Merry Christmas and Happy Whatever, everyone!
I'm visiting the family for the holidays, so posting will be light for a while (if you haven't noticed. It may even be entirely absent for another week. In the meantime, there are new recipes up, so go cook something if you are off work.
Sigh. The creationists are at it again. It never ceases to astonish me that there are so many credulous and gullible people in this country. It seems to be getting worse, not better.
First, Chris Comer was fired from the Texas Education Agency for forwarding an email about an anti-intelligent design speech. She was the director of science curriculum and in charge of the science standards for Texas schools. "Coincidentally," those standards are up for review this year. The deputy commissioner that demanded her firing used to serve as an advisor to then-governor George W. Bush. Somehow, I'm not surprised. Again, I'm ashamed to be Texan.
A man writes in to the News-Gazette with a "disproof" of evolution that has nothing to do with evolution. Hint: if a disproof of one of the most accepted and evidence-supported theories in all of modern science fits on a 3x5 card and requires only an 8th grade education, there's probably something wrong with your argument.
There's actually a creationist wiki: CreationWiki. Unlike even Conservapedia, participation isn't open; you must first ask the site admins for permission. Believing in Godly creationism is a prerequisite; Hellbound atheists need not apply.
A Florida educator sends out an email asking creationists to fight the inclusion of evolution in Florida's educational standards. Unlike the Texas case, she receives only a reprimand.
Ugh, it's just so frustrating. The good news is that if you go look at the comment on Comey's firing at the Statesman article or at the Chronicle editorial, they are predominantly pro-evolution. The frustrating part is that the anti-science comments are full of the same stuff we've seen a thousand times before: evolution is just a theory, there are no transitional fossils, evolution isn't true because we don't know what came before the Big Bang. Geez, creationism hasn't had a new argument since about 1925.
The Austin American-Statesman had an article a week or so ago about the evolution-related firing of Chris Comer, the science curriculum director of the Texas Education Agency. You haven't read my blog post on the subject because I haven't finished it yet.
My letter to the editor of the Statesman, however, was published. W00t! I am proud to join the ranks of cantankerous old bastards with too much time on their hands.
The Statesman publishes their Opinions page online as a blog, complete with a comments section, so you can read that I'm not welcome back in Texas. Sniff.
It's just another example of politics as tribalism that being pro-science and pro-evolution is the "liberal" position and the anti-science and pro-creationism position is "conservative."
There's a thread over at IlliniPundit about the recent stem cell breakthrough. In it, one commenter spouts the usual pro-life and anti-stem-cell line "We must not take life to save life." It's the same mentality that you get from pro-lifers about abortion, namely the valuable part of a person is that he is "alive." They never seem to explain under what definition of "life" a zygote is alive but the sperm and ovum are not.
That kind of belief system, however, isn't consistent with permitting organ donations for organs like the heart. Such transplants can come from people that are brain-dead. But I'm not even sure that the position that a person can even be brain-dead is compatible with the extreme pro-life position.
A brain-dead person is still, at the cellular level, alive. With the exception of breathing, many of the normal bodily functions are going on. His heart still beats; his hair still grows; his body is still warm. A blastocyst is alive only in this sense.
I'm of the opinion that brain activity isn't just the most important thing about a person, it's the only thing that's valuable. It's what makes the difference between living tissue and a person. Cut my arm off, and no one will argue that I'm less of a person; pick up my severed arm and no one will argue that it is in any way a person. So there must be something other than being alive at the cellular level that defines the important part of a person's existence.
I just don't see how anyone who's thought it through can claim these two positions are anything other than logically inconsistent. I guess it's that "logically" part that's tripping me up. The pro-life, "an embryo is equivalent to a full grown human being" position isn't a logical argument; it's an emotional one. It has emotional resonance and it soundbites really well.
I'm sure many people will disagree with me and that's fine. Just give me a usable definition of "alive" that applies to a zygote but not a brain-dead person. For bonus points, give me a meaningful definition of "person" that applies to a zygote but not a puppy.
