China, The UK of Tomorrow's Freedoms?

China has caught "teh gay".

Americans assume that rights come from the struggle of a group; Americans very much believe in the Margaret Mead "I believe that a small group of dedicated people can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

I would be loath to say that the organizers of this event in Shanghai aren't exactly that definition. Certainly, it took their bravery and skills and resources to put this together. But what I want to point out is that sometimes rights don't come from the actions of individuals, in a certain, foundational sense, but that rather they come from a government granting those rights, which then become part of the social fabric. In America, our rights are very neatly stated in the appropriately titled Bill of Rights, with other items coming from the Constitution proper. And that is a very neat way to do things - but it's certainly not, for example, the experience of the United Kingdom, which lacks any real central document laying out the rights and privileges of its citizens. Nobody, for example, has a "right" to an abortion, in the American sense where the right comes from the 4th Amendment, but rather has the right to a medical procedure authorized under the National Health Service Act, which is a very different thing on paper, though not in practice.

The divide then is appropriate to this week; what the protesters in Tiananmen wanted were rights in the American manner of obtaining them. What the gay rights celebrants this week achieved were rights in the British manner of obtaining them. The question then is who is right? The American-style activists or the British-style? My observation is that the similarity between China and the United Kingdom is that they both share a similar highly entrenched central political structure that brooks no alternative - try telling a Tudor, Stuart, Orange, or Hanoverian English monarch that they need to cease oppressing their regional minorities, allow free, unbridled speech, and provide government protection of exploited workers, and see how far you get. Under such a central and established government, only severe international political crisis can produce such a change, in the absence of which, the slow-stead-statist model of rights, in which people quietly begin to formalize the structures of those rights, and then call for their open exercise through the state, rather than against it, that seems to work the best, much in the manner in which England developed a means of publicizing proceedings in Parliament, which, once-upon-a-time, was a state crime to report. In such a case, we would find then that the best support for change, paradoxically, is through the structure of government itself, rather than through attacking the government. But of course, this is something I'm just saying, rather than stating as a universal point.

Also - new plan. Each post includes at least one funny picture. Right after the close.

That Is All For Now.

Against Adoption

With the murder of Dr. George Tiller, abortion, and the people who confuse it with actual murder, are in the headlines once again, just as they will be for the rest of Obama's administration, and just as they will be again when we again have another Democratic president. As such, it's time to revisit the arguments in favor of abortion as being better for the mother AND the child than adoption. Of course, in the case of Dr. Tiller, who was only one of three late-term abortion providers in the nation, and therefore one of the only options women who tragically want children, but must undergo invasive medical procedures or carry fetuses either legally dead or with incurably fatal birth defects to term, adoption isn't an option. But for those other cases, where adoption is the "safe, consequence-free" choice pushed onto women, it's important to remember that adoption is at least as psychologically as abortion.

For example, the Medical Science Monitor found in 2004 that women who had an abortion were 65% likely to report that their abortion was traumatic or had traumatic consequences; however, the Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless's2000 study of mothers who gave up children for adoption found that “ALL were traumatized by the act of relinquishing their child for adoption,” (emphasis mine). Depression rates for relinquishing mothers rival those of women who have abortions, and while it seems from the literature (which is limited when it comes to relinquishing mothers in comparison to that on women who have abortions) that women who have abortions certainly do put themselves at higher risk of various mental (and of course, due to the operation, physical) disorders, the difference between the two groups in the short term seems negligible, and in the long term, favors women who have abortions over relinquishing women. Here's two resources both ways: on relinquishing womenand on aborting women.

As for the children who are relinquished, the literature is clear when examining children left to the foster care system - which, to get a sense of what happens to those children, one need only read this report from Texas State Comptroller's office in 2006; children in foster care in Texas are at least 3 times more likely to die than those outside of foster care (according to my calculations from the Comptroller's report and here) and, according to this study, children in foster care in Texas are medicated at least three times more frequently than children not in foster care, with 41% on three or more classes of medication (not total medications), and with the largest-prescribed class being antidepressants. If a child is medicated in the Texas system, they're 57% likely to be medicated for depression; the national rate for depression in children and adolescents is about 5%, not all of whom will be medicated. In the Texas system, approximately 20% children are actively medicated with antidepressants.

