It is NSFW.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Just watch this
Just watch this. I tried to come up with something to add to it, but I've got nothing.
It is NSFW.
It is NSFW.
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
The Illusion of Paradox
There are two concepts I want to talk about - the Paradox of Choice, and the Illusion of Choice.
In 2004, Barry Schwartz released a book titled "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less." If you haven't heard about it, the general theory of it goes like this: People like having choices, and like having more choices available to them, but when they are actually tasked with choosing between those things, they have a harder time choosing, they take longer doing it, they evaluate it on completely irrelevant data (rather than things that matter), and they are less-satisfied with their choice later (source 1, source 2). In a recent follow-up to address some discrepancies in the theory (the paradox is not always true, it just really depends on the specific scenario, and no one knows why), Schwartz offers an examples:
The Illusion of Choice, by contrast, is this concept that you have a choice when you really don't. There's a famous "intellectual" joke that features this:
For another example, let's say you know that the vending machine regularly carries bottles of water, and you would like one. You hit the button for water after paying money in, but nothing drops, and the screen on the machine says that it's out of stock. You seemingly had a choice between paying for water or drinking from a fountain; then, you had the choice between water and anything else, but that choice was just an illusion.
The Illusion of Choice is also present when two things seem different but are arguably not. Let's go back to the vending machine example: let's say that it's also impossible to get a refund, so now you're left with a choice between sodas. All of them are loaded with sugar or artificial sweeteners, so your choice of which drink to get is merely between different types of junk. The drinks are all arguably the same, and are certainly the same from a health perspective. The choice between them is a false one - which one you select doesn't matter.
Definitions out of the way? Good. Let's move on...
Several years ago, I noticed that there were some issues regarding Paradox and Illusion with regard to online dating, and wrote a lengthy blog post on OKCupid which has since been deleted. In essence, it went like this:
In online dating, you have the ability to select very discreet feature about your potential partner: a range of heights, sometimes a range of weights or self-selected body types, eye color, hair color, smoking habits, drinking habits, religion, political alliance, kids, location, marital status, sexual orientation, and so on. It feels like you're building a person at a car dealership, selecting the options you'd like to add on. Each one of these things is a choice, and although you can certainly choose "all" for many of them, by offering the option to choose, and by further returning results for those options, it feels like the choices are meaningful (the choices are real and not illusionary) and rational. It leads to a feeling of self-importance, since you have the power to make such choices, and to a feeling that if you relax any of those choices, you're "settling."
And then, once you have all of these choices defined and you do a search, if your settings are too relaxed, you get a ton of matches. All of these matches represent a choice you have to make - whether or not to reach out to a person, whether or not to respond if they message you, and whether or not to block them entirely, removing them from your list so you never have to see them again.
And here is where the Paradox of Choice comes into play - because we have all of these potential matches, but we have perhaps too many. It can lead us to backing away from the choice rather than making it, and when we do make it, in making it based on entirely irrelevant criteria.
Case in point: when my wife first messaged me on a dating site, before we started dating of course, I had to evaluate her profile and her message to me to see if I would be interested, and it was certainly possible that evaluation would've led me to turn her down, because her grammar was not perfect (and in the past I had demanded grammatical perfection) and she was divorced (I had wanted to meet someone who had never married).
Thankfully, because I had realized the effect that the Paradox of Choice had made on my dating life, I had decided it was necessary to relax my ideas about what I need to find in a partner. It took a long time (I had written that article more than a year before we met), but by the time she sent that message, I had at least gotten to the point where I could say "well, this isn't really that important." And those things aren't. I clearly have thrown grammar out the window now, as you can certainly tell from my willingness to begin a sentence with a conjunction, and I also realized that someone's marital status wasn't always an injunction on that person's ability to make good decisions or that person's ability to follow-through on promises, and rather that it varied from person to person.
I decided to write her back, and a few days later we got together for a First Friday down at the Guthrie Green, and though the date should've been the worst date ever based on how much we both disliked the art we encountered, we both had a blast. I knew before the night was out that I wanted to spend a lot more time with this woman, and it's a decision I'm happy I made. Fortunately for me, she made the same choice.
So yes, this is a call to throw away those illusionary choices for what they are, and try to meet random people. You never know what will click. The same is true for clothes - try them all on, because even though yellow might not normally be your color (it's not anyone's color), maybe this particular shirt or dress or whatever will look amazing.
Try on everything.
That said...
The Paradox of Choice also comes into play in a lot of other areas of our lives. One of the great benefits (to corporations) of the ways in which we shut down when presented with many options is that once we make a choice, we tend to stick with it forever. That is, if we choose to eat at McDonald's, we'll choose to eat there all the time. Evaluate your own eating habits, and I bet when you eat out you eat at a fairly narrow range of restaurants. You may have your special date night restaurants (places you've never been before possibly, but maybe expensive favorites. Mine is Ti Amo.), but you probably also have places you frequent, such as Starbucks, Panera, Arby's, and so on.
Thus, you're presented with both a Paradox of Choice (too many choices preventing you from making a choice at all) and an Illusion of Choice (because when you finally go there, you'll look at the menu meaningfully and choose from a much smaller subset of dishes you normally go with anyway).
It also comes into play with politics...
You knew I'd get here eventually...
The Republican presidential field suffers both from the Illusion of Choice and the Paradox of Choice - that is, there are so many candidates that you can't possibly learn everything about every one of them, and attempting to do so can prevent you from making a meaningful decision, but it's also an Illusion of Choice because the candidates are all functionally the same.
