This video makes me wonder who taxidermized Chuck Testa.
(Episode CCLIV: The worst song ever recorded)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This video makes me wonder who taxidermized Chuck Testa.
(Episode CCLIV: The worst song ever recorded)
New thread? My work computer thanks you.
Lately, it seems like all the new threads get posted right around my bedtime.
Seriously people, you need to acclimate yourselves to my schedule. :P
Nope. Chuck Testa!
Aha; my comment obviously became entangled in the Change of Thread. To recap:
BrokenSoldier has, @683, summed up my feelings about PaulG’s attitude very neatly, and…
Nope. It’s not just you.
–
Does this mean we’re (and by “we’re”, I mean mostly me) done talking about smart phones?
This almost looks like Rhett & Link’s work, but they usually do some sort of cameo…
It is. They did a really good job getting this guy Internet famous.
But, who taxidermized Chuck Testa?
Or was he alive? I just couldn’t tell.
Glen Davidson
Coincidentally, I ran across this.
@ Benjamin
Yeah, it’s the newest meme. It’s only been a thing for a week or so.
That video is pretty great.
And these.
starstuff91, if you’ve got more to share I’m all eyes. How about, which phone handles TET the best?
Therrin, I’m not sure which phone would handle TET the best. I’ve never tried to comment on my phone so I don’t know how it would work on a smart phone. But if you wanted to attempt it, you’d want a phone with a good processor, and you’d also want to have a really good 3G or 4G connection.
5 minutes ago I had no idea what this meant. Now I’m a convert.
Nope.
I’m commenting via phone now. I’m afraid pharyngula isn’t very mobile friendly. It will pretty much be the same using any decent smart phone.
No soap, radio!
Also, ads are awful on smart phones. It can be hard to exit out of pop ups and such. It’s really only a problem with sites that aren’t designed with mobile browsing in mind, though.
Poor Jackie Chan.
The thing is, with smart phones, if you’re browsing the internet a lot at once, you’ll kill your battery life. It’s a problem with any smart phone you get. So, keep that in mind when you start using your new phone. There are certain things you can do to extend the battery life though.
Yeah, I’m somewhat familiar with battery-related issues in general. Thanks starstuff91 (and others who commented) for the information, have to go deal with a non-starting car (<3 AAA).
Good luck, Therrin.
I too must go. It’s way past my bedtime (I have to wake up at 6 am). Goodnight all.
Fuck ‘smart phones’.
Nobody has to be able to connect to the internet during every waking moment. And I for one don’t want to.
Also, apps are for saps.
Me, I choose my phone on one criterion only:
How closely does it resemble the original Star Trek communicator? (my current phone).
If they made one that made the right noise when I flipped it open, I’d get that one.
@ ChasCPeterson
I can beat your phones appearance with my app (which is not for ‘saps’):
https://market.android.com/details?id=de.schosoft.Tricorder&feature=search_result
Bam!
Anyone hear Michael Enright’s interview with Barry Zwicker this morning on Sunday Morning?
PZ,
Congrats!
_ _ _
Therrin,
True , but…
_ _ _
The Sailor,
Well, we knew the set of science nerds and gamers greatly overlap, but this is the first time, I know of, that gaming has been used to solve a science problem! Pretty cool.
_ _ _
ChasCPeterson,
I want one of these.
[previous thread]
re:PZ’s book out soon.
This is very exciting. Are there any good press releases out? Does it have a title yet? (“The Pharyngulated Atheist”?) Curiosity is getting the better of me now. sq…sq…
@ therrin
I was looking into getting the Samsung Galaxy IIs with a “Villian” ROM to save on the battery. (Check with a boffin before attempting this yourself… you can brick the phone.)
The idea being to able to check email and TET on the go (I don’t really phone much.) Unfortunately no money right now so I can’t be your guinea-pig for this combo.
Chas: Does your phone open up with the press of a button? That was my disappointment with the Razr and similar types.
Just caught this while skimming over the old subthread:
Yeeeesss! I plan to buy enough to hand out to unsuspecting Mormon boys and other unfortunate theists who happen to bother knocking on my door. Muwahahahahaa!
Burn, baby, burn! /Penguin
Good morning
Soon I’ll start what I have come to call “the dentist’s week”. 3 appointments in 5 days and today is the worst one because it’s my daughter’s.
Oh, something I’ve forgotten in the last thread:
Walton
You mentioned that you were engaged in an argument about who should pay for IVF and fertility treatment and you said you were against public healthcare doing it.
Can you elaborate why?
Girl scouts
Damn, they don’t exist here. Nothing I was sorry about so far, but now I’m obviously jealous of you Mericans
First Approximation,
Oops, I totally misremembered this.
—
ChasCPeterson
I resisted getting a cell phone for a very long time, eventually I had to for work. I still don’t use Facebook or Twitter. I’ve found myself on some occasions stuck someplace with nothing to do, and thought that it would be a nice thing to have for those times, since I need a new phone anyway.
—
PZ/Admin, it’s been mentioned but something that was changed in the site over the last week has increased the resource load significantly. If I had to guess, I’d say it was something to do with the Recent Posts/FTP Recent Posts/Recent Comments changes. David Marjanović menitoned it in regard to the comment boxes, I have similar pauses when navigating as well.
PZ:
I will, I will! I’d like a signed one though…
PaulG:
Fuck off, you slime-filled douchecake. As usual, you’re talking out of your ass and it’s stenching up the room.
Rorshach, I’m desperately behind, but I’ll catch up on your blog in the next day or two. Congrats on the link and the traffic! Pretty exciting stuff.
Chas:
I only have a cell phone because we killed off the land line. It doesn’t do internet and I rarely use it. When I leave the house, it doesn’t go with me either.
Hey look, are those kids on your lawn?
Thanks Caine ! How’s life without the gallbag ?
This is interesting : Gamers succeed where scientists fail
My criterion when choosing a mobile was that I could listen to music on it. Since I was buying from the limited list of phones that were on sale in the week when my previous mobile broke, I didn’t have much to choose from. Nothing fancy, but it works for me. Nokia 5130 XpressMusic
I could go online, but I never have. As ChasCPeterson said, I really don’t need to be on the internet all the time.
Rorschach:
Just fine. I seemed to have lucked out, I haven’t had any food issues at all. Can’t say I miss it!
Sili:
“In case any East-Swedish Pharyngulistas are around:
I’ll be in Stockholm 5-8 October. I’m tied up for a little work, but some of the evenings will be free. I may just have signed up for dinner at the Beer and Whisky Festival, though.
Any recommendations? Some people are trying to arrange jazz and/or Dramaten, but I’m more partial to classical, myself.”
— — — — —
Maybe you should ask at the Aardvarchaeology blog at Scienceblogs? Martin Rundkvist and many of his readers are from the region.
— — — — —
Can’t PZ make a tome that can only be destroyed in the fires of Orodruin?
mobile phones
I only got my first brand new mobile last year when my old one, which used to be my sister’s old one broke. Before that, I had my mum’s old one. I’m so 1999 when it comes to cellphones. I use them for actually making phonecalls and texting.
What I find funny are people who seem to have forgotten that normal phones still exist.
So they will complain because I don’t carry my mobile around in my flat. The thing’s in my handbag and I only hear it when I’m just very close to it. “I tried to call you all morning” is not going to win an argument when I was at home all morning and they have my home-number.
The other type of users who annoy me even more are people like my mum who expect me to carry the thing around with me all the time and immediately stop on the autobahn because the phone rings, but who never turn their own phone on except for calling other people…
And I totally refuse to buy the kids mobile phones before they’re 10 at least.
Just in regard to ‘Tis Himself’s joke earlier last TeT:
So this Canadian decides to get away from it all. He gets on a plane and 24 hours later he’s in Alice Springs, Australia. He’s sitting in a pub having a drink when an Aussie comes up to him and says: “Where are you from, stranger?”
The Canadian answers: “Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.”
The Aussie goes back to his table and one of his mates asks: “So where is the stranger from?”
“I dunno, he doesn’t speak English.”
Technically the Aussie is right. Both of those words are stolen from native Cree. I thought Brownian would bring out that gem of wisdom so I didn’t say anything, way back when.
You know, I’ve seen Deliverance. I know what goes on in these back-woodsy places.
It makes me wonder who stuffs and mounts Chuck Testa.
Nooope…
The main reason I bought a smartphone is because of the amount of theatre I see; I don’t always go with someone and find that browsing the internet is a convenient way to kill the twenty-or-so minutes of interval time.
That said, I do love my Twitter. It allows me to combine my need to be mostly shut-in without completely divorcing myself from human contact.
re: McChthulu, @39
See, he didn’t have to go to Alice Springs to get away from it all- in Saskatoon, you already are away from it all…
illdoittomorrow@42:
Yup. And it’s the only place in the world you can watch your dog run away from home for 4 days straight.
I think a more fitting name for the province would have been Pannekoeken. Unfortunately, they didn’t ask me.
Ooh, aren’t you all edgy and iconoclastic! I’m shivering with awe.
I always get a not unpleasant little shiver when I encounter a Dutch word in English context. Well, apart from one, that is.
Rich, you are very easily awed.
Couple of wankers in TET today, that one, and I just noted the silly missive by this PaulG guy from before. Seriously, i was quoting verbatim from the organisers’ notification to the attendees, which part of that does he think is gossip ? Moron.
Amy Winehouse – To Know Him Is To Love Him
Rorschach, has there been any word on why Hitchens didn’t make the engagement?
Caine, a recent update from the thinkinc website said this :
But Rorschach, you’re totally gloating!
*eyeroll*
That doesn’t sound good. I hope he is well.
Rorschach:
That’s worrying. I hope he’s alright.
T’ me,
Yo, Ho, Yo, Ho,
It’s “Talk Like A Pirate” Day!
That time in September when sea dogs remember
That grown-ups still know how t’ play!
When wenches are curvy and dogs are all scurvy
And a soft-wear patch covers your eye,
T’ hell with our jobs, for one day we’re all swabs
And buccaneers all till we die!
So hoist up the mainsails and shut down your brain cells,
They only would get in the way,
Avast there, me hearty, we’re havin’ a party,
It’s Talk Like A Pirate Day!
Nah. More of an off-my-lawn Luddite, truth be told.
One of Oregon’s best exports. Arrrr!
You just had to go there. You couldn’t spare my brain that image?
Besides, we’ve already seen, in the commercial, that he sleeps with a woman and a taxidermitized bear.
I want that on a t-shirt. With a Cabbage-machine in the background.
And, of course, Cabbage should actually be Babbage.
Though I do, now, wonder what a cabbage machine would look like.
———–
Tonight, for Wife’s birthday dinner, I am making pork tamales (I even have the corn husks!)
As soon as they implement cabbage as a placeable block in Minecraft, I’ll try to make a Babbage machine out of cabbage.
And what, pray tell, is a ‘Minecraft’?
Sorry, that should’ve been: “Aye, shivver-me-timbers, what, laddie, is Minecraft?”
Forgot that Saturday is Monday which is ITLAP Day.
This.
Mine All Mine, pt. 1
Mine All Mine, pt. 2
Thunderstorm here now, not to worry.
Amy Winehouse – Back To Black (Live Acoustic)
It’s like being 25 in 1968 and never having heard of Janis Joplin. Where the fuck was I in the last 5 years.
Well, I’d say that having children is a luxury, not a necessity. The state health care system should be in the business of providing for people’s critical health care needs, but, with limited resources, it shouldn’t be in the business of providing for everything someone might want.
Besides, there are a great many children desperate to be adopted. (Indeed, it’s very hard to find adoptive or foster-parents for older children, as opposed to babies and toddlers.) People who can’t conceive naturally should consider the option of adopting a child. Of course the adoption process is very, very difficult, and it isn’t for everyone; but raising children is very difficult anyway, and adoption is at least an option that people should consider, if they are in that situation.
As a matter of policy, I don’t believe in natalism; I don’t think we need, as a society, to be trying to raise the birth-rate. We already live in an overpopulated world, and we Westerners consume a disproportionately large chunk of the world’s resources. (Meanwhile, there are millions of people around the world living in poverty who would like to come to the West and work, but are stopped from doing so by arbitrary immigration restrictions… but that’s another rant for another day.) Birth rates in Western developed countries are mostly low and falling, but I see that as a feature, not a bug.
By this, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s anything at all wrong with having children; it’s an individual choice, and I respect whichever choice people make. But I don’t see a strong policy argument for state funding of IVF for everyone who wants it. It’s a luxury, and it should be funded privately, not by the taxpayer.
One more for ITLAPD.
Holy crap, I totally agree with Walton. :P
I should add that, by the same token, I do feel very strongly that birth control and abortion should be comprehensively funded by the taxpayer, and available free to anyone who wants them. Both because of the effects on women’s health, and because the birth of large numbers of unwanted children is not good for anyone (least of all the children themselves). I’d say this should be a much bigger priority for the state than IVF, for a whole host of reasons.
Reminds me of that Tax Masters commercial. The guy stands at an angle to the camera (shoulders about 45° off, but face forward), and keeps the same flat facial expression the entire time. When he spouts “Hello!”, his voice sounds almost cheerful, but his face is still flat and his eyebrows are kind of furrowed. But, I still prefer that over the ad for the American version of JustDial. That guy creeps me out for some reason.
So far, my day is pretty messed up. I dropped my iPhone in my breakfast. It still kind of works, but I’m googling about whether I can take it apart somehow without voiding the warranty, but I lack the proper tool (I may be able to get an improper tool, though). My wife woke up vomiting. Hopefully it’s just one of those one-day non-contagious things, but she seemed pretty miserable. I took care of the kiddo myself, but was running late, so I kinda had to rush to get her to day care so that I could make it to my physical therapy on time (only almost caused one accident). Turns out the therapist didn’t check the calendar or something. At about 5 minutes after the session was supposed to start, they managed to get her on the phone. They rescheduled me for later this morning, because of course, it’s not like I had anything else to do today.
