But at the same time, most people were claiming that it was unethical, yet declaring they were pro-choice. This confused me, because they clearly thought she was killing something that should not be killed, and yet, they had no problem if it was done for other reasons. Doing it for art was atrocious; doing it for personal reasons acceptable.

It would be atrocious because it would be disgusting and a violation of health codes, and because she would have been purposely hurting herself in the name of her "art." That's obvious. But let's pretend that she was doing it for some other, more acceptable reason, like she was a scientist who wanted test subjects and couldn't get them from a abortion clinic, or something. And then pretend that she wasn't endangering herself, and ignore that aspect. Let's focus primarily on the other argument brought up: that it was immoral.

If you think a blastocyst is a human being, of course you would consider this immoral. You should then think all blastocysts are human beings, and regardless of circumstances think abortions are immoral (or by the same token, IVF clinics disposing of blastocysts that are not needed are also immoral). I do not agree with this, but I can respect this view because it is consistent (of course, if you're one of those who thinks it's only okay when YOU do it, all respect disappears).

And the reverse, if you think it is NOT a human being, you should then consider this strange and disgusting, but not strictly immoral because she's simply expelling tissue she does not need, even if she then has a strange purpose for it. That was my general impression. Now, I don't think it would be the same if she had pretended to abort a 6-month-old fetus, but she was talking about blastocysts, which are basically a bunch of stem cells. I know when I personally think life begins, and I am a firm believer that barring a danger to the mother's life when there is a choice between saving the fetus or protecting the mother, after that point the mother should continue the pregnancy and chose adoption if she is unable to care for the child. For me, that point's somewhere when the fetus has brain activity and could theoretically survive a premature birth.

But many arguing it was immoral are pro-choice, or partially pro-choice (ie rape/incest abortions are okay). The truth is, I have trouble understanding that veiw. Either it's a person at the given stage of development and killing it is immoral, or it is not a person and killing it is not immoral. It's not more of a person because it was intentionally conceived for the purposes of aborting it. It's not less of a person because it's father was a rapist or also it's grandfather. Once a child is born, we don't make those distinctions; why do we make them regarding those in utero?

Of course, some people argue that it's a child, but it's okay to kill children before they are able to form attachments and shit. Like up until a few weeks after birth. I don't agree with that one either, but hey, if that's your moral belief, you are entitled to it. However, since it's fairly easy to adopt out newborns, I would find the idea strange and a bit disturbing that infanticide would be the first option barring serious deformities that cannot be repaired and would give the child a miserable, short life.

I just can't understand those who set standards based on situation. If a fetus is a human being, how is it immoral to kill them because you can't care for them but not immoral to kill them because you were raped? And at the same time, if it is NOT a human being, how is it immoral to create them with the intent of destroying them but not immoral to create them accidentally and then destroy them?

The mother's intent, some say. But by that token, if intentional creation and abortion is murder, accidental creation and abortion should be manslaughter. We punish people for that. You have to research and decide. Where do you, personally, beleive that life begins? At conception, when the genetic code is set? Implantation, when pregnancy begins? When the heart begins to beat? When they can survive outside the womb? But once we decide, we should stick to it, and consider all fetuses at the same age equal barring medical situations.

Also, to clarify, in terms of law, I think that the law should allow abortion until the fetus could survive a premature birth with reasonable interference levels (so no partial-birth or late term). After that, only for medical concerns, and always the mother's life and health should come first. Because of the variety of opinions on when life begins, before the fetus can be removed from the body and given away the law should butt out.

Alternative Medicine and the Great Pharmaceutical Conspiracy

2008-04-14T14:44:00.000-07:00

I am, in my heart, a skeptic.

That is to say, I don't tend to form opinions about things before researching them, and I can recognize real research as opposed to the biased stuff.

However, I believe in the power of yoga, massage, and tai chi to improve health, because I understand that such things are relaxing and good for the muscles, and relaxation improves health. I believe herbal remedies often work very well, because honestly, almost every medication we have today was derived from some form of plant or animal product that someone, somewhere, probably used to heal patients. Of course, they're way more useful, potent, and free of toxins in the refined form. I think DOs are a perfectly acceptable alternative to MDs and I would go to a licensed chiropractor for joint and back pain that did not respond to painkillers (though not for anything else).

So when I say I am a skeptic, I'm not the kind of person who thinks that all alternative therapies should be outlawed, or that any therapy that has not yet been tested in clinical trials must be completely useless. The truth is, clinical trials take time and money. Pharmaceutical companies can ensure that they have the safest and most effective product by charging high rates for their medications and trying those medications out on anyone who will volunteer or accept payment for it. It's usually many many years after the invention of a product that doctors even start hearing about it, much less the general public (the exception being new drugs that might cure some horrible and incurable disease, like cancer or AIDs, which the media loves even though it seems like 80% of them turn out to be dead ends).

Meanwhile, "alternative" medicine's inventors and promoters usually have certain traits in common: First of all, they are not affiliated with a licensed pharmaceutical company, usually because they either have decided Big Pharma is evil (a common problem in our society), because they do not have the credentials required to work for such a company, because any pharmaceutical company will look at their idea and say it's not worth the investment because it's so unlikely to work compared to the cost involved to develop it, or, and this is rare, because the pharmaceutical companies do not want the product to be made as it will not make them any money.

For example, medical marijuana? Pharmaceutical companies are just NOW starting to investigate it as a serious pain reliever, and they will never market it unless it is completely refined and processed because they're hardly going to make money if they announce that we can grow an effective painkiller in our backyards with absolutely no need for them. They are a business. Does that make them evil? No. They're still gonna look into it, and maybe whatever they come up with will be safer and more effective than smoking pot and it will be great. But they're a business. And if they weren't a business, where would the enormous amount of money required to research, develop, and test new medications come from? I don't know about you, but I sure as hell would prefer a business in charge of making sure my pain pills work so well that I keep buying from them and not their competitor than the government to be in charge of churning out the cheapest possible medication to shut me up while they lower taxes.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Alternative medicine. If a practitioner has decided that Big Pharma is evil, they have shot themselves in the foot, because there are three places that a practitioner can get the money and resources to turn an alternative therapy into a mainstream makes-lots-of-money one: Pharmaceutical companies, universities with a bunch of bored grad students, and the government. Strike out the biggest one-- pharmaceutical companies-- and you can have your research done by the lowest-bidder government or the universities, who have to apply for grants which most often come from-- you guessed it-- the government, or private industry like a pharmaceutical company. As it is, universities do a lot of testing on alternative medicine, but they can't do it in the same organized, methodical way that a pharmaceutical company with a lot of money riding on it can.

Now let's assume that they didn't go into it hating pharmaceutical companies, and instead applied to them and were turned down due to lack of credentials or the compnay thinking it was a poor investment. If they have insufficient credentials, then they should either go back to school and get the needed credentials and see if they still think that chelation will treat autism, or find someone who does have the credentials who is similarly interested. Chances are if they don't have the credentials and can't get them, or get someone with them to take an interest in their work, their work is based on that dream they had last week and not on actual rational thought, and you shouldn't be using it.

But what if they have the credentials, but the pharmaceutical company simply decided not to invest in whatever they are supporting? Well, that doesn't mean that Big Pharma is out to get them. They're gonna spend the same money on clinical trials and effectiveness studies if they are researching a new cancer wonderdrug as if they are trying to determine if Kombucha tea does anything to the body except look gross. They're gonna look through what evidence there is to support the idea, what evidence there is against it, and then yeah, they're gonna pick the investments that appear to be most likely to be worth the cost. And they pick wrong a lot (that's partially why meds are so pricey), but they're more likely to pick wrong if the wrong is supported by previous scientific study than if it's something the promoter pulled out of his ass. Plus, they have to market it to the mainstream, so even if you assume things like vibrational energy are real and most people are simply deluded, if most people will read vibrational energy on their pain pills and think "Uh, yeah, no thanks, that's ridiculous," a company would be stupid to invest in it.

Then, the final choice, the company doesn't want to do it because it's not gonna make them any money. PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES ARE NOT CHARITIES. Come on. They have to get their money back somehow, and clinical trials and R&D are expensive. I don't understand why people assume that doctors, lawyers, pharmaceutical companies etc should exist purely to help them, and not ask for anything in return. Honestly, even if the company WAS a non-profit, as many hospitals are, they can't LOSE money. Money does not magically appear because people are sick or in need, unless you're a politician.

The truth is, there are many alternative therapies out there that probably do work well enough that they would pass all the tests and be a worthwhile investment, but they don't appear it on the surface, or maybe they work but the cost outweighs the benefits compared to just taking the current medication, or maybe they work but not as well as (or as safely as) something we already have, or maybe they work but they sound silly and no one would ever buy them. It's a shame, but it's life. Hopefully those alternative therapies can be tested at universities enough to have a legitimate scientific backing to their claims, and maybe they will then be accepted by the more mainstream industries.

However, those alternative therapies are drowned out by the extremes, the coffee enemas, the chelation for autism, the psychic surgery, the fluoridation conspiracy theories-- the ones that quite clearly have no possible validity to them according to anyone who understands science, anatomy, chemistry, biology and in some cases physics. And that's why the potentially good therapies aren't investigated as they should be or accepted by the mainstream. It's not Big Pharma that's causing them strife, it's the fact that they are being lumped in for whatever reason with every other ridiculous and impossible quack therapy that anyone ever made a million dollars off. So alternative therapy practitioners-- stop blaming Big Pharma. Start blaming the snake oil salesmen.

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However, at the same time, I don't think that alternative therapies should be restricted unless they are actually dangerous. I think they should have to be tested and approved by the FDA according to the same standards as whatever they claim to be. If they claim to be a medicine or remedy, they should be held to the same safety standards as medicine, and require a prescription or not accordingly. If they are dietary supplements, they should also be tested (the US is atrocious in this regard, we need to have stricter guidelines about labeling and contents of supplements-- I'm sick of guessing if a brand of fish oil tablets will work or not). If it's a food, it should have nutritional information.

And if it's toxic, it should be treated as any other toxic substance. Alternative medications, whether they work or not, can be quite dangerous. At least most mainstream medications contain compounds that are safe in low quantities but will cause you to vomit if you overdose-- you're hardly gonna get that with herbal "supplements." Before alternative therapy can be held anywhere near the standards of conventional medicine it needs to hold itself to the same standards of safety.

Oh, and because I read a story about this on the internet: If your child has an ear infection, GIVE THEM THE AMOXICILLIN, don't wait until their eardrum perforates! Good god, it's an antibiotic, not rat poison. At least, if you must try alternative methods, check in their ear first and don't drop your homeopathic ear drops in through the perforation for several days until the kid is puking and screaming nonstop due to the fact you dumped WATER into their MIDDLE EAR. Good lord, that was horrific to read about.

New Stuff

2008-03-27T05:07:00.001-07:00

I've found a new site to put on my blogroll which is really interesting. Mainstream Parenting Resources debunks all the craziest "natural parenting" quackery, and it's very well written. Check it out.

Circumcision and Medical Ethics

2008-03-25T20:34:00.000-07:00

Ah, the circumcision debate.

I've been reading a lot about it lately, which probably isn't good for me, but oh well. I've analyzed both sides of the issue, I watched Penn and Teller's Bullshit on it, I read the medical literature. My conclusion is physically, it's not necessary-- but it doesn't harm them, either.

Circumcision has been consistently proven to not decrease fertility (clearly, Eritrea has a 95% rate of circumcision and they have a population growth rate of 2.5% with 33.97 births per 1000 population), it has been proven to have no effect or a positive effect on sex enjoyment and ability to have sex repeatedly, with all studies stating it had no effect on sex drive, two studies saying it improved and two studies saying it decreased erectile function, with three more claiming no difference, most studies claiming it prevented premature ejaculation, of seven studies, only one claimed it decreased penile sensation, and absolutely no studies claiming it decreased overall satisfaction.

In other words, no impact on sex. At all. No impact on fertility. Complications are very rare (comes from practice all these years) and they can be performed under local anesthesia to prevent pain (and should be, after all, we numb ears before piercing). There's some evidence that they reduce the risk of STDs, including AIDS, but there haven't been enough studies for me to comfortably say that is the case, and anyway, condoms do a much better job. The truth is, medically, there's not really any reason to bother circumcising, and it's just a body modification which we perform for aesthetic and cultural reasons. At the same time, though, it's not actually doing any long-term damage. I think the closest real comparison we have is the idea of piercing ears. Pierced ears are incredibly common, they show up in many cultures, and piercing usually happens when the person is still a child or a teen (ie not a legal adult). They are socially acceptable, and yet, they are body modification-- it is punching holes in a child's body and forcing the skin to grow back around a metal object to produce a permanent hole. They also hurt like all hell if you don't get numbed first.

So the question-- medically, neonate circumcisions (usually, barring complications) aren't needed; thus, are they ethical? Well, pierced ears aren't considered unethical. I don't think I'd want to pierce a baby's ears myself, but I wouldn't stop someone who did so to their kid, and it's quite common. And since there is no long-term pain or disability, there's nothing unethical about doing it as an initiation into a religion or something. People do all kinds of weird shit to their kids in the name of religion, and body modification is a common religious practice, so as long as the kid's life isn't really impacted, I see no objection to that. Provided, naturally, that the religious official performing the circumcision is trained, licensed, and willing to use anesthetic.

But what about people who simply think the circumcised penis looks better? Is it ethical for a doctor to circumcise a boy?

Honestly? I don't think so. I don't really like the idea of doctors doing it. However, at the same time, I think we should have people who are licensed and trained to perform circumcisions for anyone who wants it for their son or themselves. The trouble with doctors doing it is it becomes about "healing" the kid somehow. I say take medicine out of the equation, except in the sense that a person performing a circumcision should have training and licensing, same as someone who does tattoos or piercings, and more so because a mistake could be problematic. Or perhaps list it as a form of plastic surgery or something. I think it should be made quite clear to parents that it is an aesthetic/religious, not medical, choice for them to make.

But ethically, I see no problem with them making that choice. It's not like FGM, where a woman can no longer enjoy sex because her sexual organs have been cut out. The foreskin is a small and relatively insignificant part of the genitalia. Losing it does not cause lasting pain, it does not decrease sexual abilities, nothing. In other words, yes, it is a body modification, yes, it is unnecessary, no, doctors should never suggest it or encourage it for medical reasons (unless there actually IS a medical reason, like phimosis), though they should answer any questions as free from personal bias as possible. At the same time, I think that it is still firmly the choice of the parents and there is nothing unethical about allowing parents to choose to do so to their son. If it bothers him that much, he can have it restored as an adult, same as the girl whose ears are pierced can let them grow back together.

And me personally? I don't really care. I don't practice a religion that cares about foreskins, and while I find circumcision more aesthetically pleasing myself, my opinion on the appearance of my son's penis is irrelevant, what matters is what his future girlfriends/spouse thinks of it. What I find more attractive shouldn't really apply to my son's genitals. So I'll probably defer to my husband on the subject.

Paternity Testing

2008-03-08T21:10:00.000-08:00

Tennessee has proposed a new bill that would require mandatory paternity tests for all newborns.