To illustrate this, I used data from http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/ to put together a chart of how well the candidates toe the party line. The site simply gives the candidates a "Supports," "Opposes," or "Neutral/No Opinion" position as a distillation of their views, which may or may not be accurate (any simplification is always an error, as a person's views are complex), but which may be helpful to illustrate the point.
Across 18 different categories, candidates toed the party line 76% of the time. The two "questionable" categories were "Women and Minority Rights" (which really shouldn't get wrapped up into one column) and "campaign finance reform." Both of these are highly subjective, in that someone can say they support women's rights and yet vote against women's rights in every case, and can say they're in favor of campaign finance reform yet side with the Citizens United decision (case in point: Rand Paul, who has said "I agree with Citizens United").
Another questionable category is "Immigration Reform." A person can be in favor of reform in that he or she could be wanting to make immigration harder. Yet the site only gives a "supports" or "opposes," so it's hard to say what that really means.
Even with these problems, the chart is frighteningly red. The biggest exception is Chris Christie, a man who single-handedly skews the chart 2 percentage points toward the left. He's tallied as "supports" for same sex rights, despite vetoing a New Jersey bill that would have legalized it. He's tallied as "supports" for "Peace and Diplomacy," yet does not support the current Iran nuclear deal.
In the end, what we're left with is that in a large number of cases, Republican candidates are either completely right or just leaning right, and even when they lean left on an issue, it's only just.
What does this mean? That any choice between Republican candidates is, for the most part, a choice between personalities alone, rather than on beliefs.
This is largely why Donald Trump is currently in the lead by a large margin - because in a field of similar voices, his is the only one able to rise above the tide by pure virtue of his personality.
This lead will one day end. The way of primaries is to narrow the field. He might win the first few by a large margin, but those first few primaries will serve to push out those people who have no chance of winning the election. As the field narrows to five or six people, suddenly the din of voices will diminish, and people will be able to engage with the personalities of other candidates. At some point in the process, someone will rise above the crush and appear to be sane by Trump's insanity, and the result is that Republican votes will flock to him. This is likely to be Jeb Bush or Scott Walker - two people who represent the farthest right the party can go.
And here's where this whole thing comes to a head. Eventually, we'll have the simple choice between a Republican candidate and a Democratic candidate. Though this is likely to be Bush vs Clinton, it's entirely possible it could be Walker vs. Bernie Sanders. But the paralysis that comes thanks to the Paradox of Choice present on the right could prevent less-engaged voters from participating, and less-engaged voters are often younger voters who lean heavily left.
Which will result in a landslide Republican victory, even when polls will indicate that the Democrat is ahead by several digits.
The answer, fortunately, is not to fight fire with fire (running 20 Democrats), but rather the huge cult of popularity that's forming around Bernie Sanders. If he can keep up his momentum, his voice rising easily above the voices of the right, he might just have a shot at winning. He has the ability to fire up young voters in ways that other candidates haven't been able to, and that's exactly what it will take.
In 2004, Barry Schwartz released a book titled "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less." If you haven't heard about it, the general theory of it goes like this: People like having choices, and like having more choices available to them, but when they are actually tasked with choosing between those things, they have a harder time choosing, they take longer doing it, they evaluate it on completely irrelevant data (rather than things that matter), and they are less-satisfied with their choice later (source 1, source 2). In a recent follow-up to address some discrepancies in the theory (the paradox is not always true, it just really depends on the specific scenario, and no one knows why), Schwartz offers an examples:
a large retailer of office supplies reduced the number of options offered in its print catalog in many product categories. It did this not because of the research on too much choice, but to save money on production and postage. It assumed that the change would lead to reduced sales, but hoped that production and distribution savings would outpace sales losses. What the company found was that in virtually every category in which options had been reduced, sales increased. (source)You can visit that link to read more about it.
The Illusion of Choice, by contrast, is this concept that you have a choice when you really don't. There's a famous "intellectual" joke that features this:
Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, "I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream." The waitress replies, "I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?"Part of this joke has to do with the illusion of choice - that is, when the waitress is out of cream, Sartre can't meaningfully make the choice between cream and no cream; therefore, she offers him the drink without milk, so that he can make the choice (interestingly, since Sartre believes nothing is something, the decision is really between the inability to choose and the ability to choose, which is itself a choice... ok my brain is hurting now).
For another example, let's say you know that the vending machine regularly carries bottles of water, and you would like one. You hit the button for water after paying money in, but nothing drops, and the screen on the machine says that it's out of stock. You seemingly had a choice between paying for water or drinking from a fountain; then, you had the choice between water and anything else, but that choice was just an illusion.
The Illusion of Choice is also present when two things seem different but are arguably not. Let's go back to the vending machine example: let's say that it's also impossible to get a refund, so now you're left with a choice between sodas. All of them are loaded with sugar or artificial sweeteners, so your choice of which drink to get is merely between different types of junk. The drinks are all arguably the same, and are certainly the same from a health perspective. The choice between them is a false one - which one you select doesn't matter.
Definitions out of the way? Good. Let's move on...
Several years ago, I noticed that there were some issues regarding Paradox and Illusion with regard to online dating, and wrote a lengthy blog post on OKCupid which has since been deleted. In essence, it went like this:
In online dating, you have the ability to select very discreet feature about your potential partner: a range of heights, sometimes a range of weights or self-selected body types, eye color, hair color, smoking habits, drinking habits, religion, political alliance, kids, location, marital status, sexual orientation, and so on. It feels like you're building a person at a car dealership, selecting the options you'd like to add on. Each one of these things is a choice, and although you can certainly choose "all" for many of them, by offering the option to choose, and by further returning results for those options, it feels like the choices are meaningful (the choices are real and not illusionary) and rational. It leads to a feeling of self-importance, since you have the power to make such choices, and to a feeling that if you relax any of those choices, you're "settling."