I shudder at the thought of what the long-term outcomes are for those children. If 5% of children are clinically depressed, yet 30% of Americans will suffer depression at some point, can you imagine what the rates are for 20% as children, in the long run? If essentially guaranteeing that a relinquished child in foster care will suffer from clinical depression as an adult isn't argument enough against the unquestioned promotion of adoption, consider the long term effects of adoption on those in permanently adoptive families; you can examine the consequences of adoption yourself here. An indicative statistic: adoptees are overall approximately 40% more likely to show up in all classes of rehabilitation clinic for abuse.

To conclude - one woman's thoughts on having had both an abortion and a relinquishment, from Shakespeare's Sister:

"I have given a baby up for adoption, and I have had an abortion, and while anecdotes are not evidence, I can assert that abortions may or may not cause depression - it certainly did not in me, apart from briefly mourning the path not taken - but adoption? That is an entirely different matter. I don't doubt that there are women who were fine after adoption, and there is emphatically nothing wrong with that or with them; but I want to point out that if we're going to have a seemingly neverending discussion about the sorrow and remorse caused by abortion, then it is about goddamn time that we hear from birth mothers too. Believe me when I say that of the two choices, it was adoption that nearly destroyed me - and it never ends. The only comparison I have is the death of a loved one. The pain retreats, maybe fades, but it comes right back if I poke at it. Writing this has taken me nearly two weeks. Normally, I can write this amount in about thirty minutes, with bathroom breaks. I started to type, and stopped only to reread, then go wail into my pillow. There is no such thing as 'over' with this."

That Is All For Now.

The Organization of Robots and the Chaos of Africa

On the ethics of robots:

"By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate—lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they’d found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved 'cheater' robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink. Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. 'Sometimes,' Floreano says, 'you see that in nature—an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away—but I never expected to see this in robots.'"

No one, I suppose expected the Spanish Inquisition. And do robots "expect" to be poisoned? The Fourth Colony is fascinating, isn't it? Why did they evolve such evil tendencies?

An ethnologist named Colin Turnbull started-off a whole mess of debate by examining the Ik people of Uganda and Sudan. Basically, due to colonialism, these hunter-gatherers got locked into one part of their territory, placed under their native tribal rivals, and thence began a quick decline as a people. So much so, that when Turnbull found them, he described, controversially, a culture so damaged by famine and deprivation, that parents threw their children out into the street where they formed "age-bands", or age cohorts that passed along information, rather than any formal adult-to-child pedagogic system. Writes Turnbull in The Mountain People:

"You also see cruelty at the center of life. When blind Lo'ono trips and rolls to the bottom of the ravine, the adults laugh as she lies on her back, her arms and legs thrashing feebly. When Lolim begs his son to let him in, pleading that he is going to die in a few hours, Longoli drives him away. Lolim dies alone."

While more modern ethnologists have discovered that,

"On a political front, the Ik’s perceived insignificance as cultivators compared to the represented needs of their pastoral neighbours makes changing the situation almost impossible. Governed by Dodoth, the sub county office in Kalapata does not represent the Ik in a neutral light and the district office at Kotido does not even cast its eye over Ik inhabited territory. Language is also a problem for this oppressed people. They speak Icetot which is a Nilotic language. Although it takes much of its vocabulary from neighbouring Nilotic speaking tribes, Icetot is not understood or spoken in the surrounding areas, thus accentuating the existing physical isolation of the Ik. Even when members of the Ik journeyed to Kampala for political ends, they were unable to understand what was being said or the substance of possible solutions. Anything that was discussed was manipulated by the Dodoth representatives for their own benefit, whilst Ik leaders were left in the dark. As a people, the Ik seem to epitomise a population that has been forgotten by its own government. Their isolated existence means they have just two primary schools and have only recently built a medical clinic that relieves them of a 30km trek to the hospital. Diseases such as cholera and malaria dealt a heavy blow to the Ik population during the 1980s, such was the inaccessibility of medical care. A social worker describes the Ik as ‘a real case of deprivation and social injustice’ and explains that ‘no single social facility has ever been erected in the area by the authorities…’ It comes as no surprise that only 4 people amongst the Ik have ever been to secondary school and even doing so has not secured them a job."