UPDATE: To respond to Glock21's question "At what point are we a human being or person?" I'd like to hand that one off to The Frontal Cortex:
Both political extremes are wrong. A zygote isn't a baby, and a third-trimester fetus isn't a zygote. If cellular biology knows anything, it's that life is a gradient. Our consciousness slowly accumulates. There is no magic spark when an egg starts dividing and differentiating. It's just DNA doing it's thing. Of course, let those cells divide for long enough, and you'll end up with something pretty miraculous. Deciding at what point the miracle begins - at what point that bundle of cells accumulates a "soul" or "mind" or "brain" - is, of course, the really difficult part. But other countries - like Britain, where abortion is an issue debated by doctors, not grandstanding Parliamentarians - show us that this question can be answered in a methodical and rational manner.
I have to say that the obsession and fascination with a fertilized egg because it's apparently "whole" or "complete" is odd. Really, the only difference between separated gametes and a zygote is that the DNA has come together. Big deal. You can have tons of unique DNA in a test tube and it's not a person. DNA isn't even alive. And looking closely at the biology just makes the soundbite even more invalid. From The Island of Doubt:
...there is no "moment of conception."
For starters, the process of fertilization take a measurable amount of time. First the living sperm and living egg membranes fuse, then the egg completes the second stage of meiotic division -- the process that produces a haploid gamete with only half the DNA of a non-sex cell. Then the sperm loses its tail and the energy factory known as the mitochondria. Then the nuclear material from egg and sperm fuse, a process that again takes time. DNA must be wrangled and manipulated until new diploid chromosomes are ready for the next steps. It doesn't happen all at once...
Furthermore, it's only going to get worse. The better the temporal and spatial resolution of our technology,which is improving with each passing day, the more detail and complexity emerges in the reproductive cycle.
So I ask again: when exactly does in this process does one become a "human being" whose destruction is tantamount to murder? Where precisely is this moral boundary of which Mr. Bush speaks?
I understand that to admit to the fact that there is no boundary, that life is continuum, opens a lot of uncomfortable doors for those who like their ethical architecture to be straight and narrow. Sorry, but that's ... life.
I think a lot of the arguing here happens because a segment of the population is very uncomfortable with greyness. Black or white. Good or evil. You're either with us or against us. By framing the discussion in these terms, there isn't any measured or critical analysis or discussion. But it does make things oh so morally uncomplicated.
UPDATE II: Fig pointed out that this post disappeared from the site. When I wrote the above update, I accidentally saved it as a draft, rather than publishing it to the site. Sorry.
The Hollywood writer's strike continues. David has a couple of good posts up about it. Go. Read.
I just saw this today, but a couple of weeks ago, Joss Whedon wrote a response to a NY Times article on the strike. The Times article shamefully framed the writer's strike as something other than a "real" strike. A real strike involves working people, while those writers are just "working" people. As usual, Joss shows exactly why the pen is mightier than the sword (and why a pencil makes for a stake substitute when you're in a pinch):
Reporters are funny people. At least, some of the New York Times reporters are. Their story on the strike was the most dispiriting and inaccurate that I read. But it also contained one of my favorite phrases of the month.
"All the trappings of a union protest were there… …But instead of hard hats and work boots, those at the barricades wore arty glasses and fancy scarves."
Oh my God. Arty glasses and fancy scarves. That is so cute! My head is aflame with images of writers in ruffled collars, silk pantaloons and ribbons upon their buckled shoes. A towering powdered wig upon David Fury’s head, and Drew Goddard in his yellow stockings (cross-gartered, needless to say). Such popinjays, we! The entire writers’ guild as Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Delicious.
Except this is exactly the problem. The easiest tactic is for people to paint writers as namby pamby arty scarfy posers, because it’s what most people think even when we’re not striking. Writing is largely not considered work. Art in general is not considered work. Work is a thing you physically labor at, or at the very least, hate. Art is fun. (And Hollywood writers are overpaid, scarf-wearing dainties.) It’s an easy argument to make. And a hard one to dispute...