Other than that, it’s just a Monday.
So you were having an apple for breakfast? Well, you know what they say, an apple a day keeps the therapist away!
I’m glad you mentioned that. I forgot I have to go back. I gotta head out here in a few minutes. Since it’s a last minute thing, I don’t have anything set up to remind me about it.
Just gotta finish this flowchart…
I hate when people make something that used to be really simple into something really complicated. And with each meeting it gets worse, though they claim they told you all about it in the last meeting, I know that’s not true because I’d remember agreeing to such a significant rewrite of the code. I’m on the verge of tossing out all the old code and writing a new version from scratch, rather than continuing to patch this conglomeration of code from 2 or 3 devs.
Walton:
Regarding your stand on reproductive health.
I, like, totally love you (in a heterosexual non-creepy non-weird way).
We all love Walton, each in our own, hopefully non-creepy and non-weird way.
Man, that reminds me of how much I hate discussing abortion with Christians. No matter how many times I try to explain that Pro-Choice =/= Pro-Babykilling, they always refuse to get it. And it’s always “Well if those ladies didn’t want to have a baby maybe they shouldn’t have had premarital sex!”
You know someone loves children when they see them as a form of divine punishment, right?
It’s just like that pukey taste I get in my mouth whenever someone says “Everything good comes from God.” All the people in the world who struggle against suffering and injustice and sometimes sacrifice their lives to improve the quality of life for others don’t matter worth a fuck, it’s all Gawd dispensing favor and punishment according to his whims. Fucking pigshit.
God Damn, I must have got up on the wrong side of the bed today.
Infertility for the poor! Hooray! (Unnecessary sarcasm, I know.)
As an abstract argument, yours is fairly sound. In practice, it ignores the reality that couples struggling with infertility see it as a potentially medically correctable condition. In that respect, there is little to distinguish it from other non-essential medical interventions for conditions which merely cause distress and discomfort. Perhaps club foot correction and ear pinning surgeries should also be restricted to the wealthy?
The UK doesn’t make policy soley on the basis of evidence and logical argument, as you well know (being more than familiar with the criminal justice system). Limited IVF treatment is a relatively trivial cost, and it helps to rectify the situation where the rich can afford private fertility treatment but less affluent members of society, equally earnest in their desire to have biological offspring, cannot.
Otherwise, there is something of a inbalance in that the fertile rich, poor and indifferent can freely create as much unwanted life as they wish, whilst the infertile poor cannot conceive the very much wanted babies they desire. If nothing else, then the process required to achieve IVF treatment is a great selector for people who really do want their offspring.
Emotional wellbeing and public support are also factors in policy making. As scary as populism is in British politics, it is a reality, and there should be no convenient exceptions simply on the basis of penny pinching.
Is you argument against state funding of IVF a utilitarian one? In an ideal world, would you use the money saved by not waging costly wars to fund every need on the NHS?
So, the other evening, roomie and I were walking home from the gastropub where we had dinner. As we crossed a street near the apartment, this small, older, Asian fellow jogs over to us looking very desperate.
In extremely broken English with a very thick accent, it soon becomes obvious he’s trying to find directions to somewhere. My roomie (who I wouldn’t trust to find his way out of a paper bag; I swear the guy gets lost his closet) starts trying to figure out where the guy wants to go; I, on the other hand, whip out my smartphone and pull up Google Maps.
The guy’s got a series of vague street names to what looks like a wedding (I recognized a few Chinese characters), and we know he wants something that sounds like “Highland Park” in his accent, so I start looking for the streets. He sees this, comes and looks over my shoulder, and then excitedly points at “Allendale Park” on the map, which is about a mile down a road. I point him in the right direction, he thanks us profusely, jogs back to his car, and off he goes.
That is why I love smartphones. I’ve used Google Translate in similar situations, and I probably don’t need to go into the usefulness of Wikipedia for general information. I don’t actually talk on the phone much, and I’m not into mobile Facebook or Twitter or such, but having ready access to all that is the internet comes in very handy at times.
Even if it’s just some guy trying to get to a wedding.
Walton @ 64, 67, good points and well expressed. Good to know I’m not the only one who thinks that way.
So, today I did this.
It says:
“Red (college republicans): How’s that Obamacare working out for ya?
Green (me!): Pretty well. Now I’m covered under my parents’ insurance policy throughout college.”
What do you guys think? Did I do well?
Richard Austin: I must give Google credit, their sheer usefulness (Particularly WRT to translate, I use that all the time)is enough to make me overcome my natural instinct to hate and distrust all large corporations, which is to say pretty damn useful.
There’s a difference between intervention for conditions which make it painful or uncomfortable to perform normal daily activities (something which should be funded by the NHS, certainly), and intervention to allow people to have children. Having children is a lifestyle choice, not a necessity of existence. In a perfect world, we would be able to guarantee that option to everyone who wants it: but in the real world of scarce resources, there are a mountain of more important unmet social needs which we should be addressing first.
In an ideal world, of course we’d be able to fund every need. (And of course we shouldn’t be wasting money on ridiculous wars; and of course we should also be taxing the likes of Sir Philip Green more highly.)
In reality, however, there are a great many currently-unmet social needs which are of a much higher priority than IVF. I’m sure you’re well aware that the government is cutting back on legal aid, for instance, something which will likely worsen the problem of unequal access to justice and which will prevent the poor vindicating their rights in court. (The cuts will impact a range of areas – family law, landlord and tenant law, employment discrimination, immigration, and so on – which can have a devastating impact on individuals’ lives if the wrong decisions are made.) So, too, we have an enormous shortage of affordable housing in Britain and a serious problem with homelessness, something which should be a top priority; and there’s an enormous gulf in employment figures, health and quality of life between the richest and the poorest communities. And then there’s the international angle: we have, in my view, a moral obligation to give much more in international aid to the developing world, and we should also be willing to accept far more refugees and economic migrants from the most deprived parts of the world. All of these are far better uses of scarce taxpayers’ money than IVF is.
Of course the cost of NHS-funded IVF for infertile couples (which is provided to very few people) is trivial in comparison with these unmet needs. But it’s still a non-essential service, and the money could be better spent on meeting more important unmet needs. When everyone in Britain and in the world has adequate food, shelter and housing, and when we are able to welcome unlimited numbers of migrants with open arms and when we accord to them the same rights and freedoms as British citizens, then I will be happy for the state to spend money providing people with free IVF treatment. But until then, it’s a luxury we can’t afford.
Indeed – on that point, I wrote a blog post yesterday about the unreliability of the criminal trial process and the jury system in Anglo-American common-law jurisdictions. Of course most criminal trials rely on eyewitness recollections, and there’s a mountain of psychological research demonstrating the unreliability of such evidence. Witnesses tend unconsciously to fill in gaps and resolve apparent ambiguities in their accounts, for instance, and are affected by confirmation bias and wishful thinking; and their recollections are heavily affected by the ways in which questions are couched (something which is a big problem in the adversarial trial process).
This is probably inevitable, to some degree, since there isn’t always physical forensic evidence of a crime. But in the Anglo-American trial process, these problems are compounded by the fact that jurors, being non-experts, are expressly encouraged to use their “common sense” and “life experience” in evaluating the credibility of the evidence and making findings of fact. The trouble is that this encourages jurors to buy into myths and fallacies which have no basis in science. For instance, jurors will often assume that a witness who seems more confident in his or her recollections, and who recounts a lot of detail, is more likely to be accurate and trustworthy; yet both of these assumptions have been falsified by empirical psychological research. And since jury deliberations are secret, we can never really know how jurors arrive at their conclusions.
The trouble is that we’re using an archaic and demonstrably-unreliable process, designed long before the advent of the scientific method, to make decisions about people’s lives and freedoms. And there is solid evidence that it produces unreliable results. As Ed Brayton observes, during the time in which Rick Perry has been Governor of Texas, at least forty-one convicted people in Texas have been subsequently exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence – of whom thirty-five were originally wrongly convicted on the basis of faulty eyewitness identifications. Similarly, Troy Davis, whose fate is to be decided today by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles, may very well be executed this week for a crime in 1991 which he probably didn’t commit (seven of the nine witnesses at trial have later changed their stories, many having been pressured by police into giving evidence against him, and there is no physical evidence linking him to the crime).
Getting rid of the death penalty immediately would help, of course. Getting rid of juries and switching to bench trials might also help, although sometimes judges (who, after all, are trained in law, not in forensics or psychology) are just as susceptible to fallacies and misunderstanding of evidence as juries are. But, really, the answer is that the whole criminal trial process needs to be re-designed; the existing system is broken, and miscarriages of justice will continue to be routine until we fix it.
I’m not against health insurance paying for IVF specifically, but I do strenuously object to our current system in which IVF is often covered, but then maintenance care for the children who are already present (and the ones who would be the result of the IVF treatments) are not. My insurance would pay up to around 30k for me to have a baby, but won’t pay 5k for them to have properly-working teeth, or $300 a year for them to have glasses that give them properly-working eyes.
THIS.
Spouse and I sprang for our first smartphones a year ago or so and got the best Android phones. We got them just before a cousin’s wedding in the greater LA sprawl; I don’t know how we would have managed to find anything without the GPS/googlemaps functionality. Being able to verify/look up information when you need it is so useful I find myself wondering how we managed without it.
Plus having an android phone enables me to solve small work problems when they’re still preventable (having easy access to work email whenever) instead of walking into a shitstorm you didn’t know was coming.
I like Twitter, but I don’t really read it lots on my phone.
I’ve never seen the point of funding IVF either. There’s little medical consequence to a woman as a result of not-being-pregnant. Most women go through the majority of their lives not-being-pregnant. If IVF is covered than any and all cosmetic surgery should be. You may not have what you want but if not having something you want strikes you as a medical emergency that requires other people’s sacrifice then you probably have entitlement issues to say the least. Your ability to work, or to support yourself, isn’t impaired by not-being-pregnant. Your mental health may be, but honestly it’s likely that if it is to any extreme extent then you may have already had mental health issues (and those certainly SHOULD be covered).
My support of total elective abortion is on the basis that pregnancy itself is a legitimate medical condition that will have immediate consequences to the pregnant person and requires medical care. If being pregnant happened in some vacuum and not in a living person’s body I would think differently about it. Since there is no way to guarantee all pregnancies are healthy and safe, it is better to leave the people who experience pregnancies with maximal control over their bodies. Would some people choose on different criteria than I would? Sure, but they’re not me so good for them. I don’t have to *like* them, after all.
IVF isn’t that way though. If you are otherwise healthy, but unable to conceive, you are not facing mortality, body damage, unemployment,or anything of the sort if you continue to live as you are.
To have children then in that situation is simply a luxury that isn’t open to you. If you want to take extra measures to open that luxury to you (possibly) then you are welcome to, but you should pay for it!
I wonder though, once some one is pregnant through IVF are they covered by NHS for prenatal care?
Because it strikes me that they really probably should be.
Walton, on paper that is fair enough. In reality, most of our cultural identities are founded in societies that place procreation at the heart of humanity. Moreover, there is (rightly or wrongly) a strong perception of a biological imperative to breed. People do absolutely believe and expect that having biological offspring is a necessity of existence. You need to ignore the emotional realities for many infertile couples in order to make that argument. Many of those couples feel utterly bereft in that situation, and genuine turmoil and strife results.
I strongly suspect that many people not only wouldn’t accept the argument that having children is a lifestyle choice, but they would also instinctively reject it as being a bizarre and inhumane argument. I think you are underestimating the value people place on conceiving children, and therefore the very real impact on wellbeing.
Indeed, but since I don’t see the extent of the government funding cuts as in any way necessary or inevitable, I’m afraid that I cannot agree that this is or should be an either/or situation.
The government has chosen to make many petty funding cuts without addressing some of the worst excesses of waste and lost/missed revenue. Cutting legal aid, rather than (as much as I understand it) properly reforming legal fee structures and civil procedure, is a disgrace.
Agreed, and if we remove the barriers which prevent refugees and assylum seekers from working then this could quickly represent a net gain to the economy, rather than being a burden at all.
I agree with many of your priorities, I simply think that your argument rests on what is in reality an untenable statement, that having children is a lifestyle choice.
ImaginesABeach @664 in the previous chapter of TET:
As I’m sure you noticed, World Nut Daily listed a lot of the women who have been successful and/or influential in the past, and who know appear in Girl Scouts literature as subjects of study. According to World Nut Daily, just being a lesbian automatically deletes any worth whatsoever to the accomplishments of these women. Therefore, Billy Jean King was not a great tennis player. She was a lesbian, and that’s that.
Women who worked for equal pay, for childcare, to remove children from the workforce, etc. These women, if not lesbians, were progressives (possibly even socialists or communists or, god forbid, liberals) and therefore none of their accomplishments can be brought to the attention of Girl Scouts.
Domestic arts can be taught to American Heritage Girls, with prayers to Christ in between, and all independent thought can be avoided. This is the christlike way.
So ImaginesABeach doesn’t need any training. Just assume the posture.
“Original post here. Links and other lie-based demonization of the Girl Scouts included.
And here’s the World Nut Daily link: http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=97977#ixzz1YKheCVv8
Yes, but isn’t this the problem that we should be addressing? The natalist cultural norm that tells us that having children is a duty and a necessary precondition of “normal” adult life, and that a childfree existence is in some sense bereft or incomplete, is itself fundamentally irrational and harmful. There is nothing wrong with having children, of course; but there is also nothing wrong with not having children. There is no moral duty to reproduce, and it is perfectly possible to live a fulfilled, productive, caring, loving and happy adult life without ever procreating or raising children.
We should be moving towards the goal of a society in which having children is seen as an optional lifestyle choice, not as an obligation for everyone.
======
QFT. This is the essence of my point. IVF is a luxury, not a medical necessity; and as long as we live in a world in which millions of people are deprived of food, shelter, basic medical care, education, and so forth, there are plenty of more important uses for state resources than providing people with free IVF treatment.