And then, once you have all of these choices defined and you do a search, if your settings are too relaxed, you get a ton of matches. All of these matches represent a choice you have to make - whether or not to reach out to a person, whether or not to respond if they message you, and whether or not to block them entirely, removing them from your list so you never have to see them again.
And here is where the Paradox of Choice comes into play - because we have all of these potential matches, but we have perhaps too many. It can lead us to backing away from the choice rather than making it, and when we do make it, in making it based on entirely irrelevant criteria.
Case in point: when my wife first messaged me on a dating site, before we started dating of course, I had to evaluate her profile and her message to me to see if I would be interested, and it was certainly possible that evaluation would've led me to turn her down, because her grammar was not perfect (and in the past I had demanded grammatical perfection) and she was divorced (I had wanted to meet someone who had never married).
Thankfully, because I had realized the effect that the Paradox of Choice had made on my dating life, I had decided it was necessary to relax my ideas about what I need to find in a partner. It took a long time (I had written that article more than a year before we met), but by the time she sent that message, I had at least gotten to the point where I could say "well, this isn't really that important." And those things aren't. I clearly have thrown grammar out the window now, as you can certainly tell from my willingness to begin a sentence with a conjunction, and I also realized that someone's marital status wasn't always an injunction on that person's ability to make good decisions or that person's ability to follow-through on promises, and rather that it varied from person to person.
I decided to write her back, and a few days later we got together for a First Friday down at the Guthrie Green, and though the date should've been the worst date ever based on how much we both disliked the art we encountered, we both had a blast. I knew before the night was out that I wanted to spend a lot more time with this woman, and it's a decision I'm happy I made. Fortunately for me, she made the same choice.
So yes, this is a call to throw away those illusionary choices for what they are, and try to meet random people. You never know what will click. The same is true for clothes - try them all on, because even though yellow might not normally be your color (it's not anyone's color), maybe this particular shirt or dress or whatever will look amazing.
Try on everything.
That said...
The Paradox of Choice also comes into play in a lot of other areas of our lives. One of the great benefits (to corporations) of the ways in which we shut down when presented with many options is that once we make a choice, we tend to stick with it forever. That is, if we choose to eat at McDonald's, we'll choose to eat there all the time. Evaluate your own eating habits, and I bet when you eat out you eat at a fairly narrow range of restaurants. You may have your special date night restaurants (places you've never been before possibly, but maybe expensive favorites. Mine is Ti Amo.), but you probably also have places you frequent, such as Starbucks, Panera, Arby's, and so on.
Thus, you're presented with both a Paradox of Choice (too many choices preventing you from making a choice at all) and an Illusion of Choice (because when you finally go there, you'll look at the menu meaningfully and choose from a much smaller subset of dishes you normally go with anyway).
It also comes into play with politics...
You knew I'd get here eventually...
The Republican presidential field suffers both from the Illusion of Choice and the Paradox of Choice - that is, there are so many candidates that you can't possibly learn everything about every one of them, and attempting to do so can prevent you from making a meaningful decision, but it's also an Illusion of Choice because the candidates are all functionally the same.
To illustrate this, I used data from http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/ to put together a chart of how well the candidates toe the party line. The site simply gives the candidates a "Supports," "Opposes," or "Neutral/No Opinion" position as a distillation of their views, which may or may not be accurate (any simplification is always an error, as a person's views are complex), but which may be helpful to illustrate the point.
Across 18 different categories, candidates toed the party line 76% of the time. The two "questionable" categories were "Women and Minority Rights" (which really shouldn't get wrapped up into one column) and "campaign finance reform." Both of these are highly subjective, in that someone can say they support women's rights and yet vote against women's rights in every case, and can say they're in favor of campaign finance reform yet side with the Citizens United decision (case in point: Rand Paul, who has said "I agree with Citizens United").
Another questionable category is "Immigration Reform." A person can be in favor of reform in that he or she could be wanting to make immigration harder. Yet the site only gives a "supports" or "opposes," so it's hard to say what that really means.
Even with these problems, the chart is frighteningly red. The biggest exception is Chris Christie, a man who single-handedly skews the chart 2 percentage points toward the left. He's tallied as "supports" for same sex rights, despite vetoing a New Jersey bill that would have legalized it. He's tallied as "supports" for "Peace and Diplomacy," yet does not support the current Iran nuclear deal.
In the end, what we're left with is that in a large number of cases, Republican candidates are either completely right or just leaning right, and even when they lean left on an issue, it's only just.
What does this mean? That any choice between Republican candidates is, for the most part, a choice between personalities alone, rather than on beliefs.
This is largely why Donald Trump is currently in the lead by a large margin - because in a field of similar voices, his is the only one able to rise above the tide by pure virtue of his personality.
This lead will one day end. The way of primaries is to narrow the field. He might win the first few by a large margin, but those first few primaries will serve to push out those people who have no chance of winning the election. As the field narrows to five or six people, suddenly the din of voices will diminish, and people will be able to engage with the personalities of other candidates. At some point in the process, someone will rise above the crush and appear to be sane by Trump's insanity, and the result is that Republican votes will flock to him. This is likely to be Jeb Bush or Scott Walker - two people who represent the farthest right the party can go.