"The trappings of a union protest..." You see how that works? Since we aren’t real workers, this isn’t a real union issue. (We’re just a guild!) And that’s where all my ‘what is a writer’ rambling becomes important. Because this IS a union issue, one that will affect not just artists but every member of a community that could find itself at the mercy of a machine that absolutely and unhesitatingly would dismantle every union, remove every benefit, turn every worker into a cowed wage-slave in the singular pursuit of profit. (There is a machine. Its program is ‘profit’. This is not a myth.) This is about a fair wage for our work. No different than any other union. The teamsters have recognized the importance of this strike, for which I’m deeply grateful. Hopefully the Times will too.
Studios! Settle already! Give the writers the pittance they are asking for so people like Joss can get back to writing and I can get back to complaining that you haven't given Joss another series.
I rarely poke my head in at the News Gazette blogs, because they're usually fairly inane. About a week ago Rhonda Robinson blogged "Expelled: No intelligence Allowed - new movie, old debate", which is more disappointing than her usual conservative, self-pitying blather. What's unusual about this column is that the density of logical fallacies is so high is threatens to distort the flow of cars on I-74 due to its graviational pull.
Intelligent design creationists spout the same claims over and over. They used the same tired old arguments so often, that you can actually refer to them by number. The Index to Creationist Claims categorizes and indexes the standard creationist claims, distortions, and half-truths in a nice, tidy list for reference. Here I'll point out Robinson's fallacious arguments:
That's one creationist claim every 70 words or so in this blog post. That's pretty impressive for 500 words.
What I find the most irritating is the continual put-upon tone she takes in the posting. She asks "Are we still free to disagree about the meaning of life?" and why creationism is "not allowed to be heard." She even goes so far as to ask "Are we still free to disagree about the meaning of life without fear of persecution?"
Seriously, persecution? Rhonda, get down off the cross, we could use the wood. You can complain about persecution when creationists stop making a mint peddling books to the ignorant.
Robinson whines, "This is about science, and the freedom of ideas." Science isn't really about ideas. That's philosophy. Science is about evidence, and creationsists have none.
Hopefully, creationists will someday come up with some arguments that they haven't been parroting for decades, ignoring the evidence mounting against them. Until then, I'm just bored.
(Oh, and The Squire is still around. He stops by the comments and pretty much gives Robinson a good blog-lashing. Get back to blogging, you slacker.)
If you ever get to Santa Fe, you really should get to Cafe Pasqual's. It's this really good, very original restaurant on the Plaza.
One of the few podcasts I listen to on a (semi-) regular basis is The Splendid Table. A couple of weeks ago, the show did an interview with Katharine Kagel, the creator and owner of Pasqual's. If you don't subscribe, you can listen to that edition of TST here. The interview starts at 13:30
I kind of got fed up with the fake driftwood I had in the aquarium the other day. It had gotten covered in algae and was just sitting there like, well, like a rock. So I pulled it out, but that left a large open space right in the center of the aquarium that needed filling.
I was unfaithful to Sailfin, my pretty kick-ass local fish shop, and went to PetSmart. I had heard from David that they had introduced a new line of aquarium plants.
Selling plants in tubes like that is a bit weird, but they all seemed to be in pretty good condition and I could get a good close-up look at each one. They are all Top Fin brand, which I think is PetSmart's store brand. The problem was that the tubes identified the plant, but not much else. They said they were "aquarium & terrarium" plants, but not how big the plants got, where they should be put in the tank, and most importantly, what the light requirements were (which is important in an aquarium).
They had no plants in the size I was looking for that I'd heard of, so I picked up a tube each of Ophiopogon japonicus ("Kyoto grass") and Selaginella willdenowii ("Peacock fern"). No particular reason, I just liked the look of them.
After getting them home and planting the both of them, I decided to look them up on the web. Imagine my surprise when I found out neither of them is an aquatic plant! They both need to grow emersed and will eventually die when fully submersed. The Selaginella died about two weeks later and the Ophiopogon is starting to yellow and lose leaves. So I'm pretty ticked that I was sold a product unsuitable for the purpose for which it was advertised and sold.