My phone seems to be back to normal. :-)
Hehe. Wish I could.
This.
I think maybe the disagreement here is what one considers baseline quality of life. To me, some amount of emotional pain, social outcast status, or disappointment in your ability to do anything you wish is unavoidable. Society has an obligation, or should I think, to maintain a baseline quality of life. But where physical health is concerned I don’t think that optimizing people for the ideal social position is a part of it. Now when it comes to helping people deal with the disappointment they feel, I do think that should be covered. But we all have insecurities and there is a lot of social pressure put on people to be a lot of things they never will. I don’t really see how not having children is any worse than being ugly, for instance.
Wowbagger:
Exactly. I wasn’t alone, but just had that smart-phone experience.
My nephew is a big Weird AL fan, and lo, Al was in the morridor performing. My nephew bought a bunch of his relatives tickets and we all went. While waiting for the show to start, one of relatives was trying to remember when Rocky Horror Picture Show came to Idaho, and when he had seen it in the same theater. Smart phone to the rescue. Seems the relative thought he was still high school age long into his twenties. Figures.
Al did a hilarious Jim Morrison. The segue into poetry had us howling. I always figured that, for some concerts, Jim’s dirty and stiff leather pants were the only thing holding him upright. That and a precarious hold on the microphone stand.
Lady Gaga is so much …. well, just sooo very much of a muchness that I didn’t think Al could do much as far as going to far in his satire — that bit was less successful than Jim Morrison or Nirvana/grunge-in-general.
What’s with aiming fucking bright lights right into the eyes of the audience and flashing them at unpredictable intervals? Is this something non-concert-going people like me are just failing to understand?
Um. Arr.
—
Pirate talk doesn’t become me, but does it count that I’ve spent most of the day translating a high school physics textbook from Finnish to Swedish? It’s been a konkavspeglar och skenbrännpunkter day for me.
—
or maybe I’ll just say PIECES OF EIGHT! several times in a really shrill voice.
Rorschach, I love the Amy Winehouse performance of Back to Black.
Now that’s art.
Minnie,
Just memorize this and you’ll be good for the day:
The king and his men
stole the queen from her bed
and bound her in her bones.
The seas be ours
and by the powers
where we will we’ll roam.
Yo, ho, haul together,
hoist the colors high.
Heave ho, thieves and beggars,
never shall we die.
Some men have died and some are alive
and others sail on the sea
with the keys to the cage, and the Devil to pay
we lay to Fiddler’s Green.
The bell has been raised from it’s watery grave…
Do you hear it’s sepulchral tone?
We are a call to all, pay heed the squall
and turn your sail toward home.
Yo, ho, haul together,
hoist the Colors high…
Heave ho, thieves and beggars,
never shall we die.
(The only reason why PotC is allowed to have had sequels is because of this scene.)
Hmmm. I see my posts are rife with typos today. “Know” for “now.” “To” for “too.”
I need a better brain-to-keyboard interface.
Lynna:
In techie terms, it’s PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
What’s with the Nazi headgear? Anyone else notice it?
Richard:
ouch, that was powerful. Haven’t seen the film yet, maybe it’s worth watching after all (also, Johnny Depp. *droooool*).
Arrr! – What if getting V*agra was the same had similar procedures to getting an abortion? I finally wrangled a guest blogger to post and she came back with Sauce for the Anti-Choice Gander.
Knocked it out of the park, IMHO.
Minnie: not really, no. The first one was great, but they got too serious in the later films. There are some fun action sequences, but most if it’s kind of “meh”.
But yeah, that scene opens the 3rd film. And pretty much explains the whole basis for the plot. One think I liked is that, if you read it or listen, you catch later references that no one ever explains (like Barbosa saying “The song’s been sung…” and the whole deal with the 9 pieces of eight).
Here are two comments from ex-mormons on the 54 to 10 football game in which BYU was the 10, and the University of Utah (secular) was the 54:
BYU needs to run last night’s game through the correlation department so that the history is more useful.
An explanation of “correlation” from an ex-mormon:
Another effect of “correlation” was that the Relief Society and Primary lessons and guidelines were taken out of the hands of mormon women, and given to the priesthood holders. The priesthood holders succeeded in making those lessons even worse than they already were.
That game definitely fits into the not all truths are useful category.
This jibe goes to the heart of mormon teaching that Boyd K. Packer elucidated in a speech at BYU in 1981. Here’s an excerpt:
Seen at an Arby’s restaurant in Salt Lake City:
“Bring in your BYU stub and get a free turnover.”
Not true. My way is totally creepy and weird.
Totes traditionally creepy and weird, too, tho’… y’know… basement candlelit shrine, covered with photos of ‘im… cheesy tribute website full of Walton slashfic, bad MIDI on autoplay when you open it, like somethin’ outta the late nineties, whole deal… Oh, and getting back to the shrine, I even like to go in there with a violin, bash repeatedly on the same nasty-ass flattened fifth double stop with the bow, try to get the standard horror movie psycho soundtrack effect going with it…
So, sure. Creepy and weird. But I like to think it’s also nicely reassuringly accessible, as creepy and weird goes.
… Sure, arguably excessively cliche, too, but what are ya gonna do.
Re smartphones and theatre breaks: my wife would probably leave me if I pulled that sorta thing, as I’m generally with her, if I’m actually at theatre…
But when alone, damn straight, smartphones are great that way. Awkward social situation, and I don’t want to talk to anyone? Alarming* person in line looks too much like they might actually want to talk to me and I’d rather not get cooties on me from actual meatspace social interaction? Well, then, there’s something terribly important I should attend to on my smartphone. Right now…
… that it may be reading some random webcomic, well, hey. Only I need to know that.
(*/You know. Potentially sociable. And therefore alarming.)
Walton, I don’t have anything to add to your discussion of IVF and public healthcare, but did want to say that I really appreciated your take on the issue.
OT: Rush Limbaugh sinks to a new low.
It isn’t the first time: earlier this year, Limbaugh said:
I’ve never seen anything so juvenile and pathetic on so many levels. “OMG you’re so fat!!!” is the kind of pointless, nasty body-shaming insult one expects to hear on an elementary school playground, not on national talk radio. And it’s also utterly bizarre and incomprehensible, seeing as Michelle Obama isn’t even slightly overweight. (Unlike, strangely enough, Limbaugh himself.)
The only way I can respond is by posting this Roy Zimmerman song, which sums up Limbaugh pretty well. (Perhaps Roy needs to add a new verse commemorating this incident.)
It’s really strange living here and not getting super excited about things like this. You watch people in the office wearing BYU ties and the like exchanging pointed, angry looks with the guy wearing a Utes tie and just shrug.
Rorschach@63
Totally Janisesque… It was amazing to me that so many people only knew her negativly through the tabloids and never acually got round to listening to her voice.
Ogvorbis and Lynna
*blushes* Thanks!
Accurate.
In other news, it’s hunting season in Idaho. This means that we are getting our first round of stories about grizzly bears killing hunters. The stories are always in settings where I have hiked and camped. [shiver]
There was more trouble with bear attacks in the Yellowstone ecosystem in late August– and this area is closer to where I live, near where Montana, Wyoming and Idaho share borders.
And here’s a story from Alaska, dated July, 2011:
@Walton re: IVF
I agree with your argument dispite having been through the anguish suffered by a friend who has spent an enormouse amount of money trying to have a second child through IVF (we don’t any sort of government-funded health care here, so she didn’t have the option of having it for free). I could never get a clear answer out of her as to why she wouldn’t adopt, and it was nothing to do with genes because her IVF included donated sperm and ova (ovum?). There are thousands of other health defects that take priority over inabilty to concieve natuarlly.
slignot:
Same here.
I usually speed-read the Salt Lake Tribune site for regional news every morning, but this morning, five of the top stories are about the 54-10 trouncing of the BYU cougars. Christ in a football helmet!
Hey Threadizens
I’m trying out a new MRA zinger:
‘An MRA is a guy who gets invited to a Walk For Breast Cancer, and says “I’d love to, but I don’t have breast cancer”.’
It seems truthy, but I can’t decide if it actually makes sense.
Mr. Fire:
An MRA is a guy who, when you ask directions to a specific restaurant, tells you how to get to his favorite bar instead (because “it’s so much better than the place you wanted to go, trust me, I know better”).
Mr. Fire @111
but men can breast cancer too so it’s not truthy..
link
So, I have a choice… I can accept one of two jobs.
Job 1: Private company, woman-owned. Very friendly and ergonomically conscious. Temporary. $16/hour. Potential for full-time hire, but not a sure thing. No benefits unless/until I’m hired as permanent staff. Working on water quality testing, a field I’m interested in.
Job 2: Government job. Male-dominated workplace (they seem super nice though, not particularly worried about harassment). $15/hour. Permanent hire with full benefits. Working on asphalt and concrete testing. It’s science but it’s not my “thing,” so to speak.
Keep in mind that I’m not necessarily looking to settle down; I do want to move out of this state in a year or two.
If you care to offer advice, I’ll gladly read it. If you couldn’t care less, I completely understand… just keep them mousies scrollin’ then…
The MRA would refuse to participate in the Walk until they agree to have one for prostate cancer.
@Mr.Fire #111
but men can get breast cancer too..
link
sorry, double post bork
Here’s video of Rush Limbaugh making the crack about Michelle Obama’s weight:
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201109150013
Limbaugh continues to prove that he’s an idiot, a misogynist, and that he is no judge of beauty. Michelle Obama has full thighs and hips that are in very nice proportion to her height. She looks healthy and beautiful, and well within the range of normal weight.
That’s not the only time Limbaugh has taken aim at Michelle Obama.
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201102210011
“It doesn’t look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary advice.”
Limbaugh has also taken to calling her “Michelle, my butt,” and then pretending that he misspoke.
http://mediamatters.org/research/201012140031
He made the same mistake three times. A “mistake” he makes on purpose. “His wife, Michelle, my butt …. uh, my belle Obama…” “Folks, you don’t know what a thrill it is to be right as often as I am…” “My friends, exercise is irrelevant…”
@Sally, I’d go with door # 2, since it’s not something you plan on staying with long in either case. Benefits to me would outweigh having a little more money but no benefits or permanence.
@myself in 115…
Actually, the MRA would probably still refuse. They’d complain if they didn’t get equal advertising. And then after all that, they still wouldn’t actually attend either of them.
I’m curious what Limbaugh has had to say about any other First Ladies. Or does he only criticize the black ones? This could be interesting.
@Sally
Well, seeing that you are not wanting to settle down, Job 1 seems closer to finding (albeit temporary) job satisfaction than Job 2.
Finally a topic on which I have a certain measure of expertise! I’m a government bureaucrat who makes decisions about health care coverage for my (USian) state’s Medicaid program. My state is relatively generous – we cover many services that other states do not cover (including abortion). However, we always need to consider that we do not have an endless supply of money with which to pay for medical services. We cannot cover every service that a peron wants, only those that are actually needed.
Our standard is that we cover services that are medically necessary. If someone is depressed because they do not like the size of their nose, the covered service is mental health services. Likewise, if someone is depressed because they cannot conceive, the covered service is mental health services.
Walton did an excellent job above (add me to the totally not-creepily in love with Walton list)
An MRA is a guy who, when asked to donate to a famine relief appeal for children starving in Africa, starts telling you all about how the waiter at the Italian restaurant last night forgot his garlic bread and overcharged him for the beer. And demands to know why you aren’t talking about his issues, instead of other people’s.
His opinion of past First Ladies is not recorded, but apparently he did once say
…while holding up a picture of Chelsea Clinton.
lipwig:
Yes! That’s part of the point :)
Limbaugh said some nasty things about Hillary Clinton’s weight as well:
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200909230026
@ Sallystrange:
I’d take #2 since you can get benefits and I’m just pragmatic like that. #1 might be more fun, but it’s less practical and since you’re only getting $1 ph more it isn’t that much more incentive. If you’re not going to stick around until you could get the full benefits then it probably won’t be worth it, plus getting comfy when you know you’ll leave is less fun. Also permanent hire looks better on your resume, even if you leave in a year or two, so long as you have some *reason* to state when some one asks why you left.
But in the end go with whatever one makes you happy to think about doing for a year. Especially if networking with the field you’re more interested in will be more important to getting future jobs.
Limbaugh on feminism:
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200904100020
Limbaugh compares Rosie O’Donnell to a “killer whale.” http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201002260022
Limbaugh on the women’s movement: “I love the women’s movement, especially when walking behind it.” [Fox & Friends, 2/3/2010]
@Mr.Fire #126
OK, you got me there :)
I seriously didn’t know that men could get breast cancer until an malefriend-of-a-friend was diagnosed a short while ago. He is being treated successfully and has inadventently provided me with a new understanding.
Trying to establish whether Mr. Limbaugh is a sexist with racist tendencies or a racist with sexist tendencies is a bit like trying to establish whether a glass is half empty or half full.
Oh, but Walton, that was a technical error!
…
[Bonus: You get to read a Limbaugh-trashing tour de force from the late, great Molly Ivins.]
From MrFire’s link:
QFT.
Satire, when directed against the powerful, can be a liberating force. But when mockery travels down the gradient of power, and serves to reinforce an existing hegemony and to perpetuate existing prejudice, it ceases to be liberating and simply becomes bullying.
That pretty much sums up why I don’t find, say, Frankie Boyle’s “jokes” about children with Down’s Syndrome funny. And it’s why I’m deeply uncomfortable with things like “Draw Muhammad Day”, when we live in a society in which Muslims are already an unpopular minority and in which open anti-Muslim bigotry is commonplace.
Algernon: neither, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. How that applies to Limbaugh, I don’t know.