The connection: according to the original robot study, "Under individual selection, the ability to produce visual signals resulted in the evolution of deceptive communication strategies in colonies of unrelated robots and a concomitant decrease in colony performance." [emphasis mine]

Pointing out that lack of communication is a problem is nothing new - but, doing it with robots, and then finding that the social malignancies which created the "worst people on the face of the Earth" (according to Turnbull) are replicated on that levels does give one pause in considering just how fundamental the ability to communicate is to the very notion of morality, so much so that one begins to wonder if perhaps the heavy lifting of morality is merely making sure that one can communicate in the first place.

That Is All For Now.

Piles of Nonsense

From Thomas Frank at the WSJ:
"As an example of this habit of mind, consider the essay that Mr. Gingrich published in Human Events last week. 'The current liberal bloodlust over interrogations,' he wrote, referring to the Nancy Pelosi-CIA flap, is merely 'the Left's attempt to hunt down and purge its political opponents.' And yet, in a different essay he published on the very same day (this one in the Washington Times), Mr. Gingrich regretted that, in all the years of Republican rule, 'there was a strategic failure to root out the left and the special interests of the left.'"

Meanwhile, Jeffery Addicott of St. Mary's School of Law and former JAG, in his defense of "enhanced interrogation":
"In the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, we generally look to authoritative judicial decisions to define key terms in treaty and legislation. Perhaps the leading international case in the realm of defining “severe pain or suffering” in the context of interrogation practices comes from the often cited European Court of Human Rights ruling, Ireland v. United Kingdom. [A conservative quoting international law?!?! Egads, the Right is sticking to its guns about as well as that kid from The Red Badge of Courage.] By an overwhelming majority vote, the Ireland court found certain interrogation practices of British authorities to interrogate suspected terrorism in Northern Ireland to be “inhuman and degrading,” i.e., ill-treatment, but not severe enough to rise to the level of torture. Considering the level of interrogation standards set out in the Ireland case, the conclusion is clear. Even the worst of the CIA techniques that were authorized – waterboarding - would not constitute torture (the CIA method is similar to what we have done hundreds and hundreds of times to our own military special operations soldiers in military training courses on escape and survival)."

[By the way, the techniques the British used were wall-standing, hooding, exposure to noise, exposure to hunger, and deprivation of sleep. Waterboarding, denial of counsel, "compliance striking/hitting", buying alive, exposure to insects, arbitrary arrest of family and friends, injections of sedatives/amphetamines without individual's knowledge/permission, faked executions, sexual assault, disregard for age/physical condiditon, and sodomy were not approved by the Ireland court, in case you were wondering. All of the above, the Bush Adminstration argues, are neither cruel, nor unusual, nor inappropriate for use on suspects.]

And from Tara Overzat at her blog::

"It appears the security of Americans abroad has dropped since President Obama took office. ... Why do these things happen under liberal presidents? Presidential approval ratings may be the answer. Studies have shown that people in the spotlight, like celebrities and politicians, are more likely than the general population to be narcissistic and have a strong desire to be admired by others. Low approval = less people “liking” you. War, tough talk about our enemies, and increasing national security tend to bring about lower approval ratings. [No. Not really. Check out "mortality salience", when you get the time.] It makes sense- no one actually wants to go to war, [Really?] and no one actually wants to not get along with other world powers. [Again, really?] But difficult decisions are made by the government and its security bodies everyday in order to keep our 300 million plus souls safe. To paraphrase a famous saying, what’s popular is not always right, and what’s right is not always popular."