OKay, on the one hand, there are a ridiculous number of children out there who are being raised by men who are unaware that their wife/girlfriend cheated on them and did not have their child, which often would indicate a desire for a divorce; also, many men are made to pay child support for children that they are not related to, nor ever made any effort to serve as a father.

Yet I believe that DNA is not important, it's intent. Once a man decides to raise a kid, he should raise that kid, regardless of the kid's actual DNA...

I don't think it should be mandatory. No way. That's a terrible invasion of privacy and automatically assumes fault on the part of the woman, plus it can give men information they don't want to have. I think it should be offered to all fathers (when the mother is not in the room) for free. They refuse it? Fine. They can never contest the paternity of the child again, because they've made that decision at that point that they don't care about DNA (and I applaud them). Even if at a later point the child is determined to be genetically unrelated, doesn't matter, they made that choice.

If they accept the test, and they are confirmed to be the father, great. If not? Well, if they immediately deny responsibility for the child, then they don't have to take it, as long as they never take on the role of father. BUt if they stay with the mother, start to raise the kid, whatever, then the paternity test will become irrelevant.

Also, once a paternity test is completed, all the DNA and records should be destroyed except for a note on the child's birth certificate. LAst thing we want is that shit on record.

Fathers should be offered one chance to know for sure, for free, with or without the mother's consent, if the child is theirs before they bond with the kid or make financial obligations towards them. One chance. That's it. And in exchange, women should get to subpoena men they believe to be the father for a confidential, free paternity test with the DNA information destroyed immediately afterwards. So women won't be left to fend for themselves, as long as they can reel off a list of all the men they slept with about 9 months earlier. Of course, you would have to require that the entire process would be completely confidential unless the man really is the father.

So in summary:

At birth, the man who thinks he is the father is offered a free paternity test. He refuses, he's the father by default, even if later he learns otherwise. He made the decision to be the father.
He accepts and it's positive, he's the father, and can never contest that.
He accepts and it's negative, he's not the father, and he can immediately sever all ties with the kid and the mom and not be held responsible. OR, he can decide to raise the kid anyway, despite that information, and will be considered the legal father even if he's not biologically related-- a relationship he then can't contest.

At any point, a mother can subpoena a guy she suspects of being a father for a paternity test. The entire process is kept discreet and if the man is not the father, he can go on his merry way and not worry about it. If he is, she can request child support from him and insist he take responsibility.

All DNA samples and anything that could be used against a person later is destroyed, as it would otherwise be self-incrimination and illegal to use it at a later point for a purpose other than it was provided for. That would be very important and have to be specifically mentioned in the law in such a way that the entire law would have to be scrapped and rewritten to get past it.

And for Pete's sake, don't make it mandatory (unless someone is attempting to skip out on the paternity checks). Make it free an readily available, sure. But not mandatory. The law should not be intruding into people's lives in that manner.

Too much of medicine is stuck in the 1950s

2008-03-06T20:30:00.000-08:00

I have a question/idea.

I'm hoping to go into medicine. So I read a lot of people's opinions of doctors, and their mistakes, etc. You know, figure out what I should keep in mind. One thing I notice is that a lot of people complain that doctors just have a few medications that they prescribe for everything, and that medication interactions are common, especially if you're taking a lot of different meds. It's understandable; there's like a thousand plus medications on the market and doctors aren't perfect.

The thing about this, though, is, I can't help thinking it would be really easy to fix. All the doctors I've seen have a laptop they carry in to their session with me, so they can check my old medical records against my new info, update their records, etc, without having to carry in folders (they print out a hard copy later, I presume, they have files too). Anyway, they have a laptop right in front of them. Couldn't somebody come up with a program for doctors that enables them to enter a medication name and it immediately comes up with what the meds can treat, what they are normally prescribed for, their various approval ratings (government, etc), their prices, any recent recalls or class-action suits, any side-effects, and any interactions with other drugs? And couldn't that same program be modified so that a doctor could enter the diagnosis, say, "chronic joint pain," and would be immediately provided with a list of medications commonly prescribed to treat chronic joint pain? You could maybe even do a cross-referencing program so that doctors could list current medications and the ones with interactions would be eliminated from the list, for people with lots of medication (obviously unnecessary for someone who's taking only a few pills, but if you get an elderly woman with 25 medications she's on...).

Doctors could prescribe generics when people don't have sufficient insurance to cover the name-brand ones, because they would have access to the generic brand names. Of course, insured people would still get name-brands, because they've proven that the placebo effect means name-brands can work better. They could double-check prescriptions very quickly and could learn if a medication someone was on could be causing symptoms. Better care, less problems to fix down the road, insurance companies win. Better care, patients win. Slight reduction in malpractice lawsuits, happier patients, and more memory space to devote to diagnosing techniques, doctors win. Even pharmaceutical companies would benefit because they could get their lesser-known drugs out and prescribed to patients who are always getting their competitor's medication. Okay, that might be a stretch.

But in the end, if the only people who suffer are pharmaceutical companies and only in the fact that they couldn't get doctors who were quite as devoted to them due to knowing of the top of their heads that they didn't have a lot of recalls or anything, I say that's a win. I have no idea why this hasn't been created and put into widespread use yet. It's not like we don't have the ability, there are online sites that basically do the same thing, but doctors are still relying on memory (at least mine are).

If any computer programmer wants to design this and sell it for millions, feel free to steal my idea, no royalties required. I'd be benefiting as much as anyone.

Now, anyone want to tell me why this wouldn't work, or wouldn't be popular, or how my doctors are actually idiots and there already is something like this out there?

Home Schooling and the Law

2008-03-06T18:43:00.000-08:00

So California is requiring that all homeschooling parents have teaching credentials.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, there are a lot of crazy whackjobs who homeschool their children so the kids don't have to learn about evolution or condoms. On the other, public schools can really suck, and homeschooled kids whose parents were actually trying to help the kid are going to get penalized.

Clearly there should be regulations for homeschooling. You can't just let people homeschool kids any way they want, because kids aren't able to make their own informed decisions and therefore should not be at the mercy of their parents' every whim. But teaching credentials? Nah. What I think they should have is the following:

1. If a parent wants to homeschool, they should have to register with the state, or their kid should be considered to be playing hooky. That's pretty standard.

2. The parent can't have a history of physical or emotional abuse of the child, or any other kids. Also think that's pretty standard.

3. The parent should have a high school diploma, or a GED. I know, seems like a no brainer, but apparently a very small percentage of home school parents in the US never finished high school. That's probably a good sign that they aren't qualified to teach their kids.

4. Once a year, the kid should be tested against the standards for kids in his or her year. They do better or equal to other kids their age, they can continue homeschooling. I think this is also common. These tests should also include more than just reading and writing-- if it's required learning at school, and it's not gym/art/music etc, it should be required at home. So cover English, math, and history, but also science, health (even sex ed), and basic computer studies, which are neccessary to survive in the modern world.

5. When the kid reaches middle school material (ie stuff they could theoretically have forgotten since they were in school, as opposed to your basic reading and writing and times tables), the parents should have to get a special Parent Teaching Certification. I'm not talking about holding them to the levels of normal teachers. I'm talking about giving them a test that covers the material they want to teach to the kid. They pass the test, they can teach that material. If they don't, community college classes or back to school. That way you won't get people who are unqualified teaching their kids, but it's also not like they have to know Calculus and have a master's degree to teach middle-school algebra.

6. If the kid is mentally disabled (beyond a learning disability or ADHD, I mean really disabled), the parent should have some kind of degree in working with people with disabilities. Those kids need pretty specialized education, and allowing them to be homeschooled, especially since there's no real way to measure their progress like with most kids, is asking for the system to be abused. Similarly, if the kid is blind, the parent should be able to read and create (write?) Braille and if the kid is deaf, the parent should be fluent in sign language. Now, of course, sometimes you get people who are just too disabled to ever really learn anything. If that truly is the case, like they'll never pass a toddler's mental level, then I understand not making them go into a SPED program that basically will babysit them all day. That would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. But someone with, say, Down's Syndrome can benefit a great deal from a teacher who actually understands how to work with them, rather than an unqualified parent.

And that would be it. Check on the kid once a year (every six months if you want to be paranoid) to make sure something's sticking, make sure their parent is actually remotely qualified to teach the stuff and not some hick who plans to plop their kid in front of the TV all day, and keep track of who's getting homeschooled. That's all you really need. Do it right, and your homeschool kids won't be able to get a worse education than the public school ones, and it'll probably be better. And hey, to address the social aspect, let homeschool kids join sports teams and clubs at the local high school if they want and offer lots of community programs.

But making parents have the same credentials as teachers seems a bit silly. An education course (usually part of the requirement) makes sense if you need to learn how to effectively teach many different children the same thing all at once and maximize learning. For a parent who teaches one or two kids at once, and always the same kids, it's easy to learn what teaching style the kid needs. What's more, effective teaching strategies for 25 kids are going to be very ineffective for 2 kids. This just serves to make it very challenging for parents to homeschool without addressing the real problems with homeschooling, ie, that it can be abused without anyone knowing, and that no one was enforcing the old rules.

Also, maybe, just maybe, California should try to fix the problems in the public school system before wasting time trying to micromanage home schoolers, who on average are more successful than public-school graduates?

Just saying.

Vaccination and Autism

2008-02-20T06:32:00.000-08:00

You know what gets me about the whole antivaccine/vaccines cause autism bullshit?

Well, first of all, obviously vaccines don't cause autism, all the evidence has proved this over and over again. Besides, if it was caused by vaccines it couldn't be heritable, and it is (though not entirely). And kids still get autism even now that there's no mercury in the vaccines. Sorry, find a new scapegoat.

But even beyond that-- let's assume the autism really was caused by vaccines. Autism is a) non-contagious, b) non-deadly, and c) present in a spectrum, with most people within that spectrum perfectly capable of living a reasonably successful or normal life, although they're not really socially adept (neither am I, and I survive). Full blown autism is only about one in 1000 people. So in our hypothetical scenario, there is only a 0.001% chance that getting a vaccine will result in an autistic child.

Compare to the alternative, not getting the vaccine. Let's look at the DTP vaccine. Diphtheria has a 5-10% fatality rate in children under 5 years and a 20% fatality rate in adults over 40. Before the vaccine was invented, a person had a 0.002% chance of getting diphtheria. Also, diphtheria is a heck of a lot worse than autism (not that autism isn't horrible, but at least it doesn't involve open sores). And that is a single disease; things like pertussis, measles, and whooping cough add to the chance that an unvaccinated person will get SOME horrible illness. I mean, unvaccinated children living in our modern, vaccinated society manage to get polio, despite the fact that the virus can't easily perpetuate in a population that is immune to it.

So even using the false hypothesis that vaccines cause autism, it's STILL better to vaccinate, because an unvaccinated child has a greater chance of getting an illness that can be prevented by vaccines than a vaccinated child would have of getting autism. Also, most illnesses that vaccines prevent are far, far more painful, dangerous, and deadly than autism is, even at it's absolute worst.

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I'm not a huge fan of over-vaccination, which I define as vaccinating against things that aren't actually going to hurt you too much in the long run, like chickenpox (well, unless you're in your teens or older and never had it as a child), or things that could hurt you, but your lifestyle, age, and/or health make catching a bad case unlikely (like influenza for me, but not for my best friend, who often works with individuals who are high-risk for catching it).

But to prevent polio, diphtheria, rubella... there is no excuse for not vaccinating children against those illnesses. Not even religious objections (will God really stop a person from entering Heaven just because they got a shot? Wouldn't it be a worse sin to not get a shot, and catch and spread the illness, killing yourself and another? And can't you atone and describe yourself as some kind of martyr who was forced into it, anyway?).

Certain vaccines are a public health concern, they should NOT be optional. Even if it meant I had to take a flu shot every year, I'd support legislation that would force all parents to vaccinate their children without exception. If they object, force them to watch a movie about Typhoid Mary. When it comes to serious infectious disease, the government has a duty to restrict the rights of it's citizens enough to protect other citizens, and the more people we vaccinate against a disease, the more likely that disease will go the way of smallpox, no one will ever be at risk again, and we won't need the vaccine any more.

The only reasonable and safe way to stop the widespread vaccination of children is to continue it, even increase it, until it is no longer needed at all. Period.

Guns in our schools-- legally

2008-02-18T20:54:00.000-08:00

Apparently Arizona is debating allowing concealed carry rights in school zones, in the wake of all the recent school shootings (and there has been a LOT lately, hasn't there?).

Honestly, this... kind of makes sense. It's really sad that we have to deal with this at all, but you know, we live in a country where it's so easy to get a gun without a permit, we kind of need people who are armed as defense.

I'm not so sure about how young this goes, though. I can see letting high school teachers and staff, even middle school teachers and staff, who have permits and are trained in gun use and safety carry weapons, but honestly, when was the last time a first grader shot up a school? They bring weapons in at that young, but they can usually be restrained/disarmed easily. I guess you could make exceptions if there was a particular danger for an individual, like the case in Oregon where a teacher sued the school district because they refused to allow her to carry a gun when she was worried about her ex husband attacking her (he had threatened to kill her).

Maybe tighten up the standards as to who can get a special permit to carry a weapon at a school? I would say that the standards there should be a little stricter, ie, psych evaluation, take classes on gun safety, and prove that you can effectively use the gun to prevent an attacker from continuing (preferably without killing them, but preventing them from using their weapon or moving). And repeat the entire process every 5 years. At the same time, they could teach potential applicants the procedure should police arrive (basically it would have to be that unless doing so would mean serious injury or death, drop to the floor, take your hand off the trigger or slide the gun over to the cops, and keep your hands where the police can see them-- aka, give them all the signs that you are completely on their side).

I doubt I could ever kill or injure something alive with a gun, but I still support gun rights-- partially because it's in the Constitution, clear and apparent, and partially because I think people should have the right to do whatever they want as long as it's not hurting anyone else. Of course, people need permits and training in use beforehand, because guns are a lot more complex with much more variety than when the Constitution was written, plus people are living closer together and we medicate the mentally unstable people instead of locking them up or trying to exorcise them (this is a VERY good thing, don't get me wrong, but it does mean that a random, dangerous person can stop their treatment and wind up on national television). So yeah, there needs to be regulation. Also, because our culture is very different and kids are less mature at the same ages, obviously kids need to be even more regulated in gun ownership than adults, and no kid should ever be allowed to have a gun in school.

As for college students, I'd say you should keep kids from having them in the dorms or bringing them on campus. If they hunt, they can buy a storage locker somewhere. It's not that I don't think college students should defend themselves against attackers, it's just that I am a college student, and I know college classes, and honestly, I'd feel safer if one loner comes to campus and I can't be defended from them than by allowing your average college student to have a gun...

On second though, better ban it for middle school teachers too. I always was amazed that my middle school teachers didn't try the "going postal" route. Clearly, destined for sainthood.

Sorry if that was rambling, what are your thoughts on gun control?

This concept of "wuv" confuses and enrages us

2008-02-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

I know this is in Italy and I'm not supposed to be reading the news anyway, but this is ridiculous. A court in Italy decided to severely reduce a 34-year-old man's sentence for having sex with an underage (13 year old) girl because they decided there was "real love" between the pair.