Serves me right for not going to Sailfin.
I realize that pretty much anyone who's anyone has a copy of Photoshop they bring out to do any heavy image editing. I also realize that no one would ever have an less-than-legal copy of the $650 program. At least no one I know. And certainly not me.
But if you're tired of deciding between your image editing program and, say, the mortgage payment, you should check out GIMP. For just about everything, it is a drop-in replacement for Photoshop. It is also open-source and free. The latest 2.4 version is nicely integrated into the OS (previous versions looked a little odd). There's even a Windows installer (sorry, you Mac people will have to figure it out on your own).
There might be a bit of a learning curve, but there's good documentation. Just about anything you can do in Photoshop, you can do in GIMP.
Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I find Bruce Fein's editorial in the Washington Times, comparing Bush to Robespierre of the French Revolution. I found these two quotes from Robespierre interesting:
No liberty for the enemies of liberty.
That's the sort of attitude that brought us things like Gitmo, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless searches.
The second is:
We must not let foreign enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself.
Just try and tell me that's not another way of saying "The Constitution is not a suicide pact," another recent Republican mantra.
The rest of the editorial, demanding the return of habeus corpus is worth a read. He points out that only 5 percent of Gitmo detainees were captured by American forces. The rest were captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance, with little protection against wrongful detention. This is one of the fliers distributed in Afghanistan:
Get wealth and power beyond your dreams. ... You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.
Today is November 5. So:
Remember, remember
the fifth of November
The gunpowder, treason, and plot.
I know of no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Now, go watch V is for Vendetta. Happy Guy Fawkes Day!
I'll be the first to say that I don't really know anything about the politics in Pakistan, but I look at the news coming out of Pakistan and can only wonder if we're watching the death of a democracy. They're a nuclear power, have been what seems to be the edge of war with India over Kashmir for forever, and Osama bin Laden is most likely hiding out in the mountains there. Speaking of bin Laden, according to Wikipedia, his approval rating his higher than Musharraf's in Pakistan.
So when the President facing legal challenges to his re-election suspends the Constitution, arrests political opponents and lawyers, and requires judges to swear an oath of allegiance to him, it seems like kinda a big deal.
But nothing like that could ever happen here, right? Right?
I've been hanging out a bit over at Illinipundit, which is populated mostly by conservatives, many of which I strongly disagree with and a few I only somewhat disagree with. I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. Gordy, who I don't really see eye to eye with on most of what he says, seems genuinely interested in having a civil debate and an actual discussion of issues, not just shouting back and forth. When others pipe up, I usually just shake my head and think, "How can people actually believe this stuff?"
That being said, sometimes it's good to be reminded that even the craziest of crazies over there isn't actually, you know, crazy. No, these people are really crazy:
Halloween is an appropriate time to learn that a "Grand Druid Council" of 13 "Witches" control the Illuminati, and meets eight times annually on the "Witches' Sabbaths" (incl. Halloween) when millions of occult practitioners engage in orgies, which for some may involve human sacrifice... Todd says rock and roll music is designed to cast a demonic spell on the listener. I know this sounds farfetched but I urge you to listen to Todd's presentation "Witchcraft of Rock and Roll" in the multimedia section here. He says the Illuminati started Jesus Rock to control the message.
That's from "'Rothschilds Rule w/Druid Witches' Said Defector". But that's not all:
When we consider how many Americans are "habitually" under the "spell" of pharmaceuticals- I mean to the point of changing habits and personalities- we should shudder... How did it get that way? Who benefits? I think that this is beyond money, though money be the root of all kinds of evil; I think that there is a spirit of deception at work in the pharmaceutical industry. I think that it threatens the very strength, the very essence of our nation. I believe it threatens and hinders freedom of conscience and the eternity of our fellow man.