[In addition, Ms. Overzat ignores that foreign powers usually try to push new Presidents - think China with the P-3 they captured early in Bush's admin, and that Republican presidents are just as likely to have terrorists attack - anyone remember Lebanon? Khobar Towers? The hostages held by Hezbollah in the 80s? Ruby Ridge? The Order back in 1984? Nope. Only liberals get bloweded up, because they just want to be your BFF. And of course, Obama's quiet unwillingness to make a circus out of his authorization of lethal force in the rescue of Captain Phillips isn't a show of strength - Obama should've been like Bush, and flown down to the Bainbridge for a photo-op of him holding a rifle. Every good redneck knows you didn't go hunting unless there's a picture of you with your foot planted on the head of the deer, rifle in hand.]

I'm going to merely note that Ms. Overzat means "quote a famous saying," and leave it at that. The pedant in me demands it.

More importantly though, note that the single thread - I originally, and equally justifiably, wrote "threat" by accident there - in these three essays is both subtle and idiotic. We are told by conservative commentators that we must show strength - which is code for "be violent" - while at the same time, with as much shock and indignation as we can muster - deny that committing violence outside of a declaration of war or guilt and without legal oversight is a crime. Don't you get it folks? If we don't break the law by torturing people and running illegal raids then how will people know that we're a moral giant?

Or to put this another way, let's for a moment assume that Americans are made safer by "shows of strength"; then we're made less safe by choosing to limit the exercise of our power in accordance with legal statute - and then we must throw out the laws and admit that we rule in our own interests through naked strength. If we're made safer by being a nation that follows statute, then the people who break those laws are making us unsafe, and must be prosecuted, or at least completely remove them from power and public discourse. In either case, either the Right has failed us by bothering to keep laws in place, which places people under the onus of prosecution, rather than openly rolling back protections and admitting the world is too dangerous for moral restraints, or we can actually follow those moral restraints. In either case, the Right harms us.

Furthermore, it is telling that when FBI interrogators - who don't have the CIA's +5 to succesful skullduggery roll, and are therefore much likelier to get prosecuted for breaking the law (think the Whitey Bulger case) - caught a whiff of what was going on in our detention camps, they had nothing to do with it, and removed themselves from the near occasion of criminality. I don't often say it, but bravo for the FBI, because they realized from the get-go that coerced evidence is inadmissable in U.S. Courts. The very notion then that you're seeking to capture and punish evildoers falls apart when you make it impossible to legally punish them. But then again, thinking long-term is something the Bush administration consciously refused to do - remember when we were going to be out of Iraq in less than a year, 18 months, tops?

But this kind of thinking is replete in conservative circles, producing a rhetoric of Orwellian purity that lead us to spectacle of the poor Supreme Court of California essentially admitting that since the Constitution of CA lacks a clause preventing contradictory amendments from being instituted while a preoccluding clause is still in force, there is no way for the Supreme Court to keep the Constitution from becoming a logical fallacy. How does an "equal rights" clause co-exist with a clause that specifically rescinds a court-enumerated right, as gay marriage was decided to be in CA? By not thinking too carefully about the assumptions that one holds, and certainly not by thinking too carefully about the consequences of one's positions. At this point, there is no effective state limit on what the voters of CA could decide to approve, so long as they get themselves an amendment; they could define away the rights of any group to obtain anything on the state level, from the right of a child to a free, appropriate state public education, to the rights of the handicapped - to the rights of anyone seeking to own a firearm for other ends than to specifically serve in a federal militia.