First of all:

In Italy, the age of consent is 14, so this is like the equivalent of in the average US state (where consent is usually about 16) a 36 year old and a 15 year old. So sketchy, illegal technically, but don't think of it as quite the same thing legally as a 30 year old and a 13 year old in this country.

HOWEVER, the reason behind the sentence reduction was not "she was only a year away from being able to consent, so we'll reduce it on those grounds" but it was "they loved each other."

Here's the thing. The law says a 13 year old can't consent to sex, she can't consent to sex. Period. Well, she can, but it's invalid consent-- like if a completely plastered girl consents to sex, that's invalid (of course in that case, she may have had a standing consent with a guy that it was okay for him to have sex with her while she was drunk, like if they were dating. Someone who is underage could not have done that, since they have never previously been able to give valid consent). According to the laws of consent, when a person who is underage consents to sex, their words are essentially meaningless, and only affect whether or not the crime is "statutory rape" or just "rape."

And yet according to this Italian court, if the girl "loves" the man (maybe she did, doesn't matter) and he loves her, then her consent becomes valid. Despite the fact that nothing in her brain changes when she thinks she loves the man that makes her judgment better and makes her older.

Ultimately, though, what really bothers me is that this is a moral decision on the part of the judge. According to this judge, sex + love = okay, sex + no love = bad. And even though I personally agree, I don't think that that is a decision the courts should make. This is saying that a teenage girl who has sex with an older man because she thought he was hot and wanted to have sex was somehow coerced and unable to consent, but one who wanted to have sex with an older man because she felt she truly loved him was NOT coerced.

It's saying that women/girls would NEVER have sex willingly unless they loved the man and the man loved them (could also be saying the same for young men, but I doubt it; anyway, that's irrelevant). Which is not true and a moral judgment of women who have sex with people they do not love. If the judge feels that that is immoral, fine, but it shouldn't come into the courtroom. Judges should go by the law, not their own moral codes, if they live under a truly secular government, which Italy claims to have.

Technically I'm not supposed to think about this stuff, but...

2008-02-04T13:24:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about Israel a lot lately.

I used to think that while the Palestinians shouldn't be bombing Israel, it was wrong of the UN to give Palestine to the Jews in the first place, because someone already lived there, and that it was also wrong of the Israeli law to treat the Arabs differently than they treated Jews.

I still think that Israel needs to provide non-Jews with more rights and equality. I abhor a religious state, and while Israel is not at the level of the surrounding nations, not by a long shot, they clearly value the Jewish religion above all else. I would feel differently if, say, the Law of Return applied only to ethnic Jews, as in, people who are actually of Jewish ancestry by blood, instead of this business of "if your mother was a Jew or you converted to Judaism," which is a religious definition, not an ethnic one. I understand that Jews are persecuted worldwide and I understand the value of a homeland. I want Tibet to be returned to the Tibetans, too. But a Jewish state should be a state of ethnic Jews, not a state of Jewish religion. A blonde, white, Caucasian Jewish convert with the last name Smith is not really going to be persecuted on the same level as a dark-haired, olive skinned ethnic Jew with the last name Goldstein. What's more, the Law of Return completely ignores ethnic Jews who are not practicing, or whose mothers were not Jewish.

They also have a tendency to deny residency and immigration rights to Israeli Arabs under the pretext of preventing terrorism, and they tend to place predominantly Jewish towns before Arab towns. Not to mention the whole Dome of the Rock issue. There's a lot of racism and religious persecution, which happens every time a bunch of people who were once a persecuted minority become the majority. So I still think their laws need to change, same as I feel for most countries.

However, I've been looking at their history, and I've changed my mind about whether they should have been given the nation. Was there racism involved? Yeah, I mean, Britain didn't give up their colony in Palestine for years when the native Arabs wanted it, and then as soon as there was a Jewish majority, they gave it up. I have no doubt but that there was prejudice involved on the part of the UN. That said, even though Jews had not particular right to the land simply because their ancestors lived there, there WAS a Jewish majority when Israel was founded. They got their autonomy fairly. The expansion of the state to gain control of water sources was also reasonable. Doing it to gain Jerusalem for religious reasons or to get more land, not so much.

At this point I've basically decided that I don't support either side, but if I had to choose, I'd support Israel. They have less to do before I would consider them to be a reasonable and just nation; Palestine is basically under Shari'ah law. I think they should pull back, stop occupying surrounding territories and focus on defensive methods, and make their nation more secular. I also think that Egypt and Jordan need to open their borders to Palestinian immigration, since many Palestinians are actually Jordians and Egyptians who came to Israel when the Israelis began to develop the land and provide jobs.

But I don't think it's that easy. I think the entire region is very complicated, and both sides are at fault. And that the next time a nuclear weapon is used in war, it's gonna be on Israel.

Random Stuff

2008-01-31T15:56:00.000-08:00

I'm not entirely back yet, but I wanted to share.

This is brilliant. There are companies that basically clean up a person's online reputation for them. I mean, I doubt they could do it for someone who was truly everywhere online, like a public figure. But in an age where an ex, a disgruntled friend, or a drunken night out can destroy your reputation, the idea of having a company that can clear the internet for you, or at least get the worst of it, is very appealing. I applaud him, he'll get rich very quickly.

----------------------------------------

Also: Sperm cells have been created out of the stem cells of a woman. In other words, they've figured out a way for lesbian women to have biological children someday (and they're working on the male equivalent).

I have totally been predicting that this technology is inevitable for years. While I'd rather people adopt than go through a complicated and expensive process to have biological children (also applies to in vitro fertilization, not a comment about sexuality), I do think that if lesbians had their own biological children and the kids grew up fine it might help their case. Also, from a science/biology perspective, FASCINATING. Making a sperm cell out of stem cells is an incredible idea. If I didn't think it would end with a religious nut fire-bombing my laboratory I think it would be fun to go into a career as a stem cell researcher.

2008-01-20T17:12:00.000-08:00

I am working through some personal problems right now and will not be online for a while until I sort them out. Internet use seems to be contributing to them, so I'm on hiatus for a while.

Of course, it could mean more fat people...

2008-01-17T20:22:00.000-08:00

So recently the FDA approved cloned meat, and there has been talk of growing meat in labs for years. This has got me thinking about the future of human food production.

I think that we are very close to mass-produced meats that were never attached to animals. And I think that's a good thing for us. Yeah, I'm mostly vegetarian so I think there's a lot of value in meats that did not involve an animal dying, but more than that. Think about it. Factory farming is very cruel but it's currently the only way to efficiently produce food for a large population. Yet with every generation there are more people that object to it and more laws regulating how animals can be treated. Eventually the restrictions will make factory farming nonviable and meat prices will skyrocket to the point where we will be paying $25 for a single chicken breast. That will mean the lower class will not have protein. Lab meat would solve that problem, because it would not have such animal welfare restrictions.

Then there is the sheer burden of all farming. Livestock eat TONS of food. That's land that could be used for growing crops for human consumption, or that could be used for development; or maybe just turned into a nature reserve. Plus they produce methane gas (not the primary cause of global warming but still significant) and tons of waste, only some of which can be recycled as fertilizer. You stop farming livestock for food on the current scale and the environment will be much better off. Plus this could be used for fish as well, helping alleviate the terrible impact fishing has on the oceans.

Our population is still growing; lab-grown meat could be produced on a scale large enough to feed the masses. Plus vegans would stop protesting at KFC, and everyone wants that.

Of course, there will always be traditional animal farming. In areas where there is still subsistence-farming, for example. Or in Europe, where they are rabidly against using science on their food for some unfathomable reason. Animal farming will become a niche outside Europe, though, sort of like organic farming is now. Much smaller scale, much more expensive. Much easier on the environment (and the meat would be safer too, less illness).

But for the most part people will eat safer, cheaper, better-tasting meats (and cheeses and milks, though maybe not eggs, dunno how that would work) made in a lab. That's one future prediction I don't think is unrealistic or naive to make.

And yes, I would eat a hamburger made in a laboratory. I might even add laboratory bacon.

Emotions

2008-01-12T17:59:00.000-08:00

There was a discussion on Feministing that moved from talking about why men can't cry to a discussion with a single poster about how he, personally, cannot feel emotion and thinks that the human race would be better off without it because they would not feel suffering.

Here's the thing. I believe that there is a powerful value to emotional suffering. We may not realize it at the time, but emotional suffering can give us strength and make moments when we do not feel it all the more powerful. If you never suffer, you never really fully live.

What's more, there is a lot more to emotion than pain. Most emotions are not painful. The poster I was discussing it with says he does not need love, though it's not really a question of needing. When you feel love, anything is more bearable. Starving? That's okay. Poor? You can bear it. Ostracized from society? Sucks, but you can pull through. The emotion doesn't just tie you to a person, it makes all the negative aspects of your life no longer seem as bad while still making you want to eliminate those aspects-- not for your own sake, but for the other person's. And yeah, love can end in pain. But unless it was an unusual amount of pain-- like you break up and they burn down your house and kill your brother, which is why I don't recommend dating people who are batshit insane-- in the end, the remembered emotion and the drive to find it again, to make the parts of your life that you can't control better, makes the pain worth it.

And passion, which is literally the driving force behind science, medicine, and art. Why study ecology, for example, especially if you're not doing it for money like most early ecologists? Because you have a passion for nature. You are passionate about what you are learning. Why travel the world and learn about other cultures? Because you care about the people, because you feel awe at the natural and man-made wonders. Most early scientists made no money except what they got from patrons, but they loved what they did, they wanted the prestige of discovery (pride) and they were passionate about their work. Otherwise everyone in Ancient Greece would have been landowners or farming serfs, and there would have been no interest in the arts or science, thus eliminating our basis for modern scientific method. Most of our inventions in daily life are born of necessity, not passion, but they could not have been made without practical application of theoretical ideas that gave no material benefit to the scientist who came up with them-- only the thrill of discovery. And even if you say "They do it because they will get more support from benefactors" keep in mind, what gain are benefactors getting, besides learning more about that which they are passionate about?

To an outside observer, suffering seems to be the most common emotion. And I guess if you're a starving orphan with AIDS in Africa maybe it is. But suffering's not the most common emotion, just the most visible. I feel very powerful love every single day for my family and my boyfriend. That doesn't mean I'm always singing it's praises or doodling hearts in my notebook. I feel passion every time I write or read something I'm interested in that makes me want to read on, but that doesn't mean I'm telling everyone about it. Suffering is lessened when there is emotional support from others, so we complain about it so that others will sympathize. So I guess to one who feels no emotions, it would appear to be the most prevalent simply by virtue of the fact that that's the one we seek support for. That's the one we talk about.

A person who feels no emotions is only living in the biological sense. If you can't see natural beauty, if you can't wonder at the cosmos or feel passion about your work or get angry with a friend about the idiocy of some politician; if you can't lessen the pain you can't fix through love or experience joy when something wonderful happens to you, you're not really living your life. You're just... living.

If you think this sounds socialist, decent sex ed would cut back on the problem all together...

2008-01-07T11:59:00.001-08:00

I was reading an article today about teen mothers in Denver, Colorado who are fighting for the right to have excused absences after they give birth to bond with their children and recover.

I don't think high school girls who get pregnant should ever keep their children. Either abort, or if you aren't comfortable with that, arrange for an adoption. Keeping a child at that young an age is selfish and foolish and I intend to teach my daughters that they are NOT going to be ready to care for a child until they are financially independent and gainfully employed. It has nothing to do with age or marital status, it has to do with financial ability to care for a child independently without being a drain on society.

That said... If a girl DOES keep her child, we have to do something for her. Otherwise she'll just drop out of school, and thus, not be able to properly care for her child. Maternity leave is important for their health and the health of the child-- I would say two months after discharge from the hospital, with work packets to keep up with the course load; one month if she gives the kid up for adoption, to heal. Maybe get volunteer tutors to help, or something (And if they don't come back after that, treat it the same way you would treat a normal teenager who skipped school-- go after the parents). Then, have a childcare facility attached to the school, but, have the caretakers of the children in the daycare be a few supervisory staff members/teachers and then students, who are taking a class in parenting skills and childcare. A teaching daycare, basically. Provide a free service to the teen moms (and teachers) in exchange for a unique opportunity to teach students what it is like to care for children, under the supervision and guidance of professionals. That way, kids who take the class won't want to have kids for a LONG time and mothers can come visit their kids, breastfeed them, etc, during study hall and lunch (they could eat lunch with the kids). Teen dads could even come visit their kids and play with them.

And yeah, wealthier families would put the kids into professional daycares rather than have high schoolers care for them, but the point would be that there would be a chance for girls (or teachers) who can't afford regular childcare to have care for their kids. You could even have slots for children whose mothers are working adults in other jobs, but can't afford normal daycare, for a fee that is greatly reduced from the normal cost of childcare. Basically have the same idea as a teaching hospital, just have it be for childcare.

What do you think?

The best isn't great and the worst is downright dangerous.

2008-01-04T20:01:00.000-08:00

I am writing something new, a short story about sexual education. It's not going to be published-- it's just to get out my frustration. Because I am frustrated. About the school system in this country, and how they teach lies and blatant falsehoods.

I get the urge to not teach children about sex in public schools. I get it. There's something to be said for parents teaching that sort of thing themselves, making sure that the kids know everything and are prepared. There's something to wanting to protect them from sexual relationships until they are older, even.

But lying? There is no excuse for a teacher to flat-out lie to a student about the subject matter they are teaching. I mean, a math teacher doesn't sit there and say "2+2=17 because I say so, and if anyone tells you otherwise they're lying." An English teacher doesn't say "Verbs go before the subject." Why can a health teacher say that condoms cause cancer?

And then, if they are honest and simply do not tell students the whole truth (ie don't lie, but don't tell them anything besides "it's best to wait"), it doesn't work and the teen birth rate is increasing. "But that means that we need to increase abstinence-only education! It's a failure of the comprehensive sex ed programs!" the abstinence proponents cry. If that's the case, why did teen birth rates drop steadily after the 90's when there was a massive campaign to teach children about sex, birth control and their own bodies, and the rise only happened after Bush implemented the abstinence-only education requirements to schools that wanted federal funding?

So if they teach abstinence, why aren't kids listening? These educators need to turn on the TV. When every channel and every song and every movie and every one of their peers presents sex as the best thing in the world, and their own hormones are telling them to do it as well, it's natural that they should give in. Abstinence-only educators tell kids not to have sex but they don't teach them HOW to not have sex.

Yeah, I know, that seems pretty obvious, right? You just don't have sex. But you'd be stunned how many kids think that anal sex isn't sex (when it has a higher rate of spreading STDs than vaginal sex) and withdrawal isn't sex (when it has a phenomenally high failure rate and there is a chance of getting pregnant even from pre-ejaculate) and that even if they do have sex, nothing can go wrong if their partner is "clean" and they use some ridiculous form of supposed birth control like douching afterwards (which pushes the sperm further into the vagina, thus increasing chance of pregnancy).