And here's where this whole thing comes to a head. Eventually, we'll have the simple choice between a Republican candidate and a Democratic candidate. Though this is likely to be Bush vs Clinton, it's entirely possible it could be Walker vs. Bernie Sanders. But the paralysis that comes thanks to the Paradox of Choice present on the right could prevent less-engaged voters from participating, and less-engaged voters are often younger voters who lean heavily left.
Which will result in a landslide Republican victory, even when polls will indicate that the Democrat is ahead by several digits.
The answer, fortunately, is not to fight fire with fire (running 20 Democrats), but rather the huge cult of popularity that's forming around Bernie Sanders. If he can keep up his momentum, his voice rising easily above the voices of the right, he might just have a shot at winning. He has the ability to fire up young voters in ways that other candidates haven't been able to, and that's exactly what it will take.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Soylent Green
Ok, so I think I'm finally ready to weigh in on the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood and the selling of aborted fetus tissue. Fortunately, PolitiFact has weighed in on this. It turns out that while it is illegal to sell such tissue, it is perfectly legal to donate it for a fee - a fee that is meant to recoup the losses of storage, transport, and so on. So, even if PP is donating for a fee, it's still not breaking the law, assuming that the fee is "reasonable" (and we'd have to do a lot of accounting to determine whether that's the case or not).
So, at issue is not whether it's legal, but whether it's moral. The question started out as "should Planned Parenthood be profiting off of such tissue," but as PolitiFact notes, they're not profiting:
But we know that this all hinges upon this inherent belief in the immorality of abortions because we don't have the same arguments against similar conflicts of interest in other arenas. For instance, hospitals have the same guidelines, and can donate aborted fetus tissue or human cadavers of all age, with similar fee requirements. We don't question their ability to do so, because we recognize that there's a valid medical need for it - namely, that scientists and medical students might be able to use the bodies for study.
Which raises the question: what do the people angry at Planned Parenthood think PP is doing with these fetuses?
Again, this comes down to the issue of "us vs them" or self vs other that I've talked about before. On the right, there is a constant campaign to smear Planned Parenthood and other providers of abortion and abortion-related services as monsters who are out to murder babies. And when you vilify an "other" in that way, it's easy to imagine the other as capable of any number of atrocities.
Sure, they may not say that Planned Parenthood is grinding up fetuses and turning them into food and food-fillers for our fast food industry, but they're also not saying that they're donating them to research. By leaving the question open, and by filling the minds of those listening with monstrous ideas, their minds fill in such horrible ideas as "what ifs."
So, at issue is not whether it's legal, but whether it's moral. The question started out as "should Planned Parenthood be profiting off of such tissue," but as PolitiFact notes, they're not profiting:
"The amounts she cites do not appear to be out of the ordinary, but no one knows because there is no registry or compendium of fees charged by organizations (or) institutions supplying fetal tissue," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. "When she haggles about fees, that does not appear to me to be trying to profit."But it also seems wrong for Planned Parenthood to profit from abortions because of the inherent belief that abortions are bad. Ergo, if they're able to sell fetus tissue at a profit, it's in their best interests to try to abort as many babies as possible, rather than try to provide alternatives to abortion (such as prevention, parenting, and adoption assistance). It would represent a conflict of interest.
But we know that this all hinges upon this inherent belief in the immorality of abortions because we don't have the same arguments against similar conflicts of interest in other arenas. For instance, hospitals have the same guidelines, and can donate aborted fetus tissue or human cadavers of all age, with similar fee requirements. We don't question their ability to do so, because we recognize that there's a valid medical need for it - namely, that scientists and medical students might be able to use the bodies for study.
Which raises the question: what do the people angry at Planned Parenthood think PP is doing with these fetuses?
Again, this comes down to the issue of "us vs them" or self vs other that I've talked about before. On the right, there is a constant campaign to smear Planned Parenthood and other providers of abortion and abortion-related services as monsters who are out to murder babies. And when you vilify an "other" in that way, it's easy to imagine the other as capable of any number of atrocities.
Sure, they may not say that Planned Parenthood is grinding up fetuses and turning them into food and food-fillers for our fast food industry, but they're also not saying that they're donating them to research. By leaving the question open, and by filling the minds of those listening with monstrous ideas, their minds fill in such horrible ideas as "what ifs."
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
What I Used to Believe about Abortions
Senator James Lankford (R-idiculous) set off some controversy by arguing that abortion is a men's rights issue, which of course was immediately pounced on by just about everyone. It reminded me, though, of some things I used to believe about abortion, and so I thought I'd share some conservative arguments from my past that go beyond simple Biblical arguments (which I already dissected in my last post, Unplanned).
First of all, let's talk about the men's rights argument goes. Basically,
Of course, that's not what happens except in perhaps one out of every billion or so births, so the argument then proceeds that the role of women in the process must be questioned.
There is a song that came out in 1998 by Everlast called "What It's Like."
The basic premise of the song is that you really have to be in the same situation as someone else to understand "what it's like" to be stuck making the choices that person is having to make. It tells three stories in between the choruses, and I liked the first and the third easily enough, but the second I mocked. That story goes like this:
To summarize what leads to this idea,
My favorite line to say in those days was this:
It was, therefore, when I realized that choices could be considerably more complicated than that that I changed my opinion. I had already accepted rape and incest as valid reasons to get abortions, even though I didn't like it, because of the belief that women should have at least that much control of what happens to them. But then I started thinking about hypothetical situations, and imagined a woman who had been raped by someone who she didn't feel she could report, for whatever reason - perhaps because the shock of rape by someone she was so close to her left her struggling with complex emotions she had to spend time struggling to work out. Should this woman be denied access to an abortion, knowing full well that she hadn't dealt with the emotions yet that would enable her to be a fit parent, and knowing that she was raped and therefore hadn't had a choice?