====
SallyStrange, I’d take job #1, but I’m from
socialistcommunist Europe, so I have no clue whatsoever how important ‘benefits’ are. Is trying talking them into a permanent hire an option?Good point about the networking… I hadn’t considered that aspect of it. But, since I am planning on going back to school in a year or two anyway, I don’t think it will make a huge difference to my networking prospects which one I choose. I do think networking would be better with Job #1.
I’m still waiting to hear back from Job #1 about when it might start and how long it might last. They are actually waiting to hear back from the State, since the job is a contract for the State, helping with the repairs from Irene. The uncertainty isn’t helping matters any.
I asked Job #2 if they would help pay for relocating expenses. Job #2 is farther away and I’d definitely relocate for it.
I’m leaning toward the permanent hire, just because I’m tired of temporary jobs, tired of living with the uncertainty. I need some breathing room before I can really get my shit together for my next big move, and I feel as if accepting a temporary position (again) will be a huge annoyance, not knowing when and if I’ll have to look for work again.
Just writing about it is helping my thought process. Thanks guys.
@ Sally
If it were me, I’d go with #1. I’d rather be doing exactly what I want for a while than have the benefits/ long term security. But maybe I’m just young and naive.
Sally: In your position I’d probably take job #2; given the state of the economy, it’s probably worth having a permanent stable job with health insurance, notwithstanding that it pays slightly less. But obviously YMMV, and I gather that some people feel differently.
“Benefits,” i.e., human rights that everyone should have, entail:
1. The ability to access affordable health care. If I accept a job without benefits, it means I have to pay out of my own pocket for health care or health insurance. I won’t be able to afford it, because it’s fantastically expensive, and yet I’ll be making too much money to qualify for government assistance in getting access to health care. Of course, this doesn’t even include dental care. Somehow my teeth don’t affect my health, right? That’s actually a big problem for me right now, but neither job is likely to help the situation much. (No no, I’m not bitter at all…)
2. The ability to take paid sick leave when you’re ill instead of trading between income and time to heal from your sickness
3. The ability to have paid vacation days during holidays and other times of the year (otherwise, forget that 4-day Christmas weekend with your family–or else you won’t be able to pay your rent for January).
4. Access to a pension plan, something about which I know nothing because this will literally be the first time I’ve ever had to deal with it. Apart from the job selling tires, but that only lasted a couple of months so I never really got those benefits anyway. But I hear they’re quite important if you’re interested in not spending your declining years in utter poverty.
Awesome, huh? America, the worker’s
paradiseprison.Been there, done that. I’ve traveled and built cob houses and earth ovens for a “living.” I did pretty much whatever I felt like all throughout my 20s. Now it’s time to buckle down and do boring adult-type things. I’m going to be 34 in a couple of months. (Note to FB friends: my real life birthday is not the same as the one I put on Sally Strange’s FB account.)
TLC @73:
That’s one of my instant irritants with the litter-parents. Only once did I ever manage to shut one up and it was purely by accident. She was going on about how “fornicating” deserved the punishment of a baby and I asked “so, what were your kids punishment for?” I wasn’t looking at her when I said it (I was working and she should have been) but she disappeared from my desk. I was told that she turned a brilliant red, like she was about to combust. It doesn’t even sound that clever to me, just an auto-mouth thing. Clever retorts usually occur to me three days too late.
Re the IVF in general:
Maybe that would be where a private secondary insurance would come in? Like the Medicare supplement policies? Not having ever been that gung-ho for having kids, it’s never been on my priority list.
Also….
Just a little aside here to the people fighting the good fight on the sexism/rape/MRA front… THANK YOU!
classic Led Zep vid
It’s interesting that in most countries, dentistry isn’t considered to fall under the heading of “medical care”. In Britain, the NHS doesn’t provide free dental treatment (except for children, pregnant women, and those who are on very low incomes or who are eligible for certain state benefits), and access to dental care isn’t considered to be an automatic entitlement, unlike access to primary medical care. Similarly, here in the US, my university health insurance doesn’t cover dental care; if I wanted it, I would have had to take out dental insurance separately. (Which I haven’t bothered to do, since I’m only here for nine months.)
and how about some Iggy
Sally:
As a teaching assistant, I get #1 (thankfully), but not #2-#4.
This song made me break down in tears yesterday and I still can’t stop listening to it. I have no clue why, though.
SallyStrange, by now I know about healthcare insurance in the US, but WTF? Sick leave isn’t usually paid?
Benjamin – Well at least, as a teaching assistant, you’re not expected to show up for work every single day regardless of whether it’s a holiday or not. I remember working as a front desk receptionist at a hotel on Christmas day, because I could only swing getting either Christmas Ever or Christmas off, and I opted for Christmas Eve which is more fun in my opinion. Weirdest day ever. Well, definitely in the top ten. Working for the state last year, the offices close on holidays, so I didn’t even have the choice of staying at work in order to receive full pay for that week.
No SQB. Paid sick leave is a luxury reserved for the upper and middle classes. Those attempting to enter the middle class from below may or may not get it, depending on whether the job is temporary or part-time or whatever. But if you’re a waitress or a burger flipper or something like that, probably not.
Mind-boggling isn’t it. It’s like they don’t care about productivity, they’d rather sacrifice a few work-weeks every year of production than let the workers get all uppity and start expecting to get spoiled like you Europeans, with your paid sick leave and socialized health care. You probably even have unemployment insurance that people can actually live off of.
Yeah, he should be one to talk. What an ass. Overweight people should know better than to participate in fat shaming. But you know, I really don’t care what he looks like, because it’s his character that is downright grotesque.
Passport paid. Should be here in less than two weeks – turns out I was far too pessimistic about the wait.
Extra days off work arranged. Just need to apply to get holiday pay out of the old job.
oniongirl emailed – she claims there’s plenty of accommodation available. I just hope someone will hand me an itinerary when I arrive, so I know what to go see. (Not the World Trade Centre, please. And I think I can do without the Statue of Liberty – even though I’m a fan of irony.) I’m thinking MoMA even though I’m not artsy (an artsy guide would be wonderful!). But I don’t actually know what other museums are in New York – the US is sort of an undifferentiated blob to me …
Now I just need to get some tickets. At the moment Iberia is at the top of the list, but I really don’t fancy the 18 hour overlay in Madrid … (hint hint)
(We are doing tactless, tasteless humor, aren’t we?)
–
Well, they wouldn’t even say they’d love to. They should not walk so a child may live.
Actually, it’s more like trying to establish whether a zebra is black with white stripes or white with black stripes.
land its Amy and Mike/a>
‘nother bork (could be the weather)
and it’s Amy and Mick
Y’know, ever since I heard this song, I’ve had part of a video playing in my head that I really want to make, assuming I can get permission to use the song. I really want to work a Sliding Doors-esque alternate timeline sort of arrangement in, but I’m not completely certain how. Here’s my best attempt.
The video I see is all in black and white and silent other than the music. It opens with a motherly figure sitting in an auditorium. (The obvious implication is that it’s a funeral home.) She closes her eyes.
We see her yelling animatedly at a teenaged boy. The fight goes back and forth a few rounds, and eventually the boy runs to his room.
Next we see the same boy in school. He’s being bullied mercilessly, including being physically beaten. A teacher figure drags the boy to the principal’s office, where he’s berated by the teacher and the principal for reasons left up to the audience to infer.
The boy returns to his room and curls up in a fetal position. Eventually, he gets out of bed, takes a rope out of a drawer… and the next thing we see is him, waist down, stepping off of a box.
(This should be approximately 3:10 in, when the music stops briefly.)
As the music restarts, we see the same fight as above, briefly, except that when the boy runs to his room, he picks up a notepad and starts writing.
We see again the fight in the school, with the principal and teacher yelling; this time, however, we see that afterward he goes to the music room and starts playing a piano. [Too meta? Maybe something else should be used.]
The boy returns to his room, curls up in bed… then gets out and reaches into a drawer… and gets some paper and an envelope and begins addressing a letter to Juilliard.
We cut back to the motherly figure, in the auditorium, which we realize isn’t a funeral home after all. The person next to her nudges her and she stands and cheers, as we pan around and see the boy walking across the stage in cap and gown.
Fade to black. Overlay: “It won’t get better… if you don’t let it.” [Doesn’t ring right. Suggestions?]
The glass is overengineered.
And mr Limbaugh is no mr.
@Ben #155
Thats totally beautiful…
I don’t know why I ruled out the straightforward tagline: “It gets better, if you let it”.
lipwig: Thanks.
After a busy weekend, I’m trying to catch up on some things I missed here. I’m not sure my brain is working properly after I read the following privilege denial:
apros of nothing: The Piano is one of my all time favorite movies, mainly because of the music. And the sadness of her not wanting to be there, and the wierdness of her new love. My favorite scene is when she collapses into the mud with her huge black dress.
@Ben, that’s great. I like the tagline in #158 better also.
Sally Strange, tell #1 that you have the offer from #2, see if they’re willing to offer permanence immediately instead of potentially (I remember they had some contingencies as to whether they got certain contracts or something, but if they want you they might be willing to take the risk).
Otherwise, being recently unemployed, I’d probably take #2, as long as I didn’t have to smell fresh asphalt every day.
Watched The God Complex again.
At first it’s here. Then later, it’s there. Could just be a cutesy mimicking of the storyboard.
Also, I saw something else I had missed before.
Walton, fuck off. Really, just fuck off. It is bizarre and demeaning to put child-bearing/raising in the same category as skiing, knitting, decorating with only white and black fabrics, and diligently working on compiling a a life-list of national parks in which one has had sex. It’s a really really common idea, and it does not help produce solid healthy humans to relegate the production and care of such humans to a personal choice for which only the parents are responsible, and insisting that there should be no coverage of assisted reproduction is part of that philosophy. As, surprisingly enough, is the remarkable lack of public funding for child care, public education, pediatric health and dental care, public libraries, playgrounds, and a whole host of other institutions that benefit children and families.
I had fertility problems. I was lucky – I lived in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, which mandated insurance coverage of fertility treatments. Not unlimited coverage, but workups and a few months of IUI or IVF. I was able to review my options without committing massive amounts of money to the diagnostic stuff, and so I was able to decide that the health consequences of IVF and the hormones required would be unacceptable. I decided that I would take clomid (a generic low-cost drug that does not generally lead to super-ovulation), that if it didn’t work after 5 cycles, I’d look at adoption or doing foster care. Mandated fertility coverage made those choices possible by preventing the chasing-one’s-losses behavior that is hideously common in infertile couples. If I’d spent 30 grand out of pocket on diagnostics, I might not have made that call. (As a bonus, I discovered a couple of health problems that I was able to deal with at a very early stage, instead of waiting until all my hair had fallen out, or I had chronic neurological damage.)
As I say to my childfree or childless friends, there are a load of ways to parent, and cranking out one’s own biological spawn is only one of them. But it’s important to people, and a natural part of life, in the same way that having a functional penis is important to people and a natural part of life. Unless, that is, you are fine with declaring that there is no need for mental health treatments to reduce emotional distress, and no need for viagra, and no need for birth control (no one HAS to have sex, after all), and no need for most orthodontics, acne creams, removal of benign skin tags, allergy shots for cat owners…
That being said, the US states that mandate a certain number of IVF or IUI treatments have found that covering such procedures decreases the likelihood of procedures with an unacceptably high risk of higher-order multiple pregnancy, with the associated higher cost of medical care for those kids due to developmental delay and other health problems. So in addition to being fucking humane, it’s fiscally responsible. Go figure.
@slignot,
Agreed, and agreed.
–
I watched it this morning. It was really good. And I’m looking forward to the next episode, with Chris (unless I remembered the name wrong, in that case Doctor’s former roommate).
About who’s behind the door.
Good evening
Walton
I’m too tired to write a consistent answer (which you’ll get tomorrow sometime after my visit to the dentist), but I have to comment on one thing:
You’re dead wrong when you think that reproductive troubles are not something that causes pain. It causes an enormous amount of pain. Just because you’re not bleeding doesn’t mean you’re not hurting.
Believe me, due to my personal history which was not so much a case of reproductive trouble than of normal biology, I know more about this topic than I could ever wish for.
It was more than once that during my active time on a support forum that I witnessed a husband coming in to tell us that his wife just tried to commit suicide, and it was more than once that those women succeeded.
On a more cheerful note, I took the Spawn for a driving lesson this afternoon. I was utterly terrified of doing this – the Mister is a great driving teacher and I was thinking of just assigning this task to him. (I didn’t learn to drive until I was 30, and he taught me, so I know of what I speak.) My minivan is still in one piece, as are the lampposts and curbs of the parking lot, and I’m a lot more relaxed about the prospect of future driving experiments.
Afterwards, the Spawn said that the best thing I’d done as a homeschooler was teach them to teach and that there’s a huge difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to teach it.
I now return you to How to Manage Health Care Systems, Public Infrastructure, and Life in General so as to prevent the costs of Mere Lifestyle.
I can’t afford expensive phones with monthly plans for my family but we have a cheap pay-as-you-go phone that’s pretty much for sending out with one or the other of them regularly, especially the 7-year-old, and I love it. If I want her to come home from her little friend’s house two blocks away when dinner is ready, I send the phone with her and give her a ring. We’re going to the big crowded state fair next week — she carries the spare phone, and if she gets separated from us there won’t be any tears or worry at all; she’ll just call our phone.
The 12-year-old uses it a lot too, in`fact, I plan to give him his own pay-as-you-go phone at the winter holidays. He takes the city bus to a magnet school across town, and has started riding the bus other places as well, so having a way to contact him and vice versa is handy.
Honestly, if I could afford it, I *would* get a family plan with a phone for each of them and train them to carry those things everywhere. People have acted before like I’m crazy for this, but I think they’re Luddites; it’s great not to have to worry about where they are and whether I can contact them. I grew up using payphones, cadging calls on house phones from friendly businesses, or using my friends’ house phones to stay in contact with my parents, but at least where I live all those things are disappearing fast. There are practically no payphones anymore and more often than not the “house phone” at a friend’s house is a cordless no one can even find because they all use their own cell phones.