And parents don't teach their kids. Some do, sure, but most don't. They wait for the wedding day to tell their daughters to "just bear it" or slip their sons a dirty magazine and hope they figure it out. As a result, many women AND men think that women pee out of their vagina. I'm sorry, but there is no excuse for that kind of ignorance about human anatomy after a kid goes through twelve years of school. Not to mention how few people can find the clitoris, even their OWN clitoris.

So clearly we need comprehensive sex ed. Including, naturally, abstinence. BUT failure rates of abstinence should be quoted (while the perfect-use pregnancy rate of abstinence is 0%, the actual-use pregnancy rate-- the rate at which women get pregnant when they claim they have been abstinent or when they have taken an abstinence pledge-- is more like 54%), and even more importantly, kids should be taught that masturbation, athletics, yoga, etc can help alleviate desire to have sex and help maintain sexual abstinence. Part of that should be explaining how masturbation works, because while you would think it's a no-brainer, you'd be surprised.

We also need to teach kids about pornography, since they already have access to it. Kids need to understand pornography they might see and be taught to separate the realistic, good stuff-- usually amateurs-- from the fake, degrading, horrible porn one can find on the internet.

What else should all kids know, HAVE to know, about sex before graduation?

-Their own biology and the biology of the opposite sex, structure, terminology, function, and how to locate every single sexual part that is on the outside. This should include erogenous zones, etc.

-How attraction works and sexual orientation as understood by science.

-What, exactly, sex is; the advantages and disadvantages of having sex at various points in one's life, the different kinds of sexual intercourse, sexual outercourse,and foreplay.

-What consent is, what rape is, what gray area scenarios are and how to avoid them, what drug-induced rape is, what statutory rape is (including local laws), what intimate partner rape is, why rapes happen, laws about rape, and what someone should do if they are raped.

-What STDs are, how they are transmitted, symptoms, treatments, cures, and prevention with focus on abstinence and condom use, testing, and abolishing common myths

-What pregnancy is and how, biologically, a person can become pregnant; what sexual activities can result in pregnancy; why it's a good idea to wait to become pregnant until you are financially secure and independent; what are the best ways to prevent pregnancy (birth control); what are the worst ways to prevent pregnancy (myths); how to take a pregnancy test, what to do if you are pregnant (discussion of giving a kid up for adoption, abortion, or raising a kid on one's own with a LOT of help from the community and family).

-What to do if they want to become sexually active and how to know when they are ready.

-What to discuss with any and every sexual partner, like consent, age, contact information in case of a problem, STDs testing history, birth control discussion, and a discussion of limits (ie "I don't do anal").

-All about relationships, including what happens and what they should do if a relationship has problems or becomes abusive

.

When a sex ed class has all of that before a kid graduates or is able to drop out of school, I will consider it to be comprehensive. And I guarantee we would see immediate positive results-- fewer STDs, fewer date rapes, fewer teen pregnancies, maybe even fewer divorces and more tolerance over all-- if such a program could be reliably implemented with good teachers.

Cdesign proponentism

2007-12-20T17:15:00.000-08:00

From The Inoculated Mind:

"Intelligent Design was demonstrated to be merely a re-labeling of creationism in 1987 after a Supreme Court case had ruled that “creation science” in the classroom was unconstitutional. In that year, every instance of the words “creationist” and “creationism” in their high-school ID textbook were replaced with “Intelligent Design” and “Design Proponent.” The definitions were exactly the same. In one instance, “creationists” was improperly edited to become “cdesign proponentsists” - a breathtaking transitional fossil between creationism and intelligent design."

Thus:

“I am the very model of a C-Design Proponentsist” by Amadan

I am the very model of a c-design-proponentsist
The diametric opposite of all that is materialist
My engineering cert allows me call myself a scientist -
We won’t discuss those classes in Biology I might have missed

I work in a diploma mill I call a university
And there I struggle long and hard to teach the controversity
I welcome all opinions notwithstanding their diversity
I just reject the fact-based ones as atheist perversity

He just rejects the fact-based ones as atheist perversity
He just rejects the fact-based ones as atheist perversity
He just rejects the fact-based ones as goddam pervertersity

My publication record is quite pre-dispen-sensationalist
I regularly top the polls of books that are salvationist
Applause in the reviews keeps copies flying off the bookstore shelf
I couldn’t be more pleased if I had written the reviews myself

He couldn’t be more pleased if he had written the reviews himself
He wishes Amazon would keep his IP numbers to itself

When I go up for tenure I’ll submit my publication list
And if they ask for science then I’ll scream “Discriminationist!”
Religion has no place within the quest for natural knowledge
At least until I am the one who’s put in charge of [the] college

I’m waiting for the day in court when Darwin meets his Waterloo
[And] though I might find that testifying isn’t what I ought to do
I know that what’s in Genesis is strictly and completely true
It’s just a shame it’s stuck in a six-thousand-year-long peer review

He knows that what’s in Genesis is strictly and completely true
He knows that what’s in Genesis is strictly and completely true
He wishes that the IRS would let him see his research through

I claim that Dover came about because the judge was activist
I dazzle congregations with my jargon that’s distractivist
I never answer awkward questions even if you do insist
I really am the model of a c-design-proponentsist

He never answers awkward questions even if you do insist
He really is the model of a c-design-proponentsist!

This makes me happy.

Transsexuality

2007-11-20T11:42:00.000-08:00

Wisconsin is debating whether or not transgendered inmates should be allowed to take hormones in prison. And I'm wondering why there is still a question about this.

Okay, well, technically I'm not. Men have a very odd, perverse fear of MTF transsexuals, and some women pick up on it, too, from family members or friends or religious leaders. Ignoring the "god made you right" argument for now, Freud had a point-- most men are very attached to their penises and the thought of having that rather beloved organ removed is disturbing to them, even if it's not actually THEIR organ that is being removed. On top of that, there's the threat of mistaking a MTF transsexual for a woman, which, despite how much they may declare "I would always know," is always possible, like after a few beers.

Men are afraid of transsexuals. Women pick up on this fear and combine it with a sense of "biology must be right," thus joining in the anti-transsexual vibe. But honestly, it's just fear. And yes, there are many people who consider themselves transsexual who are actually disturbed, confused, whatever. But at the same time, there are out there some people that genuinely have very little wrong with them except that they feel they are in the wrong body (and thus may be depressed or have difficulty with interaction or whatever, but that's secondary). And then there's the argument, "Transgenderism is the only psychological disorder in which medicine decides that the problem is with the body, not the mind."

Well, no, not really. I have a pathological dislike of moles, particularly one mole that was on my skin and I hated for my entire childhood. I was actually at the point of scratching at it with my nails, thinking that it itched, whatever. It was a regular, benign mole, and my hatred of it was all in my head. Eventually, I talked to my therapist and to my mother and we decided to just get the stupid thing removed. Now I have a two-inch-long scar on my arm, which most people would consider to be worse than a tiny little mole. Me, I consider it SO much better. Healthy tissue, no need for surgery-- but in the end, it was easier and better for me to remove the offending part and get on with my life than to learn to accept it.

Now, obviously a mole is not the same thing as wanting to rearrange your whole body. But at the same time, my point is obvious-- people who do not want to change their minds will not be able to change their minds, and be unable to get the kind of help that might convince them to accept their body as it is. If you can determine that they will not later regret it, then they should have the ability to change any body parts they want. They should be allowed to be accepted as whatever gender they chose to be.

A while back a bill was introduced to Congress that would protect people from being discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. One version included gender identity and would have protected transgender and transsexual individuals. It did not pass, so they rewrote it to just cover homosexuals-- and it got through the House (it's still in the Senate, I think). Meanwhile, abuse of transsexuals is still not a hate crime in many places even if it is only done to the person because they are a transsexual. There is a constant insistence that transsexuals should have to mention their birth sex before even starting a relationship, and yet a non-transgender person does not have to describe the shape and size of their genitalia now and when they were born. I will concede that before it's time to get naked, pre-op transsexuals should mention that they still have male genitalia. But not before a date.

I do wonder what we can do to help the image of transgender people and help protect them from others...

Casualities of Casual Sex

2007-11-16T13:51:00.000-08:00

Here's the thing about casual sex: If you are informed and educated, healthy, your partner is informed, educated and healthy, and you both want it, then there is nothing wrong with casual sex.

If you and your partner are informed and educated, you will know not to drink or use drugs beforehand, to use birth control including but not limited to a condom (male or female, in case of accidental disease spreading), and not to expect anything from the other person afterwards except maybe another offer for "consequence-free" sex. If you are both healthy and mentally stable and use birth control there will not be any consequences. Thus, if that's the case, more power to you.

BUT. How many people, especially young people, drink or otherwise impair their judgement before having sex with someone they don't know well? How many don't understand birth control, or don't like how condoms feel? How many never check for diseases or know they have them and have sex anyway because they are impaired or they don't think they can transmit them via whatever they're doing? And how many go into it hoping that it will turn into something more long-term and are hurt when the other person doesn't call, or are having sex because they were abused or hurt in the past?

Maybe you are into casual sex and are none of the above things. But if the OTHER person is, you're in just as much trouble as they are. So go, have sex all you want, it is your choice; but please, do it with people you can trust. People who think there is nothing wrong with this choice don't seem to understand that in our world as it is today, casual sex with people you do not know and trust is very, very risky-- because you might get hurt, or you might hurt someone else.

That said, there is another problem from casual sex-- by making it an expected norm, we've labeled everyone who doesn't engage in it as either frigid or religious. The frigid/whore (or whipped/commitmentphobe) dichotomy is alive and well and it's perpetuated both by the "save it for marriage" types and the "sex please, and lots of it" types. Those of us who chose to only have sex in committed relationships, or to wait, often feel pressure from all sides to pick one or the other when in fact it is our body and we should be allowed to do what we want with it.

And almost everyone is guilty of it. If you've never heard of a party-girl type with many multiple partners and thought, "That's kind of... slutty..." then you've probably heard of some girl saying she'll wait for marriage and thought "She's just doing it because she's been brainwashed by her parents and her religion." Guys get it too-- they either sleep around a lot and are thought of as "afraid of commitment" or "misogynistic" or they never sleep around and they're "whipped" by some girl or a loser.

Sometimes I think humans MUST be designed to see the world in black and white. Nothing else explains why we are always so insistent that something can be one thing or another but not in between. Same as me or not like me but not in between. Democrat or Republican but not a mixture. Slutty or frigid but not in between. We actually have to fight that instinct. And we definitely should.

Let's Update the Divorce Courts, Shall We?

2007-11-13T06:23:00.000-08:00

I've said before I don't believe we should have alimony. That's not exactly true. The thing is, alimony came about when wives were expected to stay at home after marriage, thus preventing them from advancing their career, and making it impossible for them to get a job afterwards since they had no marketable skills. When it was conceived, it was a good thing, since it meant that women were not left without any income after the divorce.

However, today alimony is used as a revenge tool to bilk the wealthier partners out of their money. Many people who receive alimony are employable or even have a job, they just want to maintain their previous lifestyle.

So my view on alimony is this: If both partners are employed full time, there should be no alimony. Ever. Clearly they can support themselves (though they might require child support).

Now, if one partner chose to be employed at a job for which the part-time pay puts them beneath the poverty line, at the time of the divorce, due to reasons directly relating to the marriage (to maintain the household or to care for children), then the partner who was employed full-time should have to pay the part-time employed partner some court-determined amount that is just enough to raise them above the poverty line, but is not enough to either lower the breadwinner's income BENEATH the poverty line or to raise them up extravagantly high. Then, the alimony would end as soon as the partner with the part-time job either got a full-time job or remarried.

So for example, let's say partner A makes $20,000 a year and B makes $5,000 a year, and the poverty line is $10,000 a year. A would have to pay B $5,000 a year in alimony. But if A made 100,000 a year and B made $5,000 a year, B would still only get $5,000 a year, and if A made only $12,000 a year, B could get no more than $2,000 a year.

If one partner was not employed at all at the time of the divorce, the same rule as above should apply, maximum $10,000 a year until they get a job or remarry. However, the partner had to again be unemployed for reasons relating to the marriage-- because they chose to stay at home and maintain the household or, more significantly, to raise the children. If they are disabled or they wanted to pursue other interests, then they are not the other partner's responsibility.

And if neither partner is employed, neither should have to pay alimony, even if one of them gets a job after the divorce. Only exception would be if you could somehow prove that one of the spouses quit their job to prevent having to pay alimony to the other.

All of this excludes child support, of course, so the primary caretaker, if they are unemployed, shouldn't not have to sustain their children at that level. My only complaint is with alimony (glorified welfare).

Now, I know that there are "no-fault" laws but there are definitely situations where a person shouldn't have to pay alimony even if they meet the above criteria. For example, if the marriage was shorter than three years, the unemployed partner can probably go back to their previous job. Also applies if the unemployment was for less than three years. If you can prove that the person wasn't actually staying home for the kids or to maintain the house, they shouldn't get alimony. If they were abusive to the working spouse, they shouldn't get alimony. Basically it would have to be decided by a court, but while child support can be as high as necessary, alimony should be very low, and only for homemakers who have made themselves hard to employ through their marriage.

Also, no partner should get more than 50% of the joint assets, and not a penny of the assets that are in their spouse's name alone. If they were foolish enough to not keep either their own or a joint (if they are the less well-off) account, it is their own fault.

Divorce penalizes the rich and the hard working. It shouldn't penalize anyone. People have a legal responsibility to take care of their dependents (children), but not their spouses. I think it's time the divorce courts acknowledged that.

Nuclear Terrorism on Mecca

2007-11-11T19:21:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting topic Ryter and I were discussing last night.

What would happen if an American (or Israeli) dropped a nuke on Mecca?

Not the country-- an individual. The US government wouldn't do that unless something specific provoked it, like Saudi Arabian Islamic terrorists nuked Washington, and even then it would be doubtful. Israel would wait until they were nuked first. But if a terrorist group of Islamic extremists could fly planes into the World Trade Center, an American anti-Muslim extremist could theoretically smuggle in or drop a nuclear bomb on Mecca.

Then what?

Well, if it was an American, I'd guess the US would immediately find all contacts of the individual and turn over anyone who had knowledge of or involvement in the plan for trial and execution. We'd also send as much aid as possible to the area, trying to make reparations and prove to the world that it wasn't our doing and we don't support terrorists.

Meanwhile the entire Muslim world would hate us anyway, and eventually, a world war would break out.

And if it was an Israeli, I'd guess Israel would also make reparations, but in a kind of half-hearted way, due to international pressure. Then there would be a war between every single Muslim nation and Israel, and possibly with the US allying with Israel.

Meanwhile, what would happen to Mecca?

I am reminded of the Ganges River in India. Hinduism states that the Ganges is sacred, and bathing in it helps a person to obtain salvation. Drinking the water at the end of your life will take your soul to heaven. Spreading of ashes there is also holy.

But the Ganges River itself runs through some of the most populous areas of India. It is thus filled with untreated raw sewage, runoff from the leather industries, partially burnt or unburnt human remains, and livestock corpses. It is a steaming cesspool of filth and disease, and the Hindus still come. They come, they bathe, they get sick. They touch this vile, polluted, revolting river because they consider it holy.

