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.