Here’s a WTF!? story:Woman charged in death of her newborns given bond
A young woman who told police she hid her pregnancy and then suffocated her newborn twins to keep her parents from hearing their cries hung her head and listened in court on Monday as friends and family testified that she was sweet, humble, loved and respected by everyone.
Non moving pets?
Nope, not Chuck Testa.
___
Book? Yays.
___
Birger,
We don’t want one book.
___
I still do not have a mobile phone. SO THERE.
___
SQB,
I am holding out for Apron Walton ™, with optional duster.
___
RichardA,
Re: PotC III
Yes, I love that sequence.
___
The Arbourist,
That was very well done, I could even imagine something similar being effective. Sad to say, but the prolifers seem to be against anything said ahead of time.
@Mattir
That’s way better than how my mother handled it. She took me out twice, both of which she screamed the whole time (even thought she’d taken anxiety medication before hand). After that, she gave up and hired someone to teach me. Thinking back on that, I must have really freaked her out for her to have spent that kind of money.
Anyway, congrats on the successful driving lesson.
If only those women had had someone smart to explain that their wish for biological children was a mere lifestyle choice. That would have solved everything. On the other hand, I guess we’re all better off without people who are so passionately irrational about their lifestyle choices. Saves on costs, you see.
Oh shit. Sailor, what the hell is wrong with people? Murder trial, life sentence or death penalty? Who is she threatening? The children she won’t have aren’t going to happen either way, so why ruin her life moreso than it is already damaged?
Sailor, bond is about whether you’re going to show up for trial without having committed additional crimes. It’s a good and humane thing. And the murder of neonates is not, generally, the behavior of a well-adjusted person with good social support.
And yes, I’m aware that #175 is mostly straw.
Saw a family friend while I was out at lunch today. I wasn’t seated close enough to tell for sure, but it looked like he was on a date. He hasn’t been seeing anyone in a while, and I got a bit of that vibe, although it could just be grabbing lunch with a guy he works with. I kind of hope it was a date. His dog died recently and he’s been a bit depressed (understandably) and lonely.
Oops, it’s #173 that’s the straw beast.
Craig, :P. I’m looking forward to it too. The Lodger was actually one of my favourite episodes. It was fun to see the doctor try to pretend to be a normal 21st century human being.
[meta]
Walton, Mattir, Gilliel re. IVF.
„Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.“?
[ontopic]
@Algernon: “once some one is pregnant through IVF are they covered by NHS for prenatal care?”
Yes.
[offtopic]
@chigau, prevthread: “Ptarmigan”.
Roast ptarmigan à la Tea Party. (Actually sounds delicious!)
@Rorschach: “Where the fuck was I in the last 5 years.!”
Um, med school?
@SallyStrange: “I remember working as a front desk receptionist at a hotel on Christmas Day […] Weirdest day ever.”
1/1/2000: Hundreds of us in the office. Then-girlfriend-now-Wife drove me in (due to lack of trains, doubled up with a trip to see her sister) dodging shattered champagne bottles on the roads. Hourly checkpoints … global conference calls … and nothing broke.
Complete waste of time …
Anyone residing in the UK who is pregnent will be entitled to NHS care. If they do not qualify for free treatment[1] they are likely to get charged but access to care will not depend on their paying.
[1] EU nationals, along with citizens of countries that are part of the European Economic Area (such as Norway or Swizterland) get free care. As do nationals of other countries who have signed a recripical agreement to the other’s nationals free care. New Zealanders get free NHS care as a result of this.
Question for ‘Tis or anyone else economically inclined: why do I see people complain that the US uses Federal Reserve Notes rather than, say, United States Notes? I saw one person complaining that because of this the US doesn’t issue its own currency, but…I don’t see what the point is because Federal Reserve notes are issued by the US government regardless, aren’t they?
Does the US not recognise infancticide as a crime ? Here in the UK a woman can be charged with infanticide if the child she killed is under a year old, and a child she gave birth to. It is used less these days, but it used to be used in the days when the UK had the death penalty, and was thought that the courts need to take into consideration the mental and physical toll pregnancy and birth can have on a women.
Is that how the quotation marks go in German?
While I know the expression in Danish, I can’t help but read “schweigen” as cognate with “swearing”. I like that idea.
–o–
What’s the WTF?
It’s very sad, but there hardly seem much reason to lock the poor girl up. Hiding the remains in the laudry sounds stupid, though.
Of course, I’m on the record saying that babies aren’t real people, so what do I know.
Matt,
Stronger deterents hardly seem appropriate for someone who killed newborns that she was unprepared to deal with. We aren’t talking about killing someone for personal gain, but out of deperation and lack of emotional support. This person has my pity, not my anger.
Infancticide in the UK is a lesser crime than that of murder. There days most women charged with the crime plead guilty, and are given a non-custodial sentence contigent on them continuing to accept psychiatric support. There is essentially a deal between the prosecution and the defence that looks to give the woman the support she needs, rather than punish her.
@Sili, It’s how the quote marks go on Wikipedia. ;-)
I should probably add that it was (a) an attempt at levity, (b) not to be taken (too) seriously, (c) not directed at Mattir or Gilliel, (d) not intended to be offensive to Walton, (e) undertaken without any particular study or knowledge of Wittgenstein, (f) posted in a language I don’t speak or read (danger! danger!) and (g) may well have been ill-advised in a group of well-educated and philosophically-minded netizens, who’ll point out the stupidity of me speaking about something I can’t speak about.
I also missed an Oxford comma. Tsk.
MattP,
Hence my outrage at the DA talking about pursuing such monumental punishments as a death sentence or life without parole.
Sorry, misread you. Thought your ire was being directed at me. Opps!
SallyStrange, I regret that I don’t have the wisdom or knowledge to offer any sensible advice – but I would just like to say that I’m glad you have two job-avenues to consider. I hope that whichever one you go for proves fulfilling and rewarding.
.
Walton, I think on the whole that I’m yet another in the agreeing-with camp re IVF. The rich can always buy their way around any shortfall in provision (which is a massive and problematic issue in itself), but even so it seems clear that medical need should take precedence and that need is defined by what any given person requires in order to go about everyday life without pain or disability. I am not currently sober enough to pick apart different aspects of mental pain, but I think surgery for disfigurement or gender reassignment (utterly different from each other, obviously, but both determining how one is perceived every moment of every day) are clearly more a need than IVF.
.
Conversely, I am inebriated enough to scatter random personal opinions: Cartomancer, who has (assuming it’s the same person, and I think that it is) popped over from RDNet a couple of times lately to visit a couple of threads, really ought to move in. I would venture to say that he is the sort of bloke whom the horde would be delighted to call its own, being stunningly eloquent and erudite and passionately humane and one of those who (a rarity on RDNet, where I don’t go any more these days for precisely this reason) truly gets the point of spurning the MRAs and suchlike fauna beneath his heels.
.
As I have just been imbibing birthday whisky (not my b.day, though) I am currently in confiscate-from-the-multi-billionaires-so-everyone-else-in-the-world-can-have-a-full-stomach-and-a-home-and-probably-a-pony mode. I rather want the human race to stop building artificial indoor ski-slopes in Dubai and to fund universal access to education and healthcare instead, so I know I must have had a dram or three. :(
Dammit! Giliell. Soory. Soryy. Sorry.
That’s better. :-/
Setar:
The US started issuing currency during the Civil War to recoup the debt; United States Notes were, in a literal sense, debtor notes against the US and redeemable for gold. When we no longer allowed the public to own bullion, US Notes basically lost all difference from Federal Reserve Notes and were simply phased out. Federal Reserve Notes aren’t backed by US debt but by the assets of the Federal Reserve; they’re also loaned at interest, rather than simply being interest-free debt notes.
To the kinds of people who think that they can declare themselves “sovereign citizens” and avoid taxes, or who think that the only actual value comes from gold, US Notes have value but Reserve Notes do not. Otherwise, there’s no functional difference in today’s world.
At least that’s my take.
Walton, I have great sympathy for people who are marginalised because they have no wish to parents. I don’t think that anyone should be made to feel as though their life is less complete or unfulfilled. Society fails to acknowledge their legitimacy. However, I’m fairly sure that most people who do not wish to have children are no more making a choice than those who do. For most people, that decision appears to be instinctive. Because those who do wish to be parents are in the majority, I also don’t think that society has any wish to make the changes you suggest.
I’m not entirely convinced that yours is a purely rational argument rather than a justification stemming from personal apathy/antipathy towards parenthood. I am absolutely sure that my own arguments are partially as a result of my visceral desire to become a parent. I’m not unusual.
I’m concerned that you’re making a special argument about IVF treatment, when the NHS funds many treatments which are non-essential to survival. (Exempting suicides.) If the criteria for prioritizing NHS treatment is that funding should only go towards maintaining life and preventing physical pain, then we could make the argument that many treatments shouldn’t be available. By that argument, terminal cancer patients may be given priority to receive treatments which offer marginal extension of life over, for instance (and I choose this very provocative example) transexuals who
wantrequire gender reassignment. Would we even contemplate telling preoperative transexuals that they will have to settle for intensive psychological treatment because they are too poor to afford surgery? (Which anyway assumes that good psychology provision is cheaper than the alternative therapy.)Emotional pain is no less real than physical pain, and is often much more difficult to alleviate (certainly if the cause remains untreated).
Watched two TV news features about the pirate party of Berlin. One of their ads was…
1337KULTUR STATT LEITKULTUR
I almost collapsed in shrieking laughter.
They had 15 candidates. Against all expectations, all 15 have now got seats in the city parliament. Only one of them (…the deputees, not the the seats…) is a woman. When asked by reporters how come, the should-be-called-captain said “that’s shit, the way it is now”, said they had discussed it a lot and didn’t know why, said they didn’t want to be “reduced to a nerd party” in the public opinion (nerd in English in the original), and was generally embarrassed…
In a separate interview, another deputee gave good answers when asked why his party had campaigned for free public transport, free Internet access and the like for everyone, yet hadn’t mentioned how to finance that. Specifically, they would get to work immediately on issues they could now influence, like the greater transparency in the bureaucracy that they had also campaigned for, and he mentioned that they had already campaigned for stuff that would only be possible to implement on the federal level, such as a basic income for everyone. When the interviewer asked him about the gender imbalance, though, he got all flustered; instead of speaking fluently, he suddenly stumbled around. Well, he said 20 to 30 % of the party members are women.
(At least) one of the male deputees is a sysadmin. He did not wear one of those T-shirts that say “I am
/root, I’m allowed to do that!”, though.Yep.
You can’t simply equate random different consonants. :-) The cognate to “swear” is schwören “to swear [an oath]”.
Opposablethumbs, it is true: having options is a WONDERFUL feeling.
As is being told that I am the TOP candidate for a position. I must be doing something right!
So, I know I have at least a couple more weeks of down-time, then StrangeBoyfriend is moving to (the extremely diverse and cool) Silver Spring, MD. And I will be starting my new job, and looking for a new apartment as well. Lots of changes.
I’m off to the supermarket to get more apples to make another crisp. The other one is already all gone. Perhaps to pick up some more wine as well.
@ Sili #150
If you get the chance, see the Frick Museum. It is the home of Henry Clay Frick, with a good bit of it intact as it was in the day, and the art that he purchased displayed. You see some wonderful art. I like the house itself, which has been altered from the original, true, but is significantly intact. No matter what your political leanings, you do step into another world for a time.
Oh yeah. The memory I had already suppressed. Do you know what just was (perhaps still is) on the public-owned Italian TV channel Rai Uno? The competition for Miss Italia 2011. The scantily clad candidates (all of them regional misses) all look like they’re sixteen years old. *facepalm* I’ll be in my bunk to snuggle up with my plush shark and weep.
Berlusconi is having another day in court, I hope he finally gets removed from circulation this time. His popularity has recently tanked because it came out that he has called politics his “spare-time job” in opposition to business and sex.
:-) :-) :-)
Museum in New York: the AMNH. More fossil vertebrates than you ever thought existed. ;-)
Sili
I dunno about museums in NYC–though I’ve always wanted to check out the Guggenheim, which is right next door to the American Folklore museum. Apparently there’s a whole passel of museums up in that neighborhood.
I will say one thing about NYC: wear comfortable shoes when you go.
:-(
FWIW, I’m sorry. I should have known I would come to regret discussing this topic; I didn’t originally have any intention of arguing about it, and only elaborated on my views because Giliell specifically asked me. I will shut up about it after this post; I have no desire to cause pain or anger to anyone.
To a point, I suppose Bernard is right. I’ve had difficulty understanding where the people on the other side of this argument are coming from; because, personally, I’ve never felt any desire to have children, and have always been completely apathetic towards the idea of parenthood. It’s a natural drive that I seem to lack.* I suppose I underestimated the degree to which other people do feel strongly about it, and that’s something of an empathy failure on my part, for which I apologize.
I certainly don’t think that those who do want to have children are “irrational”, and I never said so. That would be judgmental bullshit.
(What I did describe as “irrational” was the culturally-enforced idea that everyone has to have children, and that one can’t have a “normal” life if one doesn’t have children: that is to say, the natalist mentality, promoted by religious movements like “Quiverfull” and the like, and accepted in our society to varying degrees. That’s the only context in which I used the word “irrational”. But no one here is arguing in favour of that view, as far as I’m aware.)
Oh no there’s a Pedobear in my bed!
I don’t have internet in my new house yet… Posting from campus now… I’m never ever going to catch up ;_;
Just to remind everyone that there are three ways to love Walton:
There’s the non-creepy Brother Og way
There’s the proudly creepy AJ Milne way
And then…well, then there’s the Sili way.
Nope. Just Chuck /b/sta.
Mr. Fire:
The record shows, I took the blows, and did it My way
But I think we should all bow in deference to the Sili way. And now you two can meet!
Sili’s way seems quite congruent with Algernon’s/the Sex Pistols’ way. Can’t I do both?