So I believe the Muslims would still go to Mecca. They would go to the radioactive ruins of Mecca and then die slowly of radiation poisoning. Not all of them, but many. So nuking a site that people of a faith MUST go to, the terrorist would be committing a crime against humanity ten times worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because you would kill not only the million or so inhabitants, but also the pilgrims (especially if it was during the hajj, with four million pilgrims), and give radiation poisoning to millions of Muslims who would try to go at some point before the fallout cleared. Most Muslims would not go before they had children and were old and able to die, so the population would not decrease.

The trouble is that the ground itself is holy. It's not just the Black Stone and the Zamzam Well and the Kaaba. That is the land where Muhammad walked, and thus, it would be holy even if to touch it was to guarantee a long, slow, painful death.

-----------------------------------------

I have to say, if I ruled the world, I would turn Mecca into the Muslim version of the Holy See-- a separate, unique state not controlled by the country it is within. I'd also say they had to allow non-Muslims to visit (but not during the hajj, because of the sheer volumes of pilgrims they already must handle). I would love to see Mecca some day-- I would even wear a hijab for respect if it was asked of me-- but I never will be able to, because Saudi Arabia has banned all non-Muslims from entering the city. Even if that were not the case, I would be hesitant to go anywhere in Saudi Arabia because of Sharia law.

It saddens me to think of all the ancient holy cities-- Mecca, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Cairo, and more-- that I would not be safe in as a woman, as a American, and as a non-religious person. So much history, and it is trapped in a place filled with hate and war. It feels sometimes like the land there is just so sick of dealing with humanity that it almost NEEDS fallout just to give it a chance to breathe, to take a break from tens of thousands of years of civilization. And yet, what we would lose would be unbearable, for while Africa is where we were born, the Middle East is where we grew, and where we became what we are today.

Patriarchy : Radical Feminists :: Communist Espionage : 1950's Politicians

2007-11-09T12:19:00.000-08:00

This is very long, but it's been building up in me for a while now.

The definition of a patriarchy: social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; broadly: control by men of a disproportionately large share of power.

Is Western white middle-class and upper-class a patriarchy?

Well, let's examine it. Legal dependence of wives-- in Western society, wives are legally independent. Reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line-- well, descent, yes. But that's just a name and if a father is absent or has a dumb name kids can be named for their mother. It's really more the choice of the parents, it's just that traditionalism says it's the guy's name. But moving on, inheritance in our society unless specified goes to the nearest living relative-- the oldest child or a sibling-- and doesn't have to remain in the male line.

Is the father the head of the clan or family? Well, let's think. Mothers are usually working. They are also expected to be the "mature" parent-- dads can play with their kids and be lovable goofballs, but moms have to be authoritarian. In most households today, the mom handles the day-to-day budget (because she buys food and household necessities); she raises the children and oversees their well being; she controls when the couple has sex; heck, she even gets final say in decorating. Now, I'm talking absolutes-- we don't all have this dynamic-- but it is what society, particularly the media, tells us it should be. Mothers "should" be calm, cool, collected, and capable of both working and managing the household, and they should reign supreme in their homes. For white, Western, middle-class and upper-class society, the mother is the head of the family.

According to the strict sociological definition of a patriarchy, we are not a patriarchy. We are a mixture. Aspects of our culture are patriarchal still, like names. Other aspects are egalitarian, like inheritance and dependency laws. And some have even become matriarchal, like who is the head of the household.

Of course, there are some subsets in our culture where not the case, but the fact is that unless you are a devout religious person, uneducated, of a minority that has been traditionally uneducated, an immigrant, or not living in Western culture, you do NOT live in a sociological patriarchy no matter how much you want to complain about one.

But what of the second part, the broader definition? "Control by men of a disproportionately large share of power?" It is undeniable that more men that women are in political office. But why? We have ONE presidential candidate this year who is female. People don't tend to vote solely on the sex of their candidate-- but they can't vote for a woman if a woman doesn't run. I look at the average ballot and there are three or four candidates and maybe one is female. Women aren't running for office-- they are choosing not to. Therefore, until you can prove that when equal numbers of men and women run for public office men will STILL control the political power in disproportionate numbers, I will withhold judgment about it. However, I suspect that were that the case, we would have a much more egalitarian situation.

Why aren't women in politics, then? Surely it is because the men are oppressing them somehow!

...Well, not really. Women avoid politics for a variety of reasons, but the most common ones I've heard are "I wouldn't do national politics because I'd be away from home too much," "I don't want to run for office because politics are nasty and I don't want to have every bit of my past scrutinized," "I don't want that kind of attention, if I become famous I want it to be for _________," and "I wouldn't get elected because I am _______ (a minority/an atheist/uneducated/not pretty enough for TV/too liberal for my area/too conservative for my area)."

Which are all valid reasons to not want to run for office, and the difference is that while many women take them as a sign they shouldn't run, many men just ignore them, and put up with their past being scrutinized, and put up with the attention. I don't know why that is the case-- social conditioning or hardwiring-- but it is the case.

Still, if we live in a political patriarchy you can't blame the men. Most of them would be happy to vote for you if you ran and agreed with them on the issues. Power doesn't fall into anyone's lap, you have to go out and GET it.

And economic power? Many wealthy people in this nation are men. That's because as a WHOLE (not individuals), men are more likely to go into business, or computer science and then invent something, and that's where the money is. Women are more likely to go to college (we make up a larger percentage of college attendees than men except in the computer sciences, theoretical math, and physics) and get jobs that relate to their specific major, but then once they start working, what happens?

Women have to take time off for maternity leave if they want biological children. That's obvious. Most men don't (can't, sometimes won't) take paternity leave, though, and that's a big chunk of time. Then because the women are the head of the household and society says they need to work AND raise children properly, they chose jobs for their flexible hours and benefits, not for their ambitiousness. Naturally those jobs are not as likely to get them up into the CEO rankings. As terrible as it sounds, from an economic position paying women less for the same work makes sense-- women are the ones who stay home to care for sick kids, they have maternity leave, they avoid overtime to get home, and they aren't as likely to push for advancement. This is not universal, but it is common enough that you have to consider the employer's position (note: I'm not saying having a wage gap for the same work isn't wrong).

Some feminists will counter by saying "Women should not have to meet the default standard set by men." So should men have to meet the default set by women? At times, sure. Mothers and fathers should spend equal time off work with sick kids, for example. But women have set an impossibly HIGH female standard-- not just impossible for men, but also for WOMEN. Why are so many women feeling stressed out, overworked, put upon? Because they are fulfilling the "superwoman" ideal, the high-powered executive mom who comes home, cares for the kids and maintains the household, and is always composed and cool-headed. Women will make themselves miserable living like that. Should they go back to being housewives? Of course not, it makes no sense economically to have half your healthy adult population staying in the home, and many women would be even less happy in that situation. But instead, women need to change the image of themselves-- they need to make themselves seem LESS together, LESS perfect, and meanwhile encourage their husbands or male partners to take a more active role in the household-- which doesn't mean giving him assigned chores to do, it means letting them pick wall colors and deciding together if you have the time or money to take little Susie to ballet class twice a week. And they need to teach their sons and daughters that maintaining the household and raising the children is not the province of EITHER parent. In a few generations, you'd see equality in home life-- and once you have men having the same demands at home as women do now, the workplace will be increasingly accommodating towards parents and potential parents, and men and women will see more equality there.

So my points are:

1. Westernized, educated, middle or upper class Americans (or Western Europeans, Australians, etc) are not living in a strict patriarchy.

2. In the broader sense, perhaps we are living in a patriarchy, but that can change easily in time if women approach the issue from the right direction-- which does NOT mean sitting around bemoaning "The Patriarchy!" or fire-bombing the homes of conservative men in the public sphere (however fun the latter might be).

What should women do to affect change?

1. Stop complaining. It alienates people and does little good. Instead, look for solutions.

2. Start small. The smaller the change, the more likely it will slide past the notice of most people-- and the more likely that you will later get what you REALLY want. Exceptions are for life-and-death situations, like fighting domestic violence or hate crimes.

3. Go into politics. Want to change the world? Your vote's not THAT important (but vote anyway). But if you go into politics, you can be a voice for many people. Plus, then you get more women in politics, which is what feminism wants. Even if you don't think you'll get elected, run anyway. Get your opinion out there. And encourage other women to run too, even if it's just for mayor of Podunksville.

4. Go into jobs that will make you a lot of money, and do a damn good job at them. That's how you'll get economic power. Be the next Donald Trump with a business empire or invent a processing system that makes you billions. The only thing holding women back from economic power is ambition. And when you do start making billions, start giving it all away-- want to be loved and remembered by millions? Be an Oprah or a Mother Teresa; and Oprah doesn't have to trudge through shit unless she wants to.

5. Don't try to be superwoman (unless you want to be Oprah). No one seems to get that this attitude is not helpful to feminism. Women can't set the standards for themselves higher than the standards for men, because if they fail, it makes them seem weak. So split household management with your spouse (not just chores). Don't take charge at home unless you have a higher standard of cleanliness you need maintained. Your life won't be perfect, but you will be helping a movement.

6. When it comes to household tasks, sons and daughters are equal. They'll live alone someday, they need to do everything. Teach (or have your spouse teach) them to do their own laundry properly, to vacuum and pick up after themselves, to scrub toilets and mow the lawn. Teach them to cook, too, as it's helpful for #5 when your kids can make you dinner after you get back from work. Household management can and should be gender-neutral, as I said before.

7. Never, ever assume you are oppressed. Instead, assume you are on top of the world, the one in power. Besides making you feel better, this will make other people treat you like you are in control too. It sounds like just "positive thinking" but people assume that whoever is in charge will make themselves known as such and will know what to do. It works.

8. Get into show business, and write/produce movies or TV shows where the man is capable and intelligent, but the woman is not weak. I want to see one TV couple, somewhere, where neither partner is weaker than the other. I'm sick of bumbling goofball dads whose kids don't listen to them, but I don't want to go back to the strong man of the house and the weak, delicate woman who cooks his dinners and tells the kids "Just wait 'til your father gets home!" either. Kids absorb so much of what they perceive as a "normal" family from what they see on TV (I know, scary, huh?), so if the media was more egalitarian, kids would pick up on that. But that can't be done as a gimmick, either.

That and a few generations could change the world. Religious revival is going out anyway.

Now, I want to make one thing clear-- this does not apply to many, many women out there. The vast overwhelming majority of 3rd world and developing nations are truly patriarchal. I do not deny that Saudi Arabia is a patriarchy or even, say, parts of Eastern Europe. It also doesn't apply to immigrant families and pockets of immigrant communities (immigrants themselves and a few generations removed if they don't Westernize), because many of them take the values and family dynamics from the "old country." It also only minimally applies to anyone who is uneducated, especially if they are uneducated and a minority, because I don't know enough about their lives to fairly discuss them. And I acknowledge that in some places religious communities are patriarchal and that is passed on to the mainstream in that area.

But your average "FIGHT THE PATRIARCHY!" feminist is white, educated, from a middle or upper class background, and living in the Western world. They are not truly oppressed, and by focusing on their own "oppression" instead of working to help others who genuinely need help, they are doing the world a great disservice.

Read More:

Feminism 101 talks about the concept of patriarchy as perceived by feminists.
Patriarchy as defined by Wikipedia.
More on feminist views of patriarchy.
Dads on TV, courtesy of MSN.com.
Children and television-- I think it's a bit outdated, but the point-- that kids learn gender roles from TV-- stands.

The Victorian woman in the black and white photo is Victoria Woodhull, a very interesting character who was more than a little ahead of her time.

Is hospital birth traumatic?

2007-11-08T17:49:00.000-08:00

I've read a bunch of stuff comparing home birth to hospital birth lately and I've been thinking about it a lot. The thing is, giving birth at home is higher risk. This is undeniable. Fetal mortality or injury happens more frequently. The data is there.

But at the same time... We have babies who are born who are GROTESQUELY deformed, who normally would not live through birth, and for good reason. Obstetrics often interferes with natural processes, and while it is the mother's choice if she wants to go to such extremes for an infant who will die soon anyway, or need massive surgery, or something, in this country the law says we have to save every child we can at birth. Home birth probably can be called more "natural" birth because deformed babies who shouldn't survive are less likely to.

And there is truth in the "traumatic" nature of hospital births-- many, many doctors are pricks who treat all their patients like idiots, and many OBs will severely disrespect the mother by, say, assuming she'll change her mind, or inducing labor when they shouldn't, or manhandling her. Should all efforts be made to save the baby? Yes. But there are a lot of processes that are done in hospitals frequently not because of the health of the mom or the baby, but because of convenience.

Episiotomies are a classic example. Most women don't need episiotomies. They might tear, but tearing will heal, and there are non-invasive methods to prevent tearing. Episiotomies should only be done if the vagina can't naturally stretch for some reason (like the birth is very, very fast), the baby is actually impeded from exiting, there is fetal distress (like his heart rate stops) and they need to resuscitate, or in some cases, if there's a breech birth (as in the picture at right, a footling breech). Many OBs do episiotomies to speed things along when they aren't needed, and what's worse, many of them used to sew up the vulva tighter than was needed, calling it a "Daddy stitch." I don't know how common that is today, though. Unnecessary episiotomies are a danger (of infection, of painful healing) that needn't be taken.

Many people describe "birth trauma" as originating from being touched or entered without direct consent. This one kind of bugs me, because how hard is is before the labor really gets going to say, "I may need to touch you in this way for this reason, in this way for this reason, in this way for THIS reason..." and then do a quick warning before actually touching? There was a story on the Navelgazing Midwife's blog about a woman who had a doctor put her hand up her vagina and into her uterus, without any sort of pain killer, with no more warning than "Brace yourself, sweetie, this is gonna hurt." Would it be so hard to say, "I need to do thus-and-such or you will have complications, and I have to put my hand up there, and would you like a shot? But I have to do it soon."

I mean, yes, there are times when things are happening too fast to really ask for permission every time you touch between the woman's legs, but not always. The least a doctor can do is not offer an epidural more than once until the woman asks for one (it's not just about doing it "naturally"-- I know, for example, that I will want to wait until I feel it is unbearable before I get an epidural simply because I don't like any meds that I don't really, really need), and neither allow the nurses to say disrespectful or manipulative things nor say them themselves.

They should really have a better code for OBs, more specific than the Hippocratic. There's a lot of things they do that they shouldn't or should do a little differently. Actually, gynecologists and ER docs in general need a better code for handling female reproductive systems, especially for rape tests, which if they are not done properly can feel very invasive. I can't remember where I was reading this (Feministing?), but someone was talking about a doctor who brought students in to see the pattern of bruising on her thighs after she was raped, despite never clarifying with her that that was okay, and tried to take pictures for the jury if she decided to go to trial. I was reading that and thinking, uh, why couldn't they cover her genitals with a cloth or something, and just take pictures of her thighs? It would still show the evidence without making her feel violated.