(From Magic Modern Wonder Drugs.) Every time you pop a Prozac, baby Jesus cries. Act now, and we'll send you this bucket of crazy, absolutely FREE:
NBC's resurrection of this 1970's [Bionic Woman] series about a mutant [sic] is timely since Sommers' ordeal is a metaphor for what the Rockefeller Foundation did to her unwary sisters.
As result, women are increasingly confused, lost and desperate. Nature designed them to sacrifice for husband and children and to be cherished in return. But elite social engineers taught them that devotion to their loved ones is "oppression." They would have to compete with men and have careers. The elite's ultimate goal is to eliminate the nuclear family as a means of controlling humanity, also the purpose of the "war of terror..."
A woman is a means to an end: home, family, companionship, life skills, emotional intimacy and security.
That would be from "The Bionic Woman: Does she Menstruate?"
These people are serious. And there's lots more. It's not just one kook running the site; I counted at least five authors at first glance. You couldn't come up this much crazy if you put all of Arkham Asylum in a blender.
(Hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)
I discovered from soyisthenewblack that this is NoBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month. I guess NBPM was less pronouncable. Trying to make a blog post every day for a month is an interesting idea. I don't know if it will just make me blog more, or if my blogging will suffer in quality. We shall see.
The original graph is in black and white and my annotations are in color. If I'm reading this graph correctly, the median age for the entry into sexual activity is about 14.5 for the group without the program, and lightly over 15 for the group with the program. So we can conclude that the program caused about an 0.8 year delay in becoming sexually active.
Furthermore, at the median age for sexual activity for the non-program group (where 50% of them had begun sexual activity), only 35% of the program group was having sex. So we can see that exposure to sexual education and the availability of contraception clearly causes a delay in sexual activity in teenagers.
The Zabin study is from 1986, probably before AIDS prevention programs and condom awareness were in full swing. So the contraception methods uses were probably primarily the pill. In fact, the study goes on to look at pill usage specifically. They also found that, even though girls were likely to postpone sexual activity to a later age, they were more likely to be using the pill when they did start sexual activity.
Dr. Fig was kind enough to send me a big, honking list of references from PubMed. I'll try to go through some of those soon.
Reference:
Apologies, this is likely to be a long one
Executive Summary
The undeniable conclusion is that access to contraception does not increase sexual activity in teenagers. Similarly and not surprisingly, access to sexual education about contraception also does not increase sexual activity in teenagers. If anything, comprehensive sexual education delays the onset of sexual activity and increases the use of contraception and condoms.
Background
Over at Illinipundit, there was a discussion about a public middle school in Maine with a health clinic that decided to proscribe birth control pills to its sexually active students. Some quick factoids from the NY Times article: there are about 500 students in the school, 135 have the parental permission required to use the clinic, 5 of those were sexually active, and they were all either 14 or 15 years old.
The scope of the teen pregnancy problem is stunning: over 40% of teenage girls are pregnant at least once by the time they're 20. (Kirby) Furthermore, a quarter of sexually active teenagers contract an STD each year. (Kirby)
In the discussion at IP D. Boon asked this:
I would really like to see some of these studies that show the prevalence of The Pill has not led to increased sexual activity at a young age. I have no qualms about saying abstinence only education is probably a not effective, but I've head the opposite about the pill.
Now, I'm pretty sure the research shows that access to contraception does not increase sexual activity in teenagers, but most of what I could remember was about condoms, not the Pill. So I went to look for the actual information.
D. Boon and redstatewannabe both also said that contraception being made available would constitute an "endorsement" of the situation. It was never really explained what that meant, specifically, but I take it to mean that it would have the effect of encouraging teenagers to have sex at a young age.
Methodology
Google Scholar. Really, that's about it. I searched for various combinations of "oral contraception", "the pill", "birth control", "contraception", "sexual activity", "teenager", "adolescent", and similar terms. I found several of what looked like good papers, read them, and followed their references to papers they cited.