Mattir – “Sailor, bond is about whether you’re going to show up for trial without having committed additional crimes. It’s a good and humane thing.”
Mattir, I know that. I was doing a drive-by comment between work and an official function and hadn’t caught up with TET. It sure was bad timing.
If I had had time I would have pointed out that it’s very unusual for bail to be set that low for a horryifying multiple murder, but I think the judge did the right thing and he gave the right reasons. So often in our system bail seems to be a pre-punishment for the crime. It will probably be the last time she can spend with her family.
My additional point is what religion does to people. she had a ‘loving’ family and still felt compelled to hide her pregnancy and kill her babies so her family wouldn’t find out. That’s sick. If that’s a functional devout family, something is seriously wrong with religion. But we knew that.
p.s. I don’t want to get to get in the shit with you, but I think it was uncalled for the way you went off on Walton. I get it that you have a more intimate involvement with the subject, and you brought up some interesting points countering his POV, but seriously, ‘Fuck you Walton’ was uncalled for.
[edit – not that we have editing, but I just caught up] Walton, you did nothing wrong. You espoused a position, supported it so well thru the early stages of TET counter-arguments, and you convinced me.
When Mattir comes back with citations to support her position actually being less expensive, I might change my mind.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
changeable moniker, if you are referring to Y2K, it went smoothly because a fuckton of us IT folks did our work beforehand so nothing happened (except to spysats.)
Cipher: I’m watching Seinfeld on DVD now, and there was a bit that reminded me of what you said a few threads ago.
Jerry: “Naaaaaa…I can’t watch a man sing a song.”
Elaine: “What are you..crazy?”
Jerry: “They get all emotional , they sway. It’s embarrassing.”
Walton and others,
I can’t comment on the NHS situation, because my experience is exclusively in the US. But I can tell you that it is necessary and unpleasant to set limits on covered services. Health care dollars, like other dollars, are not unlimited. As much as I hate saying that rich people get health care services that poor people don’t get, we all know it’s true.
If we don’t want to reach a point where we have to tell women their punch biopsy must be done without anesthesia, we need to decide that some services just do not reach the point of medical necessity.
In my state, which is more generous than most, our public programs will diagnosis the causes of infertility and will treat medical causes of infertility, such as fertility drugs and surgery to correct blocked fallopian tubes, but we do not cover IVF.
Every fall, I spend several months coming up with policy initiatives (which don’t affect the budget) and budget initiatives. For the past 3 years, we have only been asked for initiatives that save money. Some things are optional Medicaid services for adults, including eyeglasses, rehabilitation therapy and durable medical equipment. I have actually been asked how much we could save by eliminating coverage of durable medical equipment for adults. So far my argument that discontinuing coverage of ventilators would be politically challenging has been successful. Would I like to cover IVF? Sure. I would also like to cover power wheelchairs with a standing function that allows the user to access cupboards without having to ask someone else to help. And, I would like to cover silver impregnated dressings to minimize infected wounds. But until the floodgates of money are opened by those people that swear they are pro-life, we do the best we can.
I required medical intervention to conceive my daughter. My insurance at the time did not cover treatment of infertility. I was lucky that I was able to afford the treatment I needed. I’m not insensitive to the pain that infertility can cause, I just can’t put IVF at the top of my wish list.
You mean there are places where a punch biopsy is done with anesthesia!?
Mine was not. I was fully conscious.
[comment redacted]
It was awful.
Why, I just spent Saturday there. (45 min by LIRR & uptown C-train)
Joint fieldtrip with a Chemistry class (long story) so firat a courtesy visit to the (jawdropping) Hall of Gems & Minerals, then the Hall of Biodiversity (all about the phylogeny), the Hall of Ocean Life (w/ lifesize blue whale), then up to my very favorite place, the fourth floor. Fossil vertebrates, baby! There is a (still pretty accurate afaik) cladogram laid out on the floor. Everywhere are dozens of famous fossils–real fossils, most of them, not just casts–up there, stuff I’d seen in diagrams and photos for years before greeting the real things as almost old friends. So many skeletons, all so cool. Dinosaurs yes, some of the best (though I grew up on the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museum’s collection), but so, so much more as well. (current favorites: pterosaurs and Stupendemys)
I always go up there.
I couldn’t even tell you what’s on the second or third floors, at all. No idea. (not true: classic big-mammal dioramas, for one thing)
though I bet it’s cool as hell
Do I not remember Patricia’s recent medical procedure correctly? Didn’t she say she had one done without a local because the Oregon Plan doesn’t think it’s necessary?
Everyone take note: Please if you can help it at all, do not go to any doctors in small cities on the outskirts of DFW.
And people now ask me why I am willing to drive all the way up to plano for my doc and dentist. FFS, now I have options. I look at the reviews and I pick the doctor that looks the best.
Damn it sucks not to have that option.
Ack.
A moron on the newspaper site keeps posting this video as evidence of how stupid Democrats supposedly are. I pointed out that they had to interview hundreds, if not thousands, of people to get a handful to fall for it.
Her response? “Prove it.”
AAAGH.
Noooooo :-(
It’s happened. I’ve been hoping this day wouldn’t come. The Science Channel (the only channel left that doesn’t show programs that are outright wrong/false/lies) has finally fallen. I’m was watching the Science Channel and now “Unsolved History” is on, talking about Area 51 (with interviews with UFO crazies). It’s presents a skeptical viewpoint, but they’re trying to keep up the levels of “mystery” by saying “maybe it did happen”. I am disappoint.
No… I was insensitive, particularly with describing parenthood as a “luxury” and a “lifestyle choice”. I should have realized how important the topic is to people, and discussed it in a less blasé way.
@ Benjamin
I’m beginning to think you like this kind of assault on your intelligence. You don’t have to correct all of the stupid people you come across. Give yourself a break, man.
I missed it.
Meh… I had one a bit ago. They decided they needed to take more while I was there too.
Oh man. Awful. The irony here is that I make enough money that I could have paid (out of pocket if need be) for drugs. I just… didn’t know what was going on or anything.
FWIW, I found another doctor. As I said above.
Also, I should have walked out of that gyno’s office the MINUTE I saw bible verses painted on the wall. Fuck I’m an idiot some times.
OBGYN + Bible verses = TORTURE WITH VAGINAL PEAR.
Is it wrong that knew I what Algernon meant in the PEAR reference w/o having to Googly it?
Nah, The Sailor, it probably just means we might like some of the same movies.
@ Sailor
I don’t know. I don’t get the reference, but it doesn’t sound good.
Algernon, oh, right, right, um yeah, movies.
.
.
.
;-)
Algernon, thankee for The Sex Pistols. I’ve always loved that ever since I saw it at the end of Goodfellas.
Now you have me looking for other punk covers of PG-rated tunes.
First, I am not really irate at Walton and do not wish for him to engage in intimate activities with a porcupine, regardless of stage of decay.
However, here is a New England Journal of Medicine article which compared procedures and outcomes at clinics in states that did and did not require health insurance coverage. Clinics located in no-coverage states performed fewer procedures and had higher “success” rates (i.e. live births), but had significantly (p=.007) more pregnancies with three or more fetuses. Clinics located in states with insurance mandates performed more procedures, but transferred fewer embryos per procedure. So there is actual research that providing health coverage does appear to change clinical practices involved, which is a good thing. As I said above, it may also help promote better decision making by infertile couples by reducing the tendency to gamble more in order to make up for significant prior expenditures.
I suspect, but have not researched, that insurance mandates have age cutoffs for when infertility treatment is required. I would have no problem saying that women over a certain age should not be entitled to infertility coverage. One can make that argument solely on the basis of treatment efficacy – it’s significantly less likely that I’d get pregnant now, at 48, than I was to have gotten pregnant at 31.
A desire to have children is not a “lifestyle choice.” This is a phrase that indicates that the speaker considers the desire trivial, vain, and not central to one’s happiness or identity, and it’s interesting that it’s used to refer to decisions related to child-bearing, gender identity, and sexual orientation. It’s not used to refer to one’s decision to work for Doctors Without Borders or Amnesty International or EarthJustice.
I do not believe that everyone should have children. It is perfectly reasonable NOT to do so, and no one should have children just because they think it’s socially expected, just like no one should get a tattoo or gender reassignment surgery because of peer pressure. Putting reproductive decisions, whether to have biological children or remain childfree, into the “lifestyle choice” category places these decisions into the “things done at least partly because of peer pressure” zone, which is exactly where they should not be.
OT: Rawnaeris, if you’re reading, did you get my email? If not, please could you re-post your email address?
This made me laugh pretty hard.
The “fuck you” to Walton was solely because of the “lifestyle choice” language. There are perfectly reasonable policy decisions to be made about which medical procedures should be covered by insurance, but I think there are real reasons why some amount of coverage for infertility treatment makes sense, both because reproduction is an extraordinarily intimate and sometimes central-to-one’s-identity decision* and (more importantly) because coverage can reduce the societal cost of higher-order-multiple pregnancies, especially those due to developmental disabilities in the resulting children.
*As I said in my first post, even though I really enjoy parenting, I was not willing to do every conceivable treatment possible to have biological spawn. I had an agreement with Spouse and Doctor about exactly what I would do and not do, in some explicit detail and in place before I took that first dose of clomid. I think that having the benefit of insurance coverage was important in that it separated the medical treatment issues from the cost-of-care issues and allowed better decision-making.
Bwahahahahahaha!
Well, I apologize for that choice of language, and I won’t say anything further on the subject. (I’ll leave it up to others to argue the point if they want to.)
Here’s another citation summarizing the problem of IVF and higher-order multiple births, with some sidebar citations to studies examining the impact of insurance mandates. For me, the biggest issue in considering whether to cover IVF procedures is the prevention of developmental problems in children, which result in costs over the course of the lifespan and are not limited to the cost of the original IVF procedure. (It would be interesting to factor in the cost of the increased risk of ovarian and other cancers in women who have such procedures, but to my knowledge this has not been done.)
Walton, you do not need to apologize. You provoked thought and discussion, both in my meatspace life and here, about the language we use about particular types of decisions. This is why Pharyngula is a good place.
Mattir, after Walton’s response I understood that you folks know each other well enough that it wasn’t meant or received as a porcupine worthy event.
My bad.
Can’t argue….
memes…
Benjamin, the thing that makes me uncomfortable with describing parenthood as a luxury is that it opens the doors for the kind of classism that says poor people shouldn’t have children (“Couldn’t afford to pay the bills? Shouldn’t have bred! Why are we supposed to pay for their kids?”).
I agree with Mattir that childrearing is absolutely not a luxury and quite possibly literally the most important job that can be done on this planet. I differ from Mattir, however, in that I see a division between childrearing and childbearing, especially since we do live in a world with so many children who lack loving, competent adults to raise them.
IVF is a really sticky area because the decision to reproduce *is* so intimate and because people who desperately want to have babies probably are responding to innate biological demands that can’t simply be switched off. Do you think, though, that if we a) worked at deconstructing the idea that people need to have children to be complete and b) worked at decoupling the concepts of childbearing from childrearing, demand for IVF would go down?
I agree with Walton.
Mattir, way back at #164:
Having non-functional body parts is also a natural part of life, and sometimes that is also important to people. Being personally important isn’t the same as being socially important, much less medically necessary. Though I admit it’s probably not true in my case, I don’t doubt that raising children would be psychologically beneficial to some people; but as you say, there are lots of ways of achieving that beyond fertilization treatments that also meet other social needs. They’re also not as expensive and don’t have the potential to aggravate other social problems currently and in the future.
#228:
I haven’t looked at the study (and I’m no expert in the field anyway); but these seem like fairly small effects, a few percentage points. To me, at least, this doesn’t seem significant enough to give it priority over other things which I would consider socially and medically more urgent.
It also doesn’t seem like that is the more important issue for you, rather that it’s “central-to-one’s-identity.” Yet at the same time, it’s also not, for other people. I think this is the confusing part to me, because you’re either walking a fine line which I don’t understand or are contradicting yourself.
I just watched an interview with one of the survivors of the Resolute Bay plane crash.
Neither Peter nor Gabrielle mentioned god.
kristinc:
I think you have your conversations crossed; I’m not discussing parenthood or IVF.
Given that I did not do, and explicitly stated ahead of time that I would not do, IVF treatment, I’m not sure why I’m suddenly an advocate for it. I am an advocate for childbearing not being classified as a lifestyle choice, since this is a phrase generally used to describe choices that are trivial, vain, and selfish. The “lifestyle choice” discussion is totally separate from the whether-IVF-should-be-covered issue.
The prevention of lifetime monetary and human suffering costs associated with triplet-and-above pregnancies is, as far as I’m concerned, the biggest reason to mandate insurance coverage of IVF.
Garrrgh! Problem Exists Between Brain And Keyboard.
I meant Walton, of course. If my head hadn’t farted. And if I’d had the sense to re-read before hitting submit.
Argh. This is one of those rare occasions when I wish I accessed TV through the TV rather than the internet. I’d really love to watch DWTS, people are saying Chaz Bono did well. Not for me until tomorrow, unless I care to share my cell phone number with some unscrupulous internet phishers.
FWIW, I certainly do not think that parenthood is a trivial, vain or selfish endeavour, nor do I think that it’s purely an individual activity in which society has no collective interest. Quite the opposite. We all have a moral responsibility to make this a good society for the next generation of children to grow up in. And I’m strongly in favour of economic support for parents, affordable health care and childcare, education, libraries, and so on. (All services that our present societies, by and large, often fail at providing.) So when I used the phrase “lifestyle choice”, I didn’t mean to trivialize and demean parenthood; I’m sorry that this is evidently the impression I created, and, as I said, it was a stupid choice of words on my part.