My feeling on home birth is it's okay as long as one accepts the higher risks, and those risks are made clear. I also think that direct-entry midwives (who require only on-the-job training and maybe a few classes) should have much stricter regulations and certification as such. And hospital birth should be done in a more delicate, caring manner. Women at that time are flooded with hormones, they need to have people who understand their emotional needs. And no doctor should ever treat a woman with less respect, consideration and care because she was a home birth transfer to the hospital after a complication.

And one more thing-- unless the baby is going to be put up for adoption or is in the NICU, the mother should get to hold the baby either right after the birth or the second she (the mother) wakes up. I'm of the opinion that it should be quickly wipe down, towel off, check for immediate problems and hand to the mother, or the father if the mother is under anesthesia at the time. That sort of thing rarely causes problems and means the world to parents.

Men's docs probably have similar problems with making men feel violated, like in proctology, but it comes up less often and I want to be an OB/gyn, so naturally I'm focusing on that issue.

To find out more, here's what I've been reading:

Navelgazing Midwife is a natural birth and home birth advocate and works as a midwife/birth coach.
The Homebirth Debate Blog exposes some of the dangers of home birth and the problems that come from home birth advocacy. Caution-- the writer is very anti-home birth. However, she cites real articles and studies so you can read those.

Random Musing

2007-11-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think if modern feminists stopped focusing on children's toys, women's fashion, chivalry, and how middle-class white Western women like themselves were being oppressed, and directed their collective energy completely towards fighting domestic violence and countries where girls cannot walk to school without being raped, the latter problems might not be so prevalent-- and might even be abolished.

Teaching Gender Roles To Children

2007-11-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

From this Feministing post...

I believe in abolishing gender roles.

I don't believe in doing it immediately, or forcing my kids to not have them.

It's too hard on the kids. That's all there is to it. Childhood should not be about meeting some idealized world view, it should be about learning how to work with the world you have.

So my kids will ALL have the same kinds of toys that they share, but they will have to ask for them. For babies and toddlers, might as well share everything. When they can talk, though, I will give them the toys they ask for, even if the girls only want dolls and the boys only want trucks.

If my son asks for a doll, it won't be frilly and girly and pink. It will be something like a neutral-gender baby doll in a green or yellow onesie. My sons will probably play with plastic food (little boys LOVE play food, in my experience). My daughters will probably play with trucks and Legos and trains. Pink and frills should be avoided for boy's toys, though, because pink is SO connected with girls (though honestly, who has a pink playhouse for EITHER gender?). But that doesn't mean they can't have dolls, it means those dolls have to be a bit more boyish or neutral in appearance. And I won't buy girl clothes for my sons or boy clothes for my daughters unless I learn that they're transgender. Girls should have girl hairstyles and clothes until the secondary sex characteristics start to come in, and the same is true for boys (long hair's okay, but not like, pigtails or a high ponytail). That will do them well in school, to not be mistaken for the wrong gender. And it won't really hurt them, because while it clearly says "boys and girls are different" it doesn't really say "boys are better than girls." Just that they're different. Which they are.

And as for teaching them household gender roles? My mom taught me and my sister how to cook and do our laundry when we were preteens but my brother is just now learning at almost 18 years old. My kids will all learn to cook, clean, fix things around the house, change flat tires, do laundry and go grocery shopping, and not once do I intend to say "This way you can impress a guy someday!" like my dad said. Instead, I'll say, "You need to know this when you live on your own" because they do. Besides, any household I'm in will probably involve a stay-at-home or working-from-home dad anyway (medical career), so it's not like they'll get the impression that Mommy has to do all the chores and raise the kids.

And yes, I hope I'll teach my kids to suppress their emotions in public, but share them at home, because that's how you become successful. And yeah, that's a male gender role. So what? It's also a GOOD IDEA. Because whatever people might say, the surest way to survive school without, I don't know, dropping out, or in my case ATTEMPTING SUICIDE, is to learn to control your emotions in public and vent in private. And after I learned, I didn't suppress my emotions completely. I talked to my parents, I took it out at home, I complained to friends-- but in public, I could be strong.

I'm not as good at it as I should be, but I'm learning. The value of it is that no matter how progressive the people around you are, they will, on some subconscious level, take displays of emotion as weak. You are more likely to get hired if you seem cool and collected. You're more likely to make new friends if people don't perceive you as moody. Of course, you need ways to express those emotions, so I'd also teach that once you trust someone, you can share things like that with them. You can cry in front of someone you trust. But you will find life a lot easier to face if you can maintain a mask if need be.

Other "male" or "female" traits: being aggressive or passive (probably discourage both in favor of assertiveness-- and knowing what battles you can win) or becoming the breadwinner (again, I'm going into medicine and I fall for writers. Chances are I, the mother, will be the breadwinner).

What I don't agree with are feminists who insist on teaching their children to be "gender neutral" by essentially making them feminine-- using the worst aspects of feminine nature. Not in terms of the toys they play with, but in terms of teaching them that it's okay to be emotional in public or that competitiveness is bad, who lie to them and say things like "pink isn't a girl color" despite the fact that society decides what things are gender-specific and society says pink is a girl color. You have to make sure they actually understand the way the world works, even if you think the way the world works is wrong.

I look at it like this. I will tell my children not to have sex until they are 18 and legal adults and to make sure their partner is the same. I think that the time a person starts sex is not contingent on age, but on maturity and each person reaches that point at a different age. But to survive in modern society, a person should not have sex until they and their partner are 18. Otherwise, archaic laws or angry parents or double standards in high school could make their lives miserable. It's the same way with gender roles. A person needs to understand gender roles and be able to conform to them if they want to to get by, even though they should not exist.

Continue telling me how wrong I am in the comments if you like.

Incest Laws

2007-10-30T13:36:00.000-07:00

So, social libertarians out there-- which should be illegal?

A man marries his biological sister whom he was raised with and has two kids.

A woman marries her biological brother whom she was raised with, but one or both of them is sterile.

A man marries his adopted sister, who was adopted at age 3.

A woman marries her adopted brother, who was taken in at age 12.

A man marries his stepsister. Their parents were married when they were five.

A woman marries her stepbrother. Their parents were married when they were twenty.

A man marries his half-sister but one or both of them are sterile.

A woman marries her half-brother and they have kids.

A man marries his biological sister-- whom he was separated from at birth and didn't meet until adulthood. They have kids.

Same scenario as above, with sterility as a factor.

First cousins marry and have children.

First cousins marry and have no children.

Second cousins?

An aunt and a nephew?

Where are the lines?

My outlook on it-- it should be illegal under all circumstances for two full-blood siblings who were raised together to marry and/or have children. People like that have clear mental issues and their kids would be messed up, physically from inbreeding and mentally as well.

If one or both proves sterility? Doesn't matter. Still the mental issue, potential for abuse, etc. Should they be jailed if they are incestuous? Nah. Order them into counseling and set up a restraining order to keep them apart.

What if they didn't know each other as children, though? If they met as adults? Well, this is rare enough that I figure that saying they can marry as long as they prove sterility first, for the sake of any kids. They weren't raised together. They may not even have known for a while. They're probably messed up a bit, but not the same as if they had been raised together.

I've always thought the guidelines should be:

-If they were raised in the same household since before one or both hit puberty, no marriage. Even if they weren't biologically related at all. If they weren't, then they should be able to marry. This wouldn't apply to large group homes or anything, naturally, only family situations where they are raised as siblings. There is a big potential for abuse there and on top of that to be attracted to someone whom you perceive as a sibling and have always perceived as a sibling is a sign of mental issues. Natural hormones developed from growing up in the same household should have made your siblings and parents seem sexually gross to you.

-If they are immediate family, full-blood or half-blood, or they are the aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew of their potential spouse, they should not be allowed to have children. Well, more specifically, they should not be allowed to marry unless they prove sterility, and if they have children they should not be allowed to raise those children themselves. Also, they shouldn't be allowed to adopt, because we really don't want whatever made them think this wasn't vile to get passed on to the next generation, and there's too much emotional baggage involved anyway. If there is sterility and the first guideline doesn't apply, they should be able to marry.

-If they are first-cousins, they should be able to marry as long as the first guideline doesn't apply. However, double first cousins-- ones that are cousins though more than one line-- shouldn't be able to have kids. North Carolina has the right idea with the distinction between double cousins and regular cousins, I think.

And of course all the laws should be made to include homosexual relationships, which should be treated the exact same way, only in all cases, of course, the sterility would be guaranteed, and they shouldn't be allowed to adopt. Two full-blood sisters shouldn't be able to marry. An uncle and nephew? Sure, as long as there's no sign of child abuse previously and both are of age. However, if your brother and your son want to get married, I think you need to seriously consider seppuku. Or at least a nice, comforting lobotomy and a change of identity.

And yes, the very thought of it makes me feel icky. Incest in any form to anyone closer than like a third cousin makes me feel icky (that's why it's nice that my boyfriend is a completely different ethnicity). It's gross. It's taboo. There is very little redeeming about it and it should be REALLY, REALLY discouraged by religions, parents, teachers, society as a whole... but that doesn't mean it should always be illegal. Laws should protect people from other people, protect minors from everything, and protect the mentally disturbed from themselves. So in many cases where there's a likelihood that it's not a case of mental issues, and there are no kids, there are no victims. It's gross, but then again, so are lots of legal things, like open-casket funerals, scat porn, rocky mountain oysters and Michael Jackson's face.

In America, Sex Scares YOU!

2007-10-27T21:15:00.000-07:00

Ah, Halloween costumes. The time of year where children get to dress up like ghosts and witches and adults get to dress up like sexy ghosts and sexy witches.

Dear God, Halloween dance Friday night-- five French maids, about five sexy witches of some sort, a sexy nurse, two schoolgirls, a sexy 1920's gambler, a sexy angel, a sexy Hogwarts witch, a few sexy pirates and at least four prostitutes, or as I like to call them, "sexy sexies."

Which I actually don't mind because there weren't any kids there, though I do wish more people had been creative about it, or that there was at least more options in stores (my best friend Vivacia had HORRIBLE luck finding one and finally went with the pirate idea, though she wears pants with it). Don't get me wrong, though, I like sexy Halloween costumes. They're fun and they let people get away with letting down their repressions. I only wish that guys had sexy costumes, too. I have seen "Muscle Man," "Breathalyzer" (guess where you blow), and "Hefner," which count as adult costumes, plus couples costumes, which are rarely anything BUT dirty.

The only objections I have towards the sexification of Halloween is a) People who wear sexy/revealing costumes around their kids or to hand out candy-- come ON, set a good example! or b) when the KIDS are wearing sexy costumes. Honestly, when we went to the Halloween store to get Ryter a Byzantine soldier costume, they had one labeled "Child's French Maid." Child French Maid? Then "Preteen Girl Firefighter" which was really a "sexy firefighter" for kids, and pretty much half of all the girl's costumes-- for YOUNG girls, not even TEENAGERS-- were basically smaller versions of the adult women's costumes. The high school cheerleader costumes bared the midriff. REAL high school cheerleaders don't even show their midriff!

For that, I partially blame parents who can't say no to their kids (which is why they would buy that sort of thing) but also, I blame the manufacturers. What designer thought, Oh, let's make the kids French Maid costumes! and got away with it? I mean, maid costumes, maybe, but these are like SHORT skirts. And why does a female prisoner costume have to have a skirt? Is there anything wrong with making it pants? Or a firefighter, referee, police woman or army officer in camouflage? Why do we have "harem girls," can't they just be an "Arabian princess" or a "genie," and come on, cover the stomach, chances are she's going outside in cold fall weather anyway. It wouldn't be hard and it would make a world of difference.

Plus, in Halloween stores, they should have a kid's section, and then a separate, clearly marked (more than just a sign hanging over it, I'm thinking like how Barnes and Nobles has an arch over the one entrance to the kid's books section) adult section, with the normal costumes in one area and the "sexy" or suggestive ones in another. That way adults can dress however they want and have fun with it, and kids won't be exposed to the more obvious innuendo costumes.

Letting a child make their own choices does not mean letting them become sexualized at a young age. If they say "I want to be a prisoner!" and point to the striped dress, is it that hard to say, "Oh, great idea! But that will be really cold for trick-or-treating, and prisoners don't really dress like that-- why don't we get you a costume that covers more of your legs?" And if they whine, tell them that you could always MAKE them a Halloween costume-- either you're a good enough clothing maker that they'll love it, or you aren't, and they'll shut up.

Ephebophilia is Not Sick and Wrong, Just Skeezy

2007-10-26T12:32:00.000-07:00

Genarlow Wilson was freed today. Thank GOD.

Sex laws in this country are ridiculous. They either seek to control women or to let women control men, never anything in between.

For the sake of this argument I am excluding pedophilia (sexual assault on someone who has not undergone puberty).

Anyway.

Statutory rape laws-- I call these "Daddy's Little Girl" laws because they all seem to say, "Oh, my precious little baby would NEVER want sex, that man must have COERCED her!" Yeah, right. My opinion is that if a teenager actually lies about her age-- as in, tells a person over the age of consent that s/he is over the age of consent-- then there should be a slight punishment for not bothering to check, never more than a few months in prison. What's more, S/HE should be punished for lying to the man or woman who slept with her/him. I'm thinking like a year of community service plus paying damages to the "offender."

However, if s/he merely lies by omission-- never says one way or another what his/her age is-- the underage person shouldn't be punished, but it should be a slightly reduced sentence for the overage person as opposed to if they actually knew beforehand their age.

Cases of ephebophilia-- and please, let's call it that, none of this "statuatory rape" or "pedophilia" crap, call it what it is-- sex with a teenager-- should be determined based on both consent, and if that consent was coerced somehow-- promising not to tell about some misdeed, or something. There is a difference between actually taking advantage of someone and only taking advantage of them because they're not really old enough to know better.

And for Pete's sake, people, it's not statutory if they're BOTH under the age of consent, if one is and the other is less than five years older than them, or if the older person was mentally incapacitated somehow, like if they were high. Stupid and unfortunate, but not statutory (it could be sexual assault, though, if s/he didn't consent). Age-based consent isn't like normal consent. Normal consent is cut and dry-- yes or no. Age-based consent is "Is she old enough? What if she's lying? Is that ID fake?" You have to cut people some slack.

At the same time, it's kind of skeezy to want to have sex with young teenagers. I'm just saying you shouldn't attack a guy because he thought that young, hot girl was worthy of attention and she turned out to be a year too young. Then again, I also think all drugs should be legal for people over the age of 18 and the drinking age should be lowered etc, etc. So clearly, I am a Libertarian idiot, at least according to most liberals.

Death and Taxes

2007-10-21T07:15:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one who thinks there should be taxes on children, instead of tax breaks for them? Honestly. I know that you have to pay for your kid too but with so many programs designed to HELP kids and people who have them there should really be some kind of tax. That might also discourage people from having a bazillion kids. Honestly, especially if SCHIP ever gets passed, the government will be covering education and health care and after-school programs and scholarships and Social Services... and yet, we pay LESS in taxes when we have biological children.