The answer was a resounding "no," of course. But, if abortion was only available in the case of rape or incest, then she wouldn't be able to have one unless she either drummed up the courage to report it or she was legally compelled to report it - that is, her report is forced out of her. Forcing a woman to do anything, especially after she has been a victim of force, seems cruel and unusual. The resulting realization is that abortion has to be legal just because we can't know the circumstances that led the woman to that place. We don't have to like abortion to still consider it necessary.
(and to the haters who say "well, you're describing an extremely weak woman, that's a very negative view of women," I say, "perhaps, but I was a fledgling liberal at that time, so it's certainly possible I still held some negative views of women from my days arguing against abortion rights." But, I have also since met a woman who had exactly the story I describe above. I won't name names, and I won't share details of her story.)
First of all, let's talk about the men's rights argument goes. Basically,
- I had something to do with the pregnancy, too.
- The sperm involved in creating the embryo is an extension of my body.
- The embryo is therefore 50% mine, and 50% her's.
- And since it is equally mine, I should have an equal say in what happens to it.
Of course, that's not what happens except in perhaps one out of every billion or so births, so the argument then proceeds that the role of women in the process must be questioned.
There is a song that came out in 1998 by Everlast called "What It's Like."
The basic premise of the song is that you really have to be in the same situation as someone else to understand "what it's like" to be stuck making the choices that person is having to make. It tells three stories in between the choruses, and I liked the first and the third easily enough, but the second I mocked. That story goes like this:
Mary got pregnant from a kid named Tom who said he was in loveAnd my mocking basically called her a dumb bitch for believing Tom, and saying it was all her fault for getting pregnant. I wholeheartedly agreed with those who were expressed in the last line, calling her a killer, sinner, and whore.
He said, "Don't worry about a thing, baby doll, I'm the man you've been dreamin' of."
But three months later he said he won't date her or return her call
And she sweared, "God damn if I find that man I'm cuttin' off his balls."
And then she heads for the clinic and she gets some static walkin' through the door.
They call her a killer, and they call her a sinner, and they call her a whore. (source)
To summarize what leads to this idea,
- When a woman gets pregnant, it's her fault. She is responsible for birth control, responsible for declining or accepting sex based on whether or not she would like to get pregnant, and responsible for being able to resist force or coercion, no matter her age.
- If she slips up on any of these points, she's irresponsible, and should therefore be given more responsibility by forcing her to care for an infant she does not want.
- Meanwhile, the man should be forced to provide care for the infant, even if that means that the man should be forced back into the woman's life, even if she does not desire that (such as if she was raped or if the man turned out to be an ass who no one would want in the child's life).
My favorite line to say in those days was this:
I'm pro-choice, I just believe that the choice was made the day the woman had sex. She already chose to have the kid.Which is an awfully easy way of looking at the world. If every woman actually had that choice, then perhaps that would be a fair way to see things. It's hopelessly optimistic about the power available to women in this day and age, even while it reflects a willingness to grant men the power to spew their progeny far and wide without repercussions.
It was, therefore, when I realized that choices could be considerably more complicated than that that I changed my opinion. I had already accepted rape and incest as valid reasons to get abortions, even though I didn't like it, because of the belief that women should have at least that much control of what happens to them. But then I started thinking about hypothetical situations, and imagined a woman who had been raped by someone who she didn't feel she could report, for whatever reason - perhaps because the shock of rape by someone she was so close to her left her struggling with complex emotions she had to spend time struggling to work out. Should this woman be denied access to an abortion, knowing full well that she hadn't dealt with the emotions yet that would enable her to be a fit parent, and knowing that she was raped and therefore hadn't had a choice?
The answer was a resounding "no," of course. But, if abortion was only available in the case of rape or incest, then she wouldn't be able to have one unless she either drummed up the courage to report it or she was legally compelled to report it - that is, her report is forced out of her. Forcing a woman to do anything, especially after she has been a victim of force, seems cruel and unusual. The resulting realization is that abortion has to be legal just because we can't know the circumstances that led the woman to that place. We don't have to like abortion to still consider it necessary.
(and to the haters who say "well, you're describing an extremely weak woman, that's a very negative view of women," I say, "perhaps, but I was a fledgling liberal at that time, so it's certainly possible I still held some negative views of women from my days arguing against abortion rights." But, I have also since met a woman who had exactly the story I describe above. I won't name names, and I won't share details of her story.)
Friday, July 31, 2015
Rigidity of the Law
A nineteen-year-old boy has sex with a fourteen-year-old girl. It seems clear in such a case that the boy should go to jail, since he has committed statutory rape. The girl isn't legally old enough in almost any state to give consent, and the boy should have known better.
But what if it was physically impossible for him to know better?
Case in point: this story.
tl;dr: the girl lied about her age, and admitted to police she lied about her age. In court, she and her mother both stood up before the court and confessed about what she had done and pled for the boy not to be given a harsh sentence. The boy didn't know her before hooking up with her, and thus had no way of knowing she was lying.