I’d say there’s a difference, though, between the proposition that parenthood is important and that society has a moral responsibility to parents and to already-born children (something on which, presumably, we can all agree), and the proposition that the state should fund IVF and the like in order to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to produce children biologically. After all, biological procreation is not the only way to become a parent – adoption and foster care are very difficult processes, certainly, but they’re options that people in those circumstances can consider (and fertility treatments aren’t exactly an easy option either, even where they’re funded by the state). And in a world with scarce resources and a greater population than it can support, it’s very hard for me to sustain the view that assisted procreation should be regarded as a fundamental human right to which everyone should have access.
I’d like to have a behbeh but if I can’t I don’t expect the state to cover the expenses of me trying to have on.
Though it does sort of suck to think that it’s mostly my poverty that would mean the difference between parenthood and not parenthood. I’d be an awesome mom. Adoption is mad expensive too, from what I hear.
Anyways… I cooked up a giant batch of chili with beef, pinto beans, black beans, red cabbage, broccoli, garlic/cumin/cilantro, etc. Delish! Life is so much easier since I discovered canned tomatoes with jalapenos mixed in. Another batch of apple crisp is done. Perhaps this time I’ll get some over to Josh before StrangeBoyfriend and I NOM NOM NOM it all. It’s quite good, I invented a new crisp topping with more flour and quick oats instead of regular oats and I quite like it. It forms a nice crispy top. That’s probably due to the butter too.
Mmmhmm, drunken cooking…
Sili, I’m going to be in Manhattan for several days towards the end of October, mostly for visiting museums. Will you be there then? If so, would you like to get together to do something?
If you are interested, email me and I’ll give you the details. Email address is on contact info on my blog.
I’d also be open to spending time with other NYC-area Pharyngulates during my visit. E-mail me.
Yeah? Well I might be PLAYING IN THE NYC HALLOWEEN PARADE with my awesome, weird, Balkan marching brass band!
I just realized it’s 1 am on a Tuesday morning. No wonder nobody’s replying to my posts.
Bored now…
Hi Sally!
(We’re not all in ‘Merica)
@ 57 Bro Ogg
Tonight, for Wife’s birthday dinner, I am making pork tamales (I even have the corn husks!)
Giant Octopedic Conga Rats for Sis’ Ogg. Please post your tamale recipe if you get the chance. The people at the market now think I am mad for buying the husks and leaving the corn. (Tamales, for some obscure reason, are not a common Chinese dish.)
@ 140 Invisible Dragon
khekhekhekhe… excellent!
@ 182 Setar
No.
………………………..
On the subject of music, here is an excellent place for the free streaming of South African music. Link: Mama Dance. (Ideal background music for pharyngulating to.)
@ Sally Strange
While you are there, ask to meet Phoenicia.
On having children—I shared Walton’s initial reaction,but having read Mattir’s, Gileill’s, and Kristinc’s contributions, I have a far better and less ignorant understanding of the desire to have one’s own children. Thank you, sincerely.
By way of explanation (not to tell you you’re wrong, but to illustrate), here are the reasons I have a knee-jerk reaction to natalism and IVF:
1. Too many—not just a minority at all—heteros act as if their having spawned makes them Superior Citizens in every way. They fairly prance in pride at themselves for having managed to fuck and produce offspring. This is extremely irritating, and not just to homos like me. It ain’t that hard in most cases, folks.
2. Too many people act as if a household is not a “family” unless you’ve popped out spawn (heterosexually, of course). This is also irritating especially as it contributes to a movement that elevates hetero units’ legal rights.
3. There are so many children that desperately need adoption and good homes, or who are wards of the state or the foster care system, that it can be maddening to see people do everything they can to bear their own while neglecting that. No, no person has an obligation to adopt such children, and no, no person must forego their own reproduction because of that. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t privately chafe people like me.
4. Those of us who don’t have and don’t want children are sick to fucking death of the common American use of children as status symbols and self-esteem boosters for anxious and vain middle class parents. If only parents were just a tiny little bit more aware of the fact that their kids aren’t the apple of everyone else’s eyes, too, it would be easier to take.
If this doesn’t describe you, please don’t think I’m aiming it at you. But for the love of fuck don’t start screaming about how awful we childless are to have these thoughts. I don’t hate you or your children, I just want them kept in their place. Which is being charming in limited doses and out of my house and social life most of the time until they’re thoroughly sentient:))
SallyStrange—
Any time, girl. That sounds delicious!
Theo— I shall not be able to dry and mail you some Phoenicia this week before I leave for a week-long trip. Mea culpa. But I certainly can when I return. Your patience will be rewarded, however, as she’s getting more and more active. I can feed her and expect a doubling in size in less than four hours now! The longer she goes, the more developed the yeast and flavor, so the bit you get in the mail ought to be gang-busters and ready to go in a day or so after you re-activate her.
I’ll check in with you when I get back and if you’re in the middle of your move, give me your new address and I shall send some Dried Goddess to your new place. She will bide her time quietly, with narrowed eyes, in your mailbox.
Oh shit, tamales, Theo? Wow! That’s some bit of work, and they’re so good.
Luckily I’m going to Colorado, a state in the US Southwest this week where real Mexican food will flow like milk and honey. You just drive down the street and stop at the nearest sidewalk cart owned by a Mexican mom and pick up a bag of 24 steamed tamales and bring ’em home. They’re guaranteed to be fucking awesome.
We humans can be so goddamn shortsighted and dense at times. One would think it’s fairly obvious that it would benefit everyone if the people who were best at raising children were able to raise children and had the resources to do a great job. But noooooo. That would just make too much sense, wouldn’t it, Human Civilization In General?
@ 180,
Sadly, when I was in med school, Bush Sr. was still President of the USA, and Germany were soccer world cup champions. Yep, that long ago !
;)
@ Josh
I would take it a step further (to paraphrase Sartre): “Hell is other people‘s kids.”
*sobs*
I’ll have to keep eating non-divine bread for a while. If I consider that xtians have to wait ’til they die to see their god, I can wait a few weeks to see my Goddess.
I have such respect for Mexican moms after making tamales myself. There are very few Mexicans in China unfortunately. The few I have met wax lyrical about tamales, but don’t make them themselves. :'(
[book porn]
I have come across this really amazing book on teh interwebz. Unfortunately it is a bit out of my current price range. I shall either have to sell the spare kidney or wait ’til my ship comes in. Link:Frédéric Chaubin, Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed
The bizzare, pagan brutalism reminds me of similar architecture in my home town: Link- Die Afrikaanse Taal Monument.
There is something about these works that is like standing on the edge of an abyss. Unbehagen. A view into the strange, dark soul of authoritarianism.
In response to the slagging of Limbaugh – too bad he never had a Dean Wormer to tell him ‘Fat,
drunkhigh and stupid is no way to go through life, son’And in response to Walton regarding IVF being paid for by health insurance: I didn’t quite have the ‘fuck off!’ moment that Mattir did, but we have a daughter via IVF, I’ve seen the emotional effects on my wife of not being able to have a baby without it. I can sort of empathize, I used to think that way myself, and Walton’s perspective is not atypical of a lot of those who plan not to have kids, and at one time I definitely didn’t intend to either.
We do relatively well financially but still required a loan through a loan set up at a bank by the fertility clinic. If we could not qualify for the loan we were willing to relocate (back for me) to Canada where some provincial health insurances are moving to cover some or all IVF expenses.
Walton, and others, have not had a wife who broke down publicly at a family reunion because of the pregnant family members there and friends sending ‘we’re pregnant!’ cards for the previous few months. Saying there’s no detrimental health effect is definitely not true. Mental health is equally as important as physical health.
We also come from families that have very wide extended family to connect with. Siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles are as much a part of us as our own skin. Suggesting that participating in that sense of family isn’t necessary (at least to some) is a rather self-centered thing to say. We’re not you, and you’re not us.
I certainly don’t see coverage (of almost any sort) in the US because of the rampant greed and ignorance being cultivated here by the right, but in socialized countries or territories, if they have the resources to do it, it’s something that couples will be immensely thankful for if there is some assistance.
I should probably address the adoption aspect since it was raised. I think this falls into the same arguments that anti-abortion advocates make. What they end up advocating is that single women should, in essence, become baby factories for childless couples. It’s bad enough a woman has that pressure from religious loonies, but suddenly being hit from another direction doesn’t help. I understand that there are children that are orphaned or put up for adoption from other circumstances beyond a woman’s or family’s control but you have to consider what is being asked then. I’m not the kind of person that can take in a kid who has psychological issues. In essence, by your argument, you are suggesting that I should be funneled down that avenue. We do have the resources to accept a child orphaned from somewhere else in the world, and we do still have that option open for a second child, but again, you are suggesting that childless couples are responsible for the shitstorms going on in the world and they should not have their own reproductive capability if they’re poor. I can go on, but I think you get the gist.
I’m not saying everywhere should do it, but if it’s possible, the happiness it can bring can’t be equaled. Too many people are stuck in the old fashioned mode of thinking like religious people, that we can’t do things to make happiness paramount here because we’re going to get sunshine blown up our arses in the afterlife. We aren’t supposed to be thinking that way. When we’re gone, we’re gone. This is just one step to increasing quality of life for a decent society’s citizens.
The most important thing, though, is we have a little girl now who is two-and-a-half years old. Knowing now what it’s like to have her around, I would have robbed banks and stolen cars if I had to just for the opportunity to feel that joy and love. Luckily we weren’t in that situation, but once you are there, it is that important.
Badass barbarians were Swedish!
“Dig reveals human skulls mounted on stakes” http://www.thelocal.se/36226/20110919/
At 6000 BC, that means these barbarians* were the first, and have the legal rights to a practice that has become a cliché for film barbarians. If you are a descendant of these skull impalers I suggest you get a lawyer and sue the entire film industry for everything you can get.
PS The skulls were found at Lake Mälaren, near Stockholm. We in the North are much nicer.
(* Proto-Republicans? )
Re: spending public funds for fertility treatments.
I opined on this issue, in this thread A surprising Nobel about a year ago.
Short version: I don’t see it as a health issue, hence I don’t think it should be prioritised over actual health issues.
(So, my conclusion is similar to Walton’s, but its basis is somewhat different)
What a bunch of cheap bullshit. No one is advocating that single women should be baby factories to supply childless couples and you goddamned well know it. What is wrong with you? People are only talking about adopting babies that are already born to women who don’t want or can’t take care of them, and you turn this into some sort of advocacy for treating poor women as baby-breeding slaves?
That is so stupid and ridiculous I can barely believe you really typed it. Congratulations on bringing the most irrational and fucked up response to the entire thread. Got that crap out of your emotional spleen yet? I hope so. Maybe then you’ll stop saying fundie-level stuff.
Really. Honestly.
Looks like Obama is finally growing a backbone:
Probably the only reason he is doing this now is, as the article mentions, his poll numbers are low and the attempt at compromise with Republicans was (unsurprisingly) an absolute failure. Still, hopefully he sticks with this new policy of finally standing up for the right thing.
Fuck, McThulu – that makes me so angry I could spit. That is, without exaggeration, the stupidest, basest omg-my-own-emotional-attachments-are-so-important-i-can’t-think-straight-ahhh post from a non-religious person I can remember seeing here in a long time.
Fuck off. Grrrr.
I don’t get the IVF debate here tbh. When people lose their leg, we fit them a prosthesis. When you have a brain tumour or appendicitis, we cut the offender out. And when you can’t conceive because your sperm don’t wiggle their tails enough, or you’ve got scarring on your uterus or whatever, or you live in a partnership that lacks a penis (or a vagina), then medicine offers the option of IVF. I see it not as a lifestyle option, but as treatment for a medical condition (and that medical condition might well be emotional distress or depression over not being able to conceive naturally).
And because of that, I think it should be fully covered by health funds.
.
..
…
NOPE! Chuck Testa!
Also, I’m listening to ganstapunk.
Fascinating article (via Katrina) !
Allergy Recapitulates Phylogeny
It’s not like you’d be compelled to do so. You are funneling yourself, by taking on the risks associated with raising a child, any child. It’s hardly to fair to assume all those kids are damaged goods, yet your own offspring would bring no such problems. So let’s be realistic. What if your daughter has psychological issues? Are you the kind of person who would be able to take care of her? I would think so. What’s the difference?
I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt: you probably aren’t raising a kid just to make yourself feel better. You probably don’t tend to treat her as your property, only worth keeping around for the tax breaks and her positive effects on your mental health. Whatever your reasons for having a baby were, now that she’s around, you probably feel obligated in some way to take care of her.
So, the situation in our society is that there are a bunch of orphans and other adoptees, who are already around. I’m not saying your choice was wrong, but what’s the difference, ethically speaking? Their DNA doesn’t match yours closely enough? They’re not there right in front of you? Assuming society (not you personally) has some sort of obligation to take care of them, why would society have an obligation to encourage yet more children in the population, some of whom may end up in the adoption pools and orphanages themselves?
I also object to the implication that this about whether or not the poor should have reproductive capability. Simply giving the poor funds for fertility treatments does them no favors and isn’t empowering them at all. Raising kids to maturity is the expensive part, as I’m sure you’re well aware. Generally, we ought to get people out of the cycle of poverty as much as possible, so they and their kids can have a good quality of life. I’m not saying it can’t happen until there’s no more poverty (which will probably never happen), just that we’re not doing much to help the kids or the parents if we’re not prepared to support them along the way; and as things are now, we aren’t doing enough. Again, there are limited resources, which certainly aren’t being used effectively now, but we have to have priorities and avoid making even more problems for ourselves (which, realistically, probably won’t be solved adequately either).
Rorschach, fascinating indeed. Thanks for that link.
kristinc
Well, mobiles are pretty cheap in Germany, at least if you go with an outdated model and a prepaid card. It would be around 30€ a year. But it is somewhat a road I don’t want to go down that early. I don’t want to enter them into the “keeping up with the Jonses’ kids competition” that early (seriously, most primary school kids have more expensive mobiles than me) and I don’t want to fall into the trap over being over-anxious while at the same time less careful because I perceive an additional level of security that isn’t there.