Of course, this shouldn't apply to adopted children, because in that case the parents usually already have to pay an adoption fee and go through a huge hassle, and by adopting children who need homes they are performing a service for the community as well as gaining a child. Adoptive parents should get tax breaks still, and if the kid was older at the time of adoption, they should get more of a tax break. That might encourage some people to adopt instead of having biological children, as well.

I've always thought they should have a tax plan that said you pay x percent of your overall income in taxes for every biological child you have. Don't make it a lot of money, just enough to help offset the cost of properly educating them. And there should be a tax on in vitro fertilization as well. Call it a luxury tax. Besides, if you're having a kid at 50 or 60 they'll probably wind up becoming a ward of the state at some point when you keel over and die while playing catch in the yard.

I think that the tax code needs to be completely redesigned to be more effective, and on top of that, there needs to be taxes on specific things, either state of federal-- children and invtro fertilization, any drugs that might be legal (including cigarettes and alcohol-- a sin tax), non-reconstructive surgery (luxury tax), property (not a lot though-- New Hampshire property taxes are a bit ridiculous), income (a fair tax, not a flat tax), and gas-powered cars (to encourage people to switch to a more environmentally-friendly fuel, or at least bilk them until they do). Other than that, they should steer clear of taxes. Sales taxes are a hassle (although probably okay for big luxury expenses, like electronics) and meal taxes really shouldn't be at anything higher than the town level. Obviously there would also be a whole different set of taxes for businesses.

And yes, many of those things would affect me. The car, property, income, restaurant, and child taxes will all affect me some day. And yes, I am aware that taxes suck, but honestly, we have to pay our bills somehow. If the tax code seemed fair I wouldn't mind. I don't particularly mind even now, I just think it's flawed. Yeah, I know, I'm a libertarian, libertarians in New Hampshire are all tax dodgers, whatever. No society can survive without some tax paid to the government, and while I'd rather pay less and have them do less, they're going to do more, so I might as well do my part to keep them from plunging even further into debt.

Of course, some of the first things to do would be to improve the IRS, which is owed $300 billion more than it collects, and stop outsourcing to other companies, because we're paying them between 22 and 24 % of what they collect. To which I say, why aren't we just hiring more or more efficient tax collectors?

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Also, there's commentary on another candidate, Fred Thompson, in the comments to yesterday's post.

Closing Comments on the 2008 Election Series

2007-10-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

Meh. I'd do more Democratic candidates but I'm just doing the ones everyone seems to be talking about. I could do Edwards but I didn't like Edwards last time he was running and I don't like him now, and that's only partially because almost no one who wants to go into the medical field or is in it now likes him because he was once an ambulance chaser.

I think if the Republican party runs McCain or Romney, most voters will go Democrat. They are too reminiscent of Bush and the neocons. I'd vote Clinton or Obama over them, of course. If they run Giuliani, the Dems may have a challenge. They'll probably run Clinton, she's more popular.

My guesses:

Giuliani vs. Clinton: Could go either way, but there might be a knee-jerk NOT REPUBLICAN vote for Clinton. Also could be a knee-jerk NOT HILLARY vote for Giuliani. I'd probably vote for Giuliani just because Congress will be Democratic and Clinton + Democratic Congress = WAY too much power.

Giuliani vs. Obama: Obama is a pro-war Democrat who doesn't really seem to understand fiscal policy. Giuliani is a socially liberal Republican. There may be a knee-jerk NOT REPUBLICAN vote for Obama but then again a lot of people vote Republican by default even still. I would debate it a lot and likely go with Obama, because he hasn't come out in favor of executive authority like Giuliani, and because I think I disagree with Obama a little bit less than I disagree with Giuliani, which is a depressing thing to vote about.

I don't really agree with any of the candidates. I really want someone who pushes for spending cuts and peace talks, who gets along with other countries even if he or she ideologically disagrees with them. Someone who wants to focus on the deficit first and foremost, and once spending is cut in other areas, THEN will start to implement other programs. Someone who is socially liberal but who will leave most issues up to the states unless doing so involves the restriction of human rights.

Part 5 of the 2008 politics series

2007-10-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

And now, Hillary's runner-up, Obama:

1. He wants to focus on ethanol as a fuel source, which is not really the best option. At least he's willing to consider nuclear research.

2. He has said he wants to EXPAND the military. And attack Pakistan, if he thought it would get rid of al-Quaeda; and Iran, if it was a potential threat to us. I want to get AWAY from this crazy enormous military that we use like Nanny 911 to the world!

3. He's totally pro-Israel too. See my Clinton comment.

Yet he favors stem-cell research, guaranteeing certain rights for homosexuals, ensuring that abortion remains legal, not allowing amnesty for illegals, and a merit pay system for teachers and increasing teacher salaries, which could go a long way towards improving public schools. At the same time, though, the programs he wants to implement would cost a lot of money and if he tries to do them before he pulls out of Iraq we'll severely increase the deficit. I think in that case his lack of experience is an actual problem because he doesn't seem to understand the fiscal difficulties of his plans. Either that, or he's lying through his teeth.

Part 4 of the 2008 Politics Series

2007-10-19T21:30:00.000-07:00

My scintillating analysis of the 2008 candidates continues!

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My problem with Democrats, who I still may likely vote for, is fiscal policy. And because Congress will be primarily Democrat, most of their ideas will get through, whereas a Republican candidate might have to butt heads with them all the time. Like Clinton-- I hate her proposed ideas for fiscal policy. Also, she's opposed to free-market capitalism. But there are some other big issues I have with her--

1. She's totally pro-Israel. See my comment for McCain.

2. She's in favor of amnesty for illegal immigrants.

3. She wants to maintain a military presence in Iraq indefinitely. I figure we should get on our knees, beg the UN to help them, and pull out.

4. She wants to ban flag burning too.

5. She believes in executive authority, like Giuliani.

6. She's very pro-drug legislation.

7. She ALSO doesn't want to guarantee rights for homosexuals, though at least she likes the idea of civil unions.

8. She wants to ban certain very violent video games. I don't mind banning kids from them but I don't like the idea of banning adults from them.

What I agree with-- she supports stem cell research, she has good stances on environmental issues, she's decided that she doesn't like No Child Left Behind or education vouchers, and she won't ban abortion at the federal level.

Plus, I'd rather the first female president wasn't a) a former First Lady, b) so strongly pro-family and THINK OF THE CHILDREN!-ish, and c) such a stereotypical "liberal female politician." Just because I'd rather we had out first female president be a bit more like our first male President-- you know, beloved by the majority of the population, and not just "better than the alternatives." Not that I would let that influence my vote.

Part 3 of the 2008 Politics Series

2007-10-17T15:02:00.000-07:00

I'll do the last two Republican candidates together because there's no way I'd vote for either of them, and here's why.

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Mitt Romney:

1. He is very anti-abortion, though he may allow the states to decide. That's uncertain.

2. He supports No Child Left Behind, charter schools and vouchers. As stated before, I pretty much hate all those ideas.

3. He is pro-abstinence-only education, which is moronic. Abstinence-only education DOESN'T WORK. Duh.

4. His stance on environmental issues is basically "if it immediately hurts humans, stop it-- but if it doesn't, and we can get money off of it, then screw long-term effects!"

5. He opposes rights for homosexuals.

6. He would push to limit stem cell research, which could save millions of lives.

7. He opposes medical marijuana.

8. He approves of Guantanamo, and will not allow the prisoners there to have judicial review, which is a violation of the Geneva Convention and besides, it makes the US look like total hypocrites because we insist that everyone treat people in their countries a certain way and yet we don't do it ourselves.

9. He would increase troops in Iraq and continue that war.

10. He would refuse to meet with leaders of nations whom he disagreed with, or who are dictators. Now, I'm not saying we should appease every dictator who comes along, but there is a lot to be said for opening diplomatic relations with countries, even if we don't really like their methods.

I agree with his stance against censorship, against prayer in public schools, for encouraging tech research (well, it's better than other uses of the money),and that he opposes amnesty. None of those are strong enough to make me want to vote for him, ever. He's conservative on social issues AND he's a war hawk.

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As for the final Republican, John McCain:

1. He wants to continue the Iraq war, increasing troops, and wouldn't be opposed to invading Iran.

2. He is completely pro-Israel, and anti-Palestine. I'd rather we had a President who left Israel/Palestine alone, because there's too much emotion and religion wrapped up in that, and we don't need to be involved. Not that we should stop aiding Israel, but we should stop being so overt about it.

3. He would keep Guatanamo Bay as it is, like Romney would.

4. He is very pro-drug legislation, which means no medical marijuana and more of the "War on Drugs."

5. He supports school vouchers.

6. HE BELIEVES INTELLIGENT DESIGN SHOULD BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS. Gah. *headdesk*

7. He wants Roe v. Wade to be overturned, and he is against birth control and contraceptives. He would push to redefine not just fetuses, but embryos as well (an embryo is what you call it between fertilization and the 8th week of gestation) as people. He also is a supporter of abstinence-only education, which means that not only can young women not abort the mistakes but they won't know how to prevent them in the first place.

8. He wants to ban flag desecration, which is just stupid.

9. He favors amnesty for illegals. I've always thought they should amend the law so that you are not a citizen if you are born in this country but your parents are here illegally, and make it easier to get work visas. Then continue deporting and more importantly protecting the borders. With the ability to deport whole families instead of just parents, and the fact that many illegal aliens come here to give birth so their children can live in this country, that would cut down on the number of illegals. Amnesty just says "Yeah... I know we said you can't come, but we'll let it slide this time. But in the future, YOU CAN'T COME." Any kid knows that when a parent talks like that you can get away with it any time you want.

In fairness, he does at least want to allow stem cell research (unlike Romney), though he would regulate it, and favors merit-pay for teachers (a strategy I like as long as they get MORE pay for doing well, not LESS pay for doing poorly). He also would leave the gay marriage question up to the states. He opposes drilling in Alaska and ethanol subsidies, which is good, and wants to reduce the deficit. But none of that can make me ignore the fact that he wants to attack science education AND sex education and make it illegal to even take a morning-after pill. He's religious right. No thanks.

Part 2 of a Politics Series

2007-10-16T18:40:00.000-07:00

Continuing with my 2008 campaign commentary... This was interesting for me, as I actually learned a lot about the candidates and what they stand for.

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Of course, Ron Paul most likely won't get the Republican nomination-- and the main candidate, Rudy Giuliani, isn't really the kind of person I would vote for:

1. In the past, he has used government money to build massive stadiums in New York. While it's not like he'll do that in DC it's a bad sign in terms of fiscal policy.

2. He'd be willing to go to war with Iran just to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons. I don't want Iran to get nuclear weapons, but it's hardly the US's job to decide that. We aren't the Middle East's nanny. Along the same lines, he's been rather anti-UN.

3. He wants to send more troops to Iraq and continue the war there. Now, the current system is not working, clearly, and I find it problematic that a potential Commander in Chief would support a system that isn't working.

4. He likes Bush's idea of domestic surveillance. BAH. I have nothing to hide (unless my discussing plans for the evening is a terrorist plot) but it's still an invasion of privacy.

5. He likes education vouchers. I'd prefer to make the public schools we have better than to just give parents permission to pick whatever school they want on the taxpayer's dime. Exceptions are of course important for children at the extremes of the spectrum (the uber-geniuses who are doing calculus in the third grade and the developmentally challenged kids who are focusing on learning how to communicate their basic needs obviously can't be easily integrated even into a good public school) but most kids getting vouchers would be average kids like me who just need a decent, well-funded, well-STAFFED public school.

6. He wants to allow prayer in school and more importantly, the posting of the Ten Commandments and other such documents focusing on a certain faith. I view this as a violation of the first amendment because it's saying that one religion is "best" in the eyes of the government. I guess I wouldn't mind posting the Ten Commandments, as long as Hammurabi's Law, the eight precepts of Buddhism, and the five pillars of Islam are next to it. As for prayer in schools, private prayer and moments of silence are one thing, but a public school should not call such moments "prayer" or lead groups in prayer.

7. He is opposed to medical marijuana. As a firm opponent of drugs I say make them all legal, at LEAST medical marijuana.

8. He has stated that he approves of radically conservative Supreme Court judges like Scalia. Which means that he might appoint someone similar.

9. He believes in executive authority, which is just scary. A president should NEVER believe in executive authority. Bush believes in executive authority. How's that working out for us?

I like that he is pro-choice, he accepts evolution as fact and thus would likely be in favor of requiring public schools to teach it, he is in favor of guaranteeing certain rights for homosexuals, he supports stem cell research, and he believes in global warming. However, I think his stance on executive authority, his approval of conservative judges, and his views on domestic surveillance and his approval of the Iraq war would be too much for me.

Part 1 of a Politics Series

2007-10-16T06:35:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna be doing a little series on how I feel about politics now, and then another one in a year or so when it actually matters...

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Since I usually identify myself as a libertarian, everyone's been saying I should vote for Ron Paul. It's unlikely. My biggest concerns with him are:

1. Against gay marriage and adoption, and in favor of "don't ask, don't tell. Admittedly with a Democratic Congress he wouldn't be able to do a lot of damage. But he could block legislation that could secure rights for homosexuals, even if it doesn't involve federal money. He wouldn't try to ban gay marriage at a federal level, but at the same time he wouldn't allow laws that would prevent states from invading people's private lives. I know it won't happen for a long time, but we really need a constitutional amendment saying that the government cannot discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, same as we needed one that said they couldn't do it on the basis of race (There's not enough discrimination against women any more to warrant making that an amendment).

2. No federal money for schools. The one way in which I am really, truly not libertarian is that I think that we need to provide for children and the mentally handicapped or ill. But again, it's unlikely he would be able as president to decimate the federal school funding system, and on top of that at least he would push to repeal No Child Left Behind.

3. Anti-abortion. But he's agreed to leave the question of abortion to the states, which is something. With a Democratic Congress, which we will most likely have, that wouldn't be too disastrous.

4. He opposes the UN.

However, I agree with his fiscal and international policy ideas, and the concepts of state's rights and minimal intervention at the federal level. I've always felt that the only thing the federal government should enforce on the states are basic human rights and equality, and if necessary, protections for minors and the mentally handicapped/ill. Ideally the states would take care of the minors and mentally ill themselves, but they don't.

But I most likely won't vote for Ron Paul because of his stance on the rights of homosexuals, and I wouldn't vote for him anyway unless it looked like my vote didn't really matter in terms of keeping the religious right out of office.

And yes, I fully admit I bought her "Drive Me Crazy" Album. I was 10!

2007-10-15T21:08:00.000-07:00

At the risk of following the trend-- my subject today is Britney Spears.

I'm sick of hearing about her. Not because she annoys me especially, but because it depresses me. This is a girl who is clearly, obviously mentally disturbed. She has substance abuse issues, repeatedly has mental breakdowns, has had her children taken away form her due to neglecting them and has been slowly driving her employees away. And what does everyone around her care about? Getting her career back on track.

She should never have done that MTV show. The execs should have said, "No way, come back once you've gotten your life under control." The music business should essentially blacklist her until she drops out of public eye long enough to undergo extensive psychiatric therapy, get clean, get at least joint custody of her kids and get back in shape. They have fancy counseling centers that cost a fortune and keep you away from the public eye-- why can't she go to one of those? The problem is she doesn't want to-- she seems to subsist off attention, probably due to bad parenting. The only way she will seek help is if she thinks that by getting it and getting back into the spotlight she'll get more attention.