I want to make it clear this wasn't an exhaustive or comprehensive search. Google Scholar isn't the best database out there, and finds lots of extraneous stuff. I'm a scientist and engineer; the databases I usually use don't index this sort of social science material. I know there are other databases like Pubmed and Medline, but I don't know how to use them. I also want to make it clear that I'm not a social scientist, so I'm generally relying on the analysis of the authors (I really don't understand how p-values and statistical significance work). Nor did I want to spend more than an hour or two (or five, by now) on this, so I limited myself to less than a dozen papers.
My search was limited to published, peer-reviewed information and their citations. I specifically did not want to rely on any press reports because they almost inevitably over-simplify the science or get it plain wrong.
Findings
In short, neither access to contraception nor sex ed that discussion contraception hasten the initiation of sexual activity. (Committee, Kirby) Everything I found supported that conclusion. It was unanimous. Kirby even describes the amount of evidence supporting this conclusion as "overwhelming."
I was not able to find data specifically limited to the Pill, but part of that may be due to the fact that there are currently at least thirteen different contraceptive methods available, including three different formulations of the Pill. Most studies looked at contraception generally, one I found looked specifically at the effect of condoms on behavior, in the context of HIV prevention.
One thing that became clear is that access to contraception isn't enough. Access to information and education is also very important. Zabin found that access to a health clinic that sounds very similar to the one in Maine (access to sexual education, counseling, and access to contraception and medical services) actually resulted in a significant delay in the onset of sexual behavior. Quoting the study:
While the changes in the age at first intercourse are not large, they are substantial enough -- in the direction of delay -- to refute charges that access to such services as those provided by the program encourages early sexual activity... The project appears to demonstrate that if students in junior high schools are given access to nearby services and if they are offered information and continuity of care, they will use such services, and at levels comparable to those shown by older teenagers.
It usually takes about a year for an adolescent female to seek contraceptive services after the onset of sexual activity. (Committee) The Zabin study found that with one year's access to the program, a female student was about twice as likely to have sought out such services before becoming sexually active, and the percentage at six months was 70%. In other words, it is important that sexual education and contraceptive access start before the onset of sexual activity. The median age for this onset in the Zabin study was about 15. (Admittedly, this was a study in an urban high school, were it is likely to be younger than elsewhere.)
Guttmacher et al. did a study on the effect of the condom distribution program started in 1991 in all New York City schools. This was done in the context of HIV prevention, but their results should be relevant in this discussion of sexual activity as well. They found:
Clearly, making condoms available at school does not lead to increases in sexual activity.
Furthermore,
higher-risk students reported getting a condom from school in significantly higher proportions than lower-risk students.
There was also some concern raised in the IP discussion about the confidentiality of these medical services. Several commenters felt that not informing parents that their children were sexually active was a violation of their "parental rights." According to the Committee report:
The primary reason adolescent's [sic] hesitate or delay obtaining family planning or contraceptive services is concern about confidentiality.
In other words, the best way to make sure teenagers do not use birth control or condoms is to tell their parents. I understand the concern here, but a parent's rights over an adolescent are not absolute. It is the moral and ethical duty of any health care worker to care for his patient's medical needs first; the abrogated rights of a third party are a secondary concern. This isn't to say they're unimportant, as in the case of mandatory reporting of rape or abuse, but a teenager above the age of consent has some medical privacy rights.
Conservatives have been pushing for abstinence-only sex education for some years now. There's even a new TV ad pushing parents to tell their children to not have sex. Personally, I think this is stupid. Not only does it completely ignore the existence of gays and lesbians, not only is it a practice that isn't used by 90% of the American population, and not only is it the only instance I know of where mandated ignorance is a form of education, but there's this to consider:
About 26% of adolescent couple trying to abstain from intercourse will become pregnant within 1 year. [Committee]
Conservatives usually inflate and distort condom failure rates when they try to claim they're ineffective, but they never cite the failure rate for their abstinence programs. Over one quarter of abstinent teenage couples get pregnant within a year, and that's not counting the couples that fail at abstinence and don't get pregnant!