Maybe you feel like it was still wrong of him, based on beliefs about sex before marriage or a perception of society's "hook up culture" - but those two things are legal and people have the right to have sex with whomever they want so long as both parties consent. It's not justice to take out your belief against premarital sex on anyone (and if you truly believe it's wrong, you also likely believe that God will sort it out after death). Barring such a belief, the only question is one of whether it's the responsibility of both parties to verify each other's age - and, for anyone under 18, people are not required to carry ID, which can make such verification impossible
But let's assume you can twist it around in your brain to the point where you still feel you must convict the boy and punish him for the act. What is right?
For the sake of determining what's appropriate, let's assume for a moment he knew her age and acted anyway. Then the question of punishment should be one of recidivism - that is, will he do it again? If he is a child predator, with a history of attempting to engage in sexual activity with underage girls, then it's entirely appropriate to give him a long prison sentence. (I disapprove of sex offender registries in general, but that's another argument.) But, if he's a first offender who simply made a bad judgment call, and punishment can be expected to encourage him to make better judgment calls in the future, then a short sentence is appropriate.
And not long ago, judges had the authority to make such calls.
An editorial in The Independent, out of the UK, explains the problem as it transpired there. It is similar to what happened in the states.
And it further doesn't help that so many of us have this "the law is the law" belief that was expressed to me in argument on Facebook that this boy should be punished as harshly as he is. When you say "the law is the law," you're really making a claim about how perfect the law is. You're making a claim that, even though it was written by human beings (notably flawed) in a written language (notably plagued by interpretation issues), and even though it is extremely narrow in its scope and the possibility of human interaction is always necessarily wider in scope, that it is perfect and should never be questioned.
That was originally what judges were for - to interpret the law, and make decisions about whether it's appropriate to apply it in certain situations. But, we believed they were too loose with it, so we took that power away from them, or found other judges who more fit our narrow beliefs. That was originally what juries were for, to decide not only whether a person was guilty of breaking a law, but whether it was even right to apply that law to their case (jury nullification is a thing, but no one ever talks about it).
When the law is rigid, it is always unjust.
But what if it was physically impossible for him to know better?
Case in point: this story.
tl;dr: the girl lied about her age, and admitted to police she lied about her age. In court, she and her mother both stood up before the court and confessed about what she had done and pled for the boy not to be given a harsh sentence. The boy didn't know her before hooking up with her, and thus had no way of knowing she was lying.
Maybe you feel like it was still wrong of him, based on beliefs about sex before marriage or a perception of society's "hook up culture" - but those two things are legal and people have the right to have sex with whomever they want so long as both parties consent. It's not justice to take out your belief against premarital sex on anyone (and if you truly believe it's wrong, you also likely believe that God will sort it out after death). Barring such a belief, the only question is one of whether it's the responsibility of both parties to verify each other's age - and, for anyone under 18, people are not required to carry ID, which can make such verification impossible
But let's assume you can twist it around in your brain to the point where you still feel you must convict the boy and punish him for the act. What is right?
For the sake of determining what's appropriate, let's assume for a moment he knew her age and acted anyway. Then the question of punishment should be one of recidivism - that is, will he do it again? If he is a child predator, with a history of attempting to engage in sexual activity with underage girls, then it's entirely appropriate to give him a long prison sentence. (I disapprove of sex offender registries in general, but that's another argument.) But, if he's a first offender who simply made a bad judgment call, and punishment can be expected to encourage him to make better judgment calls in the future, then a short sentence is appropriate.
And not long ago, judges had the authority to make such calls.
An editorial in The Independent, out of the UK, explains the problem as it transpired there. It is similar to what happened in the states.
it was hypersensitivity to the outrage [early release murder cases] caused that led Labour to coin its most effective catchphrase ever: "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", promising ... to take the civilising steps that would discourage the young and poor from setting off down the wrong road, while vowing that it would also come down brutally hard on offenders.
Successive hardline home secretaries cleaved fiercely to the pledge to be tough, and as a result the discretion that judges had long enjoyed to discriminate between cold-blooded, premeditated murder, murder caused when the intention was only to warn or to wound, and murder committed in the heat of passion or at the wish and request of the "victim", was abolished. All were "murder", all were equally iniquitous crimes, and all would be punished by the same tariff: life.
This, it was decided, was the most effective way to stop the right-wing press from pouncing at regular intervals. But the resulting rigidity reduced the judge to a robot, and cast a blanket of moral uniformity over actions that ranged from the unspeakably vile to the merciful.The problem is, we decided we needed to be tough on crime, and somewhere in the process, we reduced the ability of judges to actually judge anything. In many cases, as the editorial describes, we make judges simple robots who merely assign the preordained punishment to the crime. In other cases, though, thanks to our system of electing judges and this belief that judges must be tough on crime, we choose judges who will be over-the-top and make decisions that are based solely within a narrow definition of morality that happens to fit the minority of people who turned out to vote on election day. We don't choose judges on their ability to make wise decisions, but rather on their ability take someone the rest of us would let walk free, look him in the eye, and say "f#%! your life, I have a political agenda to make."
And it further doesn't help that so many of us have this "the law is the law" belief that was expressed to me in argument on Facebook that this boy should be punished as harshly as he is. When you say "the law is the law," you're really making a claim about how perfect the law is. You're making a claim that, even though it was written by human beings (notably flawed) in a written language (notably plagued by interpretation issues), and even though it is extremely narrow in its scope and the possibility of human interaction is always necessarily wider in scope, that it is perfect and should never be questioned.
That was originally what judges were for - to interpret the law, and make decisions about whether it's appropriate to apply it in certain situations. But, we believed they were too loose with it, so we took that power away from them, or found other judges who more fit our narrow beliefs. That was originally what juries were for, to decide not only whether a person was guilty of breaking a law, but whether it was even right to apply that law to their case (jury nullification is a thing, but no one ever talks about it).