The truth is, Britney Brand was pretty popular. She was very marketable. The music industry is trying to salvage her career by giving her a new CD, trying to give her a comeback, etc. They shouldn't. They want their money machine back, they need to turn her back into the pop star she was, only with a "sad period" in her life and maybe a book deal. Which means therapy.

If the record execs went to her and said, "We're dropping you, but if you prove that you can clean up your act and get mental help, we'll take you back" she might do nothing, at least not at first. But without a job and without her kids, she will eventually run out of alternatives. She will start to fade from the public eye, and that will terrify her.

In one of my more socialist thoughts, I wish that there was a way that people who were so obviously nutzo and were accepted as such by psychiatrists who only READ about them could be committed to an asylum against their will. Obviously such laws could be ripe for abuse and would need strict regulations on when and how they could be used, but seriously. Think of how many celebrities you hear about who really obviously need mental help. I'm not talking the Scientologists here, that's not the same thing-- but the Michael Jacksons who are addicted to creepy plastic surgery, the Mary-Kate Olsens who nearly starve themselves to death, and the Lindsey Lohans and Britney Spearses, who are trainwrecking their lives. No decent psychiatrist or medical doctor will argue that Michael Jackson or Britney Spears doesn't need serious therapy, just based on their obvious, public problems. And yet, they're around.

Honestly, what would be BEST for Britney Spears right now would be if she bought a nice house out in suburbia, went to therapy twice a week, stayed clean and got a "something to do" job as a lounge singer or a waitress-- quiet, out of the way, and able to live out her life in peace. If she did that for five years, the paparazzi would start to leave her alone, because PTA moms are boring.

But she won't, because she's an attention whore. Instead, she'll try to get her life back in the stupidest ways possible and we'll read about her drug-related death on the evening news...

The Culture of Food vs. Exercise

2007-10-08T21:30:00.000-07:00

In Western cultures at least, and probably in many others as well, there is a strange relationship between humans and their food. Specifically, the consumption of nutrients and calories, born out of survival instinct, has become an art. People make their careers not out of just turning raw materials into food, but doing it in the most tasty, artsy way they can. We have a culture of food-- first dates are always a meal or at least coffee, holidays are celebrated with feasts, people bemoan the loss of the "family dinner." We love to eat. We are even, one might argue, obsessed with eating. Keep in mind I am making gross generalizations and there are many people to whom this doesn't apply.

In primitive times, it made sense to celebrate food. Food was a sign of status, of privilege, because you had it. Now, the vast majority of people (in the Western, developed world) has basic food supplies. But instead of simply not celebrating with food, we celebrate with fancy food, tasty food, expensive food. We upped the requirements of "feast food." But we still love to eat, and thus, the rampant obesity in both this country, Canada and the UK and, to a lesser extent, mainland Europe.

At the same time, exercise is a chore. Again, generalizations, focusing on the average schlub and not the super athletes. We try to figure out times to cram in a walk or a trip to the gym. We avoid it if we don't feel like it, or if it's a holiday. If we excercise, it is because our doctors told us to, we want to feel better about ourselves, or we want to look better for the opposite sex (or the same sex, as the case may be). We tend not to do it because we want to. It's not pleasurable the way eating is. Is there "comfort exercise"? Do people ever say to you, "I can't stop exercising, I only do it because I'm stressed out?"

And yet, we need exercise as much as we need food, and in this culture, one is vastly more preferable and thus more available. The roles really should be reversed-- eating should become a maintenance operation, and exercise should be fun "family time." That's not going to happen though.

What could happen is that instead of the concept of a gym membership, where you pay a huge sum and then invariably stop going, they should have a gym that's more like a restaurant. You can go in and pay a little fee for the use of the machines for a workout of a given length of time. Include pay showers and rentable lockers, and put them everywhere, with nice long hours instead of the whole "closed at seven" crap. So I can stop by while running my errands, if I have the time, and pay $5 to work out for half an hour on the Stairmaster. No commitments, I don't get guilty if I don't come in, and if you could make them like Starbucks, put them everywhere, people might be more inclined. Especially if it was inexpensive. Maybe offer incentives, or have a "social room" and a "non-social room," so that those who wish to shoot the breeze can do so and those who wish to just work out quickly can also do so. And make the air very, very dry, but offer free camel packs (see picture) with a small charge for the mouth thing so you have a new one, so you can drink water as you work out. That will cause sweat to evaporate quickly and make people more comfortable.

Make it as convenient to exercise as it is to eat, and people may want to do the former a little more often. Then again, gyms pretty much LIVE off the guilt factor-- my concept might not work economically. They would have to open the first one in the upper-middle-class residential area of a big city, since city types are more likely to want to go to a gym.

Cheating

2007-10-07T11:17:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while on Fark there will be an article about someone who cheated on their spouse and got some terrible and disturbingly humorous retribution, or whose infidelity was discovered in an interesting way. A while ago-- a long while-- there was one on how the US is the country that most disapproves of infidelity. Other cultures, particularly in Europe, take a "don't ask, don't tell" approach, or consider it people's private business, but in the US, several states still have adultery laws and infidelity is considered to be the WORST thing you could do to a significant other with the possible exception of certain bedroom behaviors a lady doesn't share in her online blog.

In fact, statistics say that 22% of married men and 14% of married women in the US have had extramarital affairs, and yet 90% of us believe, at least in public, that it's morally wrong. Keep in mind that all those statistics need to be adjusted for the inherent secrecy of infidelity. And couples counselors estimate that 50% of male clients and 40% of female clients cheat, according to Newsweek.

This harks back to our Puritan days. We are a comparatively very conservative nation. But at the same time, those who disapprove of infidelity aren't just the diehard Christians. You can be an American atheist and be furious to learn that someone you know is cheating or is being cheated on. It's not just a religious taboo, it's a cultural, social taboo.

I mean, no one wants to be cheated on, ever. But the WORST thing? Women will support their spouses while they sit in jail but if they cheat, it's over. I think I would prefer to find out my husband had a mistress to finding out he was a murderer, or only married to me for tax reasons, or poking holes in the condoms. Admittedly, there are serious health problems that can result from infidelity-- monogamous relationships don't pass on STDs. But that's not what people think when they first find out they've been cheated on. They think, I've been wronged.

What's even more interesting than our powerful cultural reaction to infidelity, however, is that it happens anyway. You'd think that with that much of a taboo stacked against us, cheating would be out of the question. But it isn't. Cheating happens all the time. Is it just a biological imperative to diversify the gene pool? But such liaisons don't usually produce children. You would think that the power of our collective morality would be more of a deterrent.

The other factor is, no one wants to be cheated on, and yet many people cheat-- why? Why do people think, It's okay that I cheat, but if my significant other did, then it's over? Some people claim it's justified-- He's busy at work, she's always too tired-- but in the end, no justification is enough if they are the abandoned one.

I wonder about this because the thought of cheating, for me, is unfathomable. I really can't imagine a situation where I would. Finding a date is HARD, why would I go back to it once I had someone? If I was truly unhappy in a marriage, I would divorce, after much counseling had failed. And yet, the first thought I would have if I found out my spouse had been cheating would more likely be, Oh, shit, did I get some disease? followed by Oh, shit, did he have a KID? followed by Why did he cheat, what have I been doing wrong, why didn't he tell me if he was unhappy, and oh god, what if he wants to leave me for her? It wouldn't be, He betrayed me-- he deserves to die, or at least lose as much of his money as possible in a messy divorce.

It's interesting.

Israel and Palestine

2007-10-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

I've noticed something, in reading online forums and in talking to people. Very few issues are as hotly debated as that of Israel and Palestine. Threads on this topic are more vehemently debated than gay marriage. I think this is because in any given group, people tend to be either staunchly conservative, staunchly liberal, or moderate and not particularly opinionated on subjects like homosexuality, feminism, racism etc. But 90% of the people who know more about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than the name have an opinion on it, and your normal political alliances don't really apply-- it's not like conservatives are pro-Israel and liberals are pro-Palestine or vice-versa. If it's at all important to them, it's REALLY REALLY so.

Of course, the time to really worry is if they're truly, deeply passionate about it, because then they will be furious if you disagree. I've discovered a system for knowing when not to talk about the conflict:

-If you believe that Palestine is right, or that Palestine might have some decent points of grievance, don't talk to someone who is Jewish, of Jewish ancestry, or has ever expressed any anti-Muslim opinions.

-If you believe that Israel is right, or that Israel might have some decent points, don't talk to anyone who is Muslim, anti-Semitic, or a conspiracy theorist because WHY are 90% the conspiracy theorists anti-semitic too?? Must be because "the Jews control the banks and the media" and all that jazz.

This causes a problem for me, because since I am not part of a major religion and the one I was loosely raised as is secular Protestant, I actually have a much more impartial view than most people I talk to. I think both have grievances, because I believe that the UN had no right to make Israel a country all those years ago and encourage Jews to move there, so the Palestinians have a legitimate complaint, especially since many laws are biased against them. At the same time, that doesn't give them the right to terrorize the Jewish people any more than living there gives the Jews the right to "fight back." The Israelis have a legitimate complaint in that all their neighbors are ready to kill them, they're much more progressive and can better handle the land than most of the Palestinians, and they've been there for so long it's not fair to kick them out.

Besides, everything in the Middle East is tied up with religion. You can't kick anyone out. And they can't live together, clearly. At this point the two groups have pretty much equal claims to the land, whatever they may want to do with it-- and although I know Palestine would enact Sharia law, I still say that it was their land to begin with and they have equal claim to it.

If I were Empress of the World... I'd wall off all the major holy sites. Jerusalem especially. Completely wall it off. Then impose martial UN law over the land, saying it no longer belongs to any nation. Ban Jews or Muslims or anyone who is known to have a strong side in the issue from that military service. Set up a number of gates, all strongly policed, sort of like the Vatican-- make sure that if you want to get in you haven't a single weapon on you and no history of terrorism. Inside the walls, put soldiers everywhere, with non-lethal weapons.

Then, split the rest of the land.

Make sure there is a clear, protected road from whichever country doesn't contain Jerusalem to the city; then force a mass exodus. Tell people which area is which. Allow the governments to (non-lethally) evict their enemies from their land. Make sure the land is divided by population and if you can, make sure they get comparable shares of the most fertile land. Will people be happy? No. Which is why you police the border like crazy and impose a major UN presence in the area for at least two generations.

Of course, this would hardly solve the problem but it would certainly hold of the inevitable. I would also pump aid money into this new Palestine with certain stipulations-- namely, that it has to go towards building schools and educating the populace (or as I would put it, "making sure you are at the same level or higher than your enemies so you can protect yourselves"), that it can't be used to manufacture weapons or it will ALL go away, and that all women must be educated under an improved curriculum until the age of 18, regardless of if they are married before then. Forcing them to educate their women or forfeit large quantities of aid would lead to a generally more educated populace, women marrying later (a man doesn't want a wife who has to go to school every day and can't watch his children), giving birth later, and hopefully getting a bit of empowerment thrown in with it all.

So clearly I can't just be Empress of the World, I also have to be God, because that's pretty much the only way this would happen. My boyfriend's probably right, just pull out of the region in a military sense, give money to the Kurds, and force major civil war that will drastically decrease their numbers.

Bah. Being an optimist is hard in this world.

The Case For Group Marriage

2007-10-07T05:39:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan of legalizing stuff. I'm a social libertarian when it comes to adults. I've always thought laws should protect people from other people (i.e. no murder) and protect children and the mentally ill, but if you're of sound mind and body and you want to become a crackhead, I'm not about to stop you, unless I actually care about you personally.

But there's some things that are tricky.

Group marriage is a good example. I'm calling it group marriage because the term "polygamy" is used colloquially to refer to "religious-based polygyny" but "group marriage" both includes traditional polygamy and those weirdos where there's three men and four women and they all love each other.

Now, I think people should be allowed to marry how many people they want. And yet. There should be restrictions. If group marriage was legalized, you would have to say:

-All members would have to be over 18. This applies even if people can marry their first partner at a younger age, like how in Utah it's 14. Teenagers can be a lot more impressionable than adults and you want to hold off that sort of thing as long as possible. They need to be out from under their parent's control, and if my other idea of a national service was enacted, wait until they get out of the national service, when they're 20 or so. The longer they are out from under their parent's immediate control before the marriage, the better.

-All previous spouses must agree. Let's say a man decides he wants to marry his mistress, but he and his first wife don't want to divorce because of the kids, and his first wife doesn't approve. He can't just marry the second woman. The first wife has to give her consent before a judge and that judge has to make an effort to make sure the first wife was in no way coerced. The second wife would also have to be doing this of her own volition (and not under parental control or anything) and be fully aware of the man's situation. I'm thinking waiting periods and consent forms and opt-out clauses and everything.

-All partners have to have regular access to the mainstream community and the right to file a divorce if they so chose.

-You have to figure out certain logistics. Like what happens in case of a divorce? I say if one woman divorces her husband, who has three other wives, then she should get MAXIMUM 1/5th of his money and belongings. He should still have to pay normal child support though (and I favor abolishing alimony).

-Another logistic would be who makes the decisions? Let's say you're in a polyamorous marriage and one of your two husbands is on life support, but your third wife is radically anti-pulling the plug and your first wife thinks it's time. I say that unless the husband writes a living will labeling one of the partners as the decider it should be chosen by vote.

But there are other issues with group marriage, like the toll it takes on a society. Look at the Muslims, who have created an underclass of unmarried, very frustrated men who blow up buildings for God. Now, let's face it. There is no way that legalizing group marriage in America will make it mainstream, not with the above restrictions. There's too many Christians, too many empowered women, and too many educated men who understand the flaws in that system. You would have three groups who try it: Fundamentalist Mormons, who are doing it anyway and at least the prospect of making it legally binding and giving them validity would (potentially) make them come into the open and thus help us regulate the negative sides to it-- plus most of their practices would be illegal under my system anyway; very few Fundamentalist Muslims, mostly just-off-the-boat immigrants-- Westernized Muslims don't do the plural marriage thing; and nutty polyamorous people who are a tiny minority AND tend to be educated enough that people leave when they figure out that they don't like it.

If we make it seem to the religious polygamists that we are more accepting of their lifestyle, they will be a bit more trusting of us. Then we can start educating their children.* Once you educate the younger generation on your own you can start to empower the young women to protest, encourage the young men to see the problems in the system, and over many generations of Westernization the ideas will lose popularity.

Laws don't really change society, education for children changes society, and much faster.

*In an ideal world you would also say that no person can have more than two biological children. That would basically ELIMINATE religious-based group marriage, because those men don't want to support a wife who can't provide offspring. But that's unlikely at best.

Welcome.

2007-09-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

If you got back here, you've probably been reading the archives. I'm flattered you care.

This blog is designed for a simple reason-- to voice my opinions and hear those of others in an anonymous environment. What more could we hope for?