But, lacking any sort of empathy or imagination, the right in this country cannot, I repeat, cannot imagine themselves as genuine victims of something. For all their alleged victimhood, the Right in this country has never once considered that it could be their sons and daughters which end up being put to enhanced interrogation. Remember, this is a country in which we recently had a case before the Supreme Court asking whether or not schools had the right to perform an on-the-spot strip search of a child - if immediate danger, the "ticking time bomb" is the means of adjudicating what is and isn't permissble, then could you imagine what Newt Gingrich would say about the government if one of his children was anally or vaginally searched because school officials thought it within the realm of possibility that he or she might be hiding pills in an orifice? Why do we even bother with investigating crimes? Let's just waterboard people until they confess! If it's not torture, then it's not torture, and we should use it whenever we feel that there's a slight chance that someone might be less than forthcoming with the full infomation we want. What conservatives other than Edmund Burke seem not to realize is that "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is not merely advice - in law, doing unto others sets precedent - and therefore is the main justification and guide for doing unto you. Hypocrites or idiots, the "War is Safety, Torture is Cool," crowd is, sadly, only going to get worse as the measures they so fervently fought for get turned against them in the next couple of decades - but they are, undoubtedly, hypocrites and idiots still.

The Myers-Briggs Typology - of this blog!

From - http://www.typealyzer.com/

"INTP - The Thinkers"
The logical and analytical type. They are espescially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about."

"Might come across as arrogant"? Excuse me? I work very, very hard to condescend, and I don't need some-jumped up computer with an online M.A. in social work and friends who think they're "just soooo perceptive!" evaluating my entire blog personality, dammit.

That Is All For Now.

How You Know What's Coming

I'm just going to avoid the preamble - there is something bad coming down the road, and I know it because all there is on TV are shows about prison and I got solicited at the Home Depot, for the first time in my life, for a job by a middle aged white man who then out-and-out asked me for some money to get back to Texas. Day labor is by far the most recession-responsive industry there is; if a homebuilder cuts a single house, it's the equivalent in man-hours of laying off two men for a year. And he wasn't the only one there.

Now, it's normal to find guys looking for work outside a building supply store - but not two white guys, and not on a SUNDAY morning, when all there is are just the weekend putterers who want to do the stuff themselves (otherwise, they wouldn't be there.) Imagine if NASA engineers were looking for work outside the hobby shop, hitting up the people building model rockets; you'd probably say "Things must be bad at Cape Canaveral; and you'd be right.

Now, if you think that culture responds to society in unconscious ways, then the crime shows one sees on television are the dream state of that culture; when the economy was good, all that was on TruTV and MSNBC and Nancy Grace were cases of rich white girls being abducted - which is perhaps the most perfect analogue for the Freudian castration fantasy of the American bourgeois home. Coming home on JetBlue - remember, I don't own a TV, so I never get that "frog-boil" effect of getting used to the zeitgeist - there was a marathon of "what prison is like" stories; today on TruTV - the same thing. I suspect that this is because, knowing how the crime statistics are going to go, the deep troubled mind of the nation is wondering what exactly the conditions of prison are these days, much in the same way that Sigfried Krakauer discussed the formation of a infantilized man seeking masculinity in group action in the years before the rise of Nazism. Needless to say, I have the full expectation that everything Paulson does will make the economy work - why wouldn't it? he's a Bush selection, and therefore, by proxy, is an extension of the unsurpassed ability of the President to screw up - and it will literally be years before Obama's plan - if it works - has any tangible effects on jobs.

That Is All For Now.

Bush Will Be Very Alone Soon

Oh man, between John "Disappearing Act" McCain and this from the G20, the Republican administration is nothing but a bunch of children. Furthermore, consider the fact that Mitch McConnell wouldn't speak to Harry Reid for about two weeks after the election, because he was so pissed about the Democrats trying to take his seat. Needless to say, karma's a bitch, and there's no better newscaster for pointing out the awkwardness of Bush than Rick Sanchez, who's basically a SoFla broadcasting legend (if there's such a thing) on account of the fact that he says the most bizarre non-sequiturs in human history with this very earnest tone of voice. Here though, he's gold. And he hits it right on the money; if Dubya were a young kid, and I still worked in special education, I would totally have stopped the photo shoot right then and there for a group discussion. But he's a bloody idiotic warmonger who's brought the world's economy down, progressed nothing anywhere, and must probably suck in dinner table conversation at these summits; but then again, there's always this gem from The Onion: "Bush Regales Dinner Guests With Impromptu Oratory On Virgil's Minor Works".

That Is All For Now.