When the law is rigid, it is always unjust.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Unplanned
The last couple of weeks, there's been a big story in the media about Planned Parenthood and attempts to sell the remains of unborn fetuses to science. I have no interest in debating whether that's true or not, or whether it's right for aborted human zygotes to be sold. I would instead like to talk about why right-wing groups consistently try to find problems within the organization as part of their attempts to defund it.
I've talked previously about how within Fundamentalist Christianity, we were taught to see the world in "us vs them" terms, that we were having to wage war for our very souls. We were also taught that abortion was evil - that life began at conception and that abortion was therefore murder. Their key passages to prove this are:
There is a final passage, though, that requires a bit of willing self-deception to accept. Allow me to digress a moment...
See, so far, we haven't got a living human being in the womb, just something that is knit together. Carrie Gordon Earll, in a post as part of Focus on the Family's "Abortion Series," gives us this passage:
Earll jumps around between versions in her article, quoting:
Greg Koukl does a great job breaking down the meaning behind the original Hebrew words, and why they might be translated as birth or miscarriage. Unfortunately, he makes a leap in logic that isn't supported - namely, that Moses chose a word that means live birth. By Koukl's own admission, though, it doesn't:
If Earll encountered such a definition (and it is in the RSV and the KJV that she quotes), then she is being intellectually dishonest by hiding that possibility from her readers.
If we read the passage as "delivered" rather than birth or even miscarriage, then we discover that the passage doesn't care one whit for the life of the child - the injury is to the mother, who may very well die from an injury serious enough to cause her to deliver early. Thus, "life for life" refers to her life, not her child's.
If we disregard that, then we can accept that the death of the fetus is equivalent to the life of a man, and we can infer from that that means the child is covered by the same "thou shalt not murder" law that covers other human beings. Then, finally we have a "proof" that abortion is murder.
Back to the main thread...
Because abortion is murder in the minds of Fundamentalists, it serves therefore that those who execute abortions (doctors and women who terminate pregnancies) are murderers, and organizations that facilitate this interaction are accomplices to murder.
And, since abortion is legal, and murderers and accomplices cannot be tried in court, this simply frustrates the Fundamentalists even more, which is how we end up with vigilantes bombing abortion clinics in the hopes of stopping abortions from happening. In the mind of such a vigilante, murder demands a death sentence for the murderers, and since the law won't do it, it's up to vigilantes to do so.
In the church, we publicly condemned such actions, but we did so with a side of "but they earned it," because we honestly believed they did.
So the thinking goes: Planned Parenthood, as an organization that facilitates abortions, then, is an accomplice to murder. Rather than bombing it, the only thing left to do is attempt to defund it. If we defund it enough, then perhaps abortions will stop occurring there. Their other services aren't bad, but their abortions must be stopped. Nevermind that federal money can't be used to pay for abortions, and thus defunding the organization means only taking money from their other beneficial programs, because we had to do SOMETHING.
Obviously, I felt the same way at one point in my life. Planned Parenthood was the poster child for abortion clinics. As a 20-year-old IT worker for a local IT company, I was given the task to go to a Planned Parenthood office to fix several computers. (Interestingly, no part of me said I should be a conscientious objector to that - we didn't think about rejecting work just because our client did something we didn't agree with.) I felt like I was walking into the gates of Hell. I tried not to make contact with the women sitting in the waiting room of the office, who I imagined were all there because they wanted to have abortions, and I judged them for it. I thought I might accidentally wander into some doctor's office where an abortion was actually being performed (nevermind that Planned Parenthood doesn't do that in Oklahoma - my level of education about the organization was limited at best).
My experience was somewhat different from what I expected.
While I did see some information about abortion - one small pamphlet on the subject, if I recall correctly - everything else was about mostly unrelated activities, such as breast exams and other women's health issues. There were several resources about adoption, and contraception information was probably the thing I saw most.
And the employees weren't hateful people hell-bent on killing babies; instead, they were people who were just trying to help others as best they could.
It was an eye-opening experience, but the ways in which it was were unexpected and unplanned.
It would be another 7 years before I started becoming a liberal, but that would be the last time I badmouthed Planned Parenthood. Perhaps a field trip should be a requirement for everyone.
I've talked previously about how within Fundamentalist Christianity, we were taught to see the world in "us vs them" terms, that we were having to wage war for our very souls. We were also taught that abortion was evil - that life began at conception and that abortion was therefore murder. Their key passages to prove this are:
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalms 139:13, NIV)
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you..." (Jeremiah 1:5a, NIV)As with the creation of the Heavens and the Earth, Fundamentalists see the creative acts ascribed to God in the Bible as being entirely dependent upon Him - ergo, every child is literally a miracle of God, rather than something that would happen anyway. This act of creation is instantaneous rather than a process - the initial cell combination of sperm and egg is God's Will, and it cannot spark the engine that will churn out a human being without God's Will. God knew He would create such a child before the child's conception, which means that the child is part of God's plan.
There is a final passage, though, that requires a bit of willing self-deception to accept. Allow me to digress a moment...
See, so far, we haven't got a living human being in the womb, just something that is knit together. Carrie Gordon Earll, in a post as part of Focus on the Family's "Abortion Series," gives us this passage:
"'If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise' (Exodus 21:22-25, NIV)"She uses this as proof that humans are not "allowed to take life before birth." The idea hinges upon the idea that she is giving birth to a living, breathing child, which is why the passage says "gives birth prematurely." The second sentence, then, appears to mean that the fetus is not delivered successfully, and that fetus's life is equal to the life of the man who caused the accident, ergo the man should be put to death as well.