Lastly, I just want to point this out to parents that still look down on sex education and contraception. This has got to be one of the most frightening statistics I've seen:
First intercourse was nonvoluntary for 9 percent of teen females. This percent was higher among those who were younger at first intercourse. (Abma)
If that doesn't make you think "Holy crap!", what does? I'm not quite sure if the use of the word "nonvoluntary" means some of these girls were just pressured into having sex as opposed to out-and-out rape, or if that's just scientific jargon for rape, but it's a stunning percentage. One in ten.
Mind you, that's just for first intercourse. One in four women will be raped in their lifetime. I can't find statistics that break it down any further, but women between 16 and 25 years old are at more than three times the risk of women in any other age group, and about 20% of women are raped by the time they're college-aged. It's sort of out of the scope of this blog post, but remember that women are not the only ones at risk. Six percent of rape victims are men, and in about 10 percent of both rape attempts and sexual assaults, men are the victims.
Conclusions
The literature conclusively states that access to contraception does not hasten the onset of sexual activity. Access to a comprehensive sex ed program as well as contraception actually seems to delay sexual activity in teenagers, if they get it early enough.
References
Sorry to have not written anything in a while. I've just been swamped and for most of the past week my internet connection has been unpredictably up and down. Now that I've got a shiny new cable modem things should get better.
One of the things I've wanted to write about for a while is whether or not politics and our public discourse in general is just tribalism. By that I mean that people associate themselves with either Republicans or Democrats and have an emotional stake in that decision. After a while, it becomes about maintaining that identity and keeping power away from the other side, rather than thinking about the issues and trying to come up to the best solution to a problem.
Of course, as soon as I started thinking of this post, Dispatches from the Culture Wars said it better than I ever could. Here he's talking about a blog getting tagged as left or right:
...down with dualism. The whole point of such dichotomies is to avoid having to think. If you can just put that "liberal" or "conservative" label on someone, you can know whether to dismiss them or not. If you're intellectually lazy, that is. If you're capable of rational thinking, you know that labeling an argument does not defeat the argument and that you actually have to examine the logic of the argument and whether it explains the evidence or not.
I think that is the emotional root of why people respond so virulently to such [separation of church and state] cases, because in their mind religion is primarily a form of tribalism - those who agree with you are "Us" and those who don't are "Them." The moment you buck the majority, you are immediately placed in the "Them" category and the basic tribalism instinct kicks in; they truly do see themselves as protecting the in-group from the barbarian hordes at the door.
I've noticed this while hanging out over at Illinipundit. Commenters there are quick to start ridiculing their opponents as traitors, Marxists, socialists, anti-troop, illiterate, stupid (I'm looking at you, JB), and so forth. It quickly stops being about analyzing the issue or even trying to have a discussion, and becomes about attacking the ideological enemy.
In one of the debates, every single Republican Presidential candidate said that evolution was wrong. I really have a hard time believing that these presumably well-educated and reasonably smart guys, every one, thinks that biologists, cosmologists, and astrophysicists are wrong about their own field of study. It's the same thing when Bush said he would never appoint anyone to the Supreme Court that could approve of the Dred Scott decision. Come on, does he really think that there are a lot of Supreme-Court-quality lawyers that support slavery? No, this was a coded message about Roe. Both of these things were a way for the candidate to say to his followers, "Here I am. I'm one of you. I'm one of the tribe. Trust me."
4 Jobs I’ve Held
Waiting for the bus this evening, a car stopped for a red light at the streetcorner where I was standing. That's not too unusual. What was unusual was that this woman driving was actually eating what looked like spaghetti.
Now, on a long trip and when on an interstate, I've been known to munch. I've even had a sandwich on a few occasions. But this woman was not only driving on Green Street in the middle of campus, where a pedestrian stepping into the middle of the street is a not-uncommon experience, but she was eating food that required the use of utensils. I think it's pretty obvious that, when you have to have one hand on your plate, one hand on your fork, and one hand on the wheel, you're driving distracted.
I couldn't tell if she had garlic bread, too.