Earll jumps around between versions in her article, quoting:
- the New American Standard Version 6 times;
- the New International Version 6 times;
- the New King James Version 5 times;
- the Phillips New Testament in Modern English 1 time;
- the Revised Standard Version 1 time;
- the King James Version 1 time.
"When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine." (RSV)
If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. (KJV)In fact, this idea of "miscarriage" instead of "birth" occurs in the Common English Bible, The Message Bible, and the New Revised Standard.
Greg Koukl does a great job breaking down the meaning behind the original Hebrew words, and why they might be translated as birth or miscarriage. Unfortunately, he makes a leap in logic that isn't supported - namely, that Moses chose a word that means live birth. By Koukl's own admission, though, it doesn't:
The verb yasa is a primary, primitive root that means "to go or come out."
There is only one time yasa is clearly used for a dead child. Numbers 12:12 says, "Oh, do not let her be like one dead, whose flesh is half eaten away when he comes from his mother's womb!"He says that the frequency of the word's use to describe live birth, and its infrequency as anything else, means that it must be a living child delivered in this passage; however, he just said it means "to go or come out". That is, when a woman gives birth, it doesn't matter whether the child has a pulse or not, whether it's a stillbirth or not, for the purposes of the word "birth." We often assume it means that the child is alive, but that is not necessary to the word. In the Hebrew language, it's the same way, just as the KJV translates it into simply "depart from her."
If Earll encountered such a definition (and it is in the RSV and the KJV that she quotes), then she is being intellectually dishonest by hiding that possibility from her readers.
If we read the passage as "delivered" rather than birth or even miscarriage, then we discover that the passage doesn't care one whit for the life of the child - the injury is to the mother, who may very well die from an injury serious enough to cause her to deliver early. Thus, "life for life" refers to her life, not her child's.
If we disregard that, then we can accept that the death of the fetus is equivalent to the life of a man, and we can infer from that that means the child is covered by the same "thou shalt not murder" law that covers other human beings. Then, finally we have a "proof" that abortion is murder.
Back to the main thread...
Because abortion is murder in the minds of Fundamentalists, it serves therefore that those who execute abortions (doctors and women who terminate pregnancies) are murderers, and organizations that facilitate this interaction are accomplices to murder.
And, since abortion is legal, and murderers and accomplices cannot be tried in court, this simply frustrates the Fundamentalists even more, which is how we end up with vigilantes bombing abortion clinics in the hopes of stopping abortions from happening. In the mind of such a vigilante, murder demands a death sentence for the murderers, and since the law won't do it, it's up to vigilantes to do so.
In the church, we publicly condemned such actions, but we did so with a side of "but they earned it," because we honestly believed they did.
So the thinking goes: Planned Parenthood, as an organization that facilitates abortions, then, is an accomplice to murder. Rather than bombing it, the only thing left to do is attempt to defund it. If we defund it enough, then perhaps abortions will stop occurring there. Their other services aren't bad, but their abortions must be stopped. Nevermind that federal money can't be used to pay for abortions, and thus defunding the organization means only taking money from their other beneficial programs, because we had to do SOMETHING.
Obviously, I felt the same way at one point in my life. Planned Parenthood was the poster child for abortion clinics. As a 20-year-old IT worker for a local IT company, I was given the task to go to a Planned Parenthood office to fix several computers. (Interestingly, no part of me said I should be a conscientious objector to that - we didn't think about rejecting work just because our client did something we didn't agree with.) I felt like I was walking into the gates of Hell. I tried not to make contact with the women sitting in the waiting room of the office, who I imagined were all there because they wanted to have abortions, and I judged them for it. I thought I might accidentally wander into some doctor's office where an abortion was actually being performed (nevermind that Planned Parenthood doesn't do that in Oklahoma - my level of education about the organization was limited at best).
My experience was somewhat different from what I expected.
While I did see some information about abortion - one small pamphlet on the subject, if I recall correctly - everything else was about mostly unrelated activities, such as breast exams and other women's health issues. There were several resources about adoption, and contraception information was probably the thing I saw most.
And the employees weren't hateful people hell-bent on killing babies; instead, they were people who were just trying to help others as best they could.
It was an eye-opening experience, but the ways in which it was were unexpected and unplanned.
It would be another 7 years before I started becoming a liberal, but that would be the last time I badmouthed Planned Parenthood. Perhaps a field trip should be a requirement for everyone.
Monday, July 27, 2015
Sharia don't like it
The latest "ZOMG SHARIA LAW" post I saw on Facebook is that the mayor of Seattle is introducing Sharia Law (compliant home-loans). I mention that last part in parentheses because it's never the headline of the story and it's always clear that the people responding to it have either not read it or not understood it.
It's illegal to pay interest in the Muslim faith, and there are some organizations- some of them governmental - that help with this problem, as it's pretty much completely impossible to buy a house, a car, or even anything online without that help.
But before you go apesh€t over this, understand that it's also against the Bible for Christians to pay interest. This is why it was in The Merchant of Venice that Shylock wanted a pound of flesh - interest was seen as being that damaging to a person.
The term in the Bible is "usury" - and here's what the Good Book says:
"If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest." (Exodus 22:25)
"Suppose he has a violent son, who sheds blood or does any of these other things...
He lends at interest and takes a profit.
Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he is to be put to death; his blood will be on his own head." (Ezekiel 18:10,13)
"But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked." (Luke 6:35)
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