Yes, getting lost at fairs (or in a damn fashion store) is a real problem that happens to most kids at some point. I rather want them to have the tools they need in order to find their way back. After all, they can’t call me up for the rest of their lives.
Walton
OK, this is going to be a long post, but I think you won’t mind.
I’ll try to cover your points one by one.
There are two severe problems I see here.
First of all, globally speaking, having children isn’t a luxury but a necessity. I’ll come to the problem of “world-population” later, but on a basic level. raising the next generation is an important task for a society as a whole.
But really big problem here is the “limited resources” argument, which is a dangerous path to trot. In health care we have already heard a lot of those discussions about who should be entitled to get treatment and who shouldn’t, whose needs are deemed important and whose aren’t. What it boils down to in this specific discussion is that you judge fertility issues to be of no importance, regardless of what those people with fertility issues are saying and that therefore you don’t want money to be spent on it.
This is rather naive.
I tried to find numbers for the UK, but I couldn’t find any that showed how many of the children in state care are actually up for adoption.
I know for Germany that there are hardly any. Since most countries priorize help for families and try to leave them intact (to a ridiciulous extend, I admit), what there is is a lack of qualified foster parents, not people looking for adoption.
It’s not that people aren’t looking into the possibility of adoption, it’s more that it’s a long hard road to go down.
Being a foster parent is a great thing and I personally regret that if my life goes on as planned, there will probably be no space in it for a foster child, because I think that I could do good there.
But people who often have already traumatic experiences with losing children are not a good place for children who might leave again in weeks, months or years, especially not when the children come with severe issues of their own.
If you’ll forgive the comparisson with dogs: A family who would make a great home for a puppy isn’t necessarily suited for a grown dog who had been used in dog fights.
That’s why it is hard to find suitable foster or adoptive parents for older children: few people qualify and well-meaning, loving but unsuited people can cause even more damage to an already traumatized kid.
Now, that’s a really big field to discuss and I’ll try to do so briefly. If you remember, I mostly agree with you on issues of immigration, but I don’t think it is a good means to stabilize our societies around the world.
Of those millions of people who’d like to come here and work, few are qualified to do the jobs that are avaible in western societies.
Which means that we’re either exploiting those societies even more via brain drain, or we’re creating a society in which the unskilled, badly paid work is done by immigrants while the higher qualified work is done by “natives”.
I don’t think that either option would create a better world.
The third option is the adoption of foreign children which is a very problematic subject again. It smells too much of human trafficking and indeed there are numerous cases where children were kidnapped and sold to adoption agancies.
Just looking at population statistics globally isn’t a way to solve the problem. People are not just another resource (I know that’s not your point, but I think that’s what it is coming to) that should be traded on the world market. Giving real developmental aid, healthcare and contraception in third world countries is a much better way to lower birth rates and give people a chance to make a worthwhile living where they are.
This stands in direct contrast with your later position about birth control:
It means that you favour one choice over another and are willing to spend a whole lot of money on people sharing your priorities.
Just some quick math for Germany: there are currently about 18 million women between 20 and 49 (I use those numbers because I have those, I am fully aware that one of the groups that needs contraception and sex-education the most is those between 12 and 20). If you sponser their contraception with 10 bucks a month (which is rather low compared to what I paid for the pill 6 years ago) you get the fantastic sum of 2.16 billions a year.
In contrast: Since the possibility of IVF became avaible, there have been 60.000 procedures in Germany (current cost about 4.000). That’s less than 1/10 of the cost in 40 years than what you’re willing to spend on contraception in one year.
I actually agree with you that we should cover contraception and abortion under public health care, but I think that to discuss this as opposed to IVF doesn’t hold up.
I have already told you about the enormous amount of pain and suffering infertility and reproductive problems cause. This pain is real, and no amount of your good-willed talk about adoption and global overpopulation will help those people. IVF and fertility treatment do.
It is cruel to deem their needs as “unimportant”. Would you tell that to a trans-person as an argument why their surgery is not paid for by healthcare, since their body is fully functioning and does not cause them physical pain in their daily lives?
No, there absolutely isn’t anything wrong with not having children or raising some that you didn’t spawn yourself. If you don’t want children that’s the thing to be, childfree. Nodoby should have children they don’t want to have. But to be child-less against your will is something entirely different. It is a medical condition. Some part of your body isn’t working propperly and we have a way to fix it.
That’s an argument I’m not buying anymore since I was told I should eat my vegetables because of the starving children in Africa.
And I’m not buying the “we don’t have the resources therefor you small, vulnerable and not very rich person have to pay the price” argument. It is again an argument where resources are taken from those within the western societies that are deprived of them already in comparisson to other members of the western societies.
Because our societies have plenty of resources and they could make cuts where it would not hurt that much (or not at all).
Sally Strange
I’d go with #2
Health issues can happen faster than you think and a paid for flu in autumn alone will make up for the $1 less/hr
changeable moniker
I understand the German, but I have no clue what you’re trying to say.
Sili
Yep, bottom at the beginning of a quote, top at the end of it. But it is changing.
David M.
Hmmm, are you aware of the term “Leitkultur as it is used in Germany? It describes the idea that everybody has to submit themselves to the christian German culture.
It’s asupremacist xenophobic concept.
As for the Pirates: Yep, they definetly have a gender problem. I watched the shots from their “Wahlparty” and I could see an astoundishing number of 1 female face.
Josh
I agree with 1,2 and 4, I’ve discussed 3 above
Haha, and you all thought I was bad during my Amanda Palmer period (which I blame entirely on Janine, IIRC) ! You ain’t seen nothing yet LOL.
Amy Winehouse – You Know I’m No Good (acoustic live)
Hey Monsanto shills, what’s up with this ? Not so much Roundup Ready anymore, huh ?
Oh, and I’ll relay this FYI :
Source
Theophontes, when I take over, the new capital will be named “Unbehagen”. And I will only employ insane architects channelling Albert Speer.
-The Soviet architecture in the pictures makes me think of James Bond visiting the hi-tech lair of the archvillain.
Actually, this is where the geography of Saskatchewan would be useful; Monumental architecture would be visible very far.
KULTUR?
See Stanislaw Lem’s imaginary article KULTUR ALS FEHLER in his collection of reviews & comments to non-existing novels and articles in “The Perfect Vacuum”
Fun Fact about the pope visiting Germany
A number of members of the Bundestag have anounced that they will not be present when he adresses the Bundestag out of protest.
But no worries, the seats will be filled with clerks who have no right to refuse the “honour”*, so the pope doesn’t get the impression that nobody is interested in what he says.
*Sadly I fear that they don’t have to order people to be there, there’ll be more volunteers than seats
Gilliel (274), I heard the ranks would be filled with former members of parliament. Clerks usually don’t sit in members’ seats….
I think the pope is aware of the discussion, I mean several bishops, amongst them Cardinal Meisner, have decried the boycott, calling the critics “obsessed” etc..
Walton, your gracious admission that your language was poorly chosen is good enough, you don’t have anything to apologise for with respect to articulating your general views on IVF. Your want to share your opinion is always appreciated, even if we disagree.
consciousness razor,
Adoption statistics are difficult to untangle with respect to unfulfilled need. However, in the UK some 39,879 women had IVF treatment in 2008, resulting in 12,211 births of 15,082 babies (the latest national statistics I can find). It is therefore safe to assume that the mere 2300 children (remembering that only a proportion of these will be babies) on the adoption register in 2010 would not meet demand if a significant number of IVF recipients chose to adopt instead.
I’m not sure that any significant network for international adoptions would be appropriate either, because it wouldn’t necessarily usefully address overpopulation or the numbers of unwanted children. Reducing poverty and increasing access to family planning services would be better goals, I think.
As for the issue of biological versus non-biological offspring, of course there are many parents that are unconcerned by such things, but not everyone is capable of becoming or wants to become an adoptive parent. For many, it would be a last resort, which probably leads to a perverse system where adoption is a default reaction, rather than the ideal course of action.
It would also be a huge mistake to think that having children is merely about the end result of gaining mouths to feed. The biological imperative, whether real, cultural ingrained, or imagined is a powerful drive. People value conception and pregnancy and the ability to raise biological offspring. It is impossible to alter that, because in reality there is absolutely no popular will to change, even assuming that there is no inherent drive to reproduce.
pelamun
Hmmm, I suppose you don’t mind me giving a source in German. Although I acknowledge that Yahoo isn’t the most reliable news outlet, of course.
No, he won’t be able to pretend that the protests don’t happen. I think he’ll play the usual martyr card of eeeeevil secularism trying to destroy mankind.
Sili wrote:
In New York City, places to visit:
Natural History Museum
Central Park
NY Public Library (beautiful, historical and they give tours)
United Nations tour
For art:
In addition to MoMA:
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Guggenheim
urgh, sorry for not closing the bold tag, this looks like I was trying to shout via the internet, I’m sorry, I’m not.
I’ve arranged transportation for Rhinebeck and will almost certainly be going.
A wool and sheep festival. Oh the wild and hedonistic life we atheists live.
Bernard:
When it exists. Both I and my wife have taken extreme care for many years not to be burdened with children* (menopause to the rescue!)
I guess I’m not a member of the set of ‘people’, then. ;)
—
* Yeah, for her, abortion would’ve been out of the question.
Oh hey, look who hasn’t posted for a while. Good morning everyone, life’s been… kind of a trial.
On Sunday, about 8 PM , I discovered that Snip had fleas. So I had to walk to Wal*Mart (an hour’s walk) and pick up a flea comb and some baby shampoo. It was not a fun experience getting home in pitch black because the buses weren’t running (on a side note. I did get Nutella, yumyum.)
So I had to give Snip a bath, he did not enjoy it and I currently bear the scars from that event. I then spent the next 4 and a half hours vacuuming and washing laundry. Didn’t get to bed until 2.30 AM yesterday morning. Had about an hour of good sleep.
Work was fun working on an hour of sleep, but finished a report in an hour and a half. Brought Snip to the vet, fleas seemed taken care of, and he went through his 6-month checkup. No FeLV or FIV (yay.)
On the IVC issue, I’m quite torn. I can understand where Walton et al. are coming from, and that in order for mankind to keep its standards, the industrialised nations need to decrease their standard of living, and a population reduction due to a lower fertility rate would go hand in hand with that as well as increase the necessity to invite more foreigners in from less-developed nations.
But I’ve also been involved in bringing life to this world, helping close lesbian friends of mine conceive (well the first son was born last year, and now the other partner wants to get pregnant. It’s also been a great experience for me, the “funny uncle”, to see the little guy getting bigger and bigger… but one thought Walton, it might be an age issue, you might think differently about kids as you near the end of your 20s, at least that’s when I started finding babies cute, even though that are not related to me; and before that I didn’t really want kids either)..
We mostly did it the “cheap way”, but every time you need to use a facility, it sets you back 1000s of Euros, as you have to go to a neighbouring country, and pay for the procedure etc. Thus, thinking this to its logical conclusion, “conception is a luxury” would also limit the right of lesbians to conceive, after all, if it’s a luxury, they could just adopt (assuming that the country you’re in allows gay couples to adopt, though I think that has gotten much better over the last decades).. So I think I have to side with Mattir and Gilliel on this one. If a woman wants kids, that’s not a luxury. If she doesn’t, she shouldn’t feel pressure to have any either, of course.
There are still plenty of other problems in this particular case: in the European country my friends are at, you can’t even use a donor bank as a “single woman”, as the facility would be afraid to be sued for alimony, so you have to go to a different country. Even if you do it privately, the donor can always be sued, and contracts excluding matrimony will be regarded as null and void by the courts, so it has to be very close friends like in our case. Also, civil unions are not equal to married couples regarding taxation, another injustice.
277, Giliell,
before posting, I was looking for a link but most just said that the MPs present would invite guests and the Vatican delegation would “chair up” to the effect that they would even have to add additional seats. Maybe the former MPs were among the guests of the MPs attending, who knows.
In lieu of a money quote, I give you the quote of an openly atheist MP of the Left Party, who has said she will attend:
Eine, die ihren Platz nicht hergibt, ist die Linke-Abgeordnete Halina Wawzyniak. Schließlich, sagt sie, “bin ich ins Parlament gewählt, und da höre ich mir das an. Als Atheistin sage ich mir: Ob da ein alter Mann mehr oder weniger redet, ist doch egal.
(I’ve been elected to parliament, so I’ll listen to it (instead of boycotting the speech). As an atheist, I say to myself: it doesn’t really matter if there is one old man more or less who is speaking.)
(http://www.taz.de/Papst-Rede-im-Bundestag/!78388/)
John:
I hope that I didn’t cause any offence. (I’m noting the emoticon, but still.)
I was generalising for the sake of some semblance of brevity in an already overlong post. I struggle enough as it is, overburdened by the compulsion to resort to verbiage and pretty language where half the words would do. I was not trying to exclude any group from the label of persons, but was merely using the term people as shorthand for a subset (probably the majority).
Absolutely.
I should have inserted “many”.
I think there is much to be envied about the freedom that childless-by-design couples enjoy. As it is, I know that when we finally start the family we (increasingly) want, I will be willingly sacrificing my current lifestyle. I’m sure that there will be times when I resent my children, and some of those might be when I look at couples who thrive without the need to be parents, enjoying doing what they want to!
Ensuring that you don’t conceive over the course of a sexual lifetime together requires no little attention and effort! I’m glad yours was rewarded.
This is a curious comment: if one opts to raise one’s own children, rather than adopting, there’s still no guarantee that they won’t end up with “psychological issues”. Not all psychological issues are caused by traumatic experiences; some are purely biological in character. I had a very happy, stable and caring childhood, and have never suffered any serious trauma; yet I’ve also had severe and debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias and emotional instability since early childhood, and these things have never gone away. They are, as far as I can tell, genetic and innate (and heritable, which is one of the reasons I myself would never consider having biological children).
We need to draw a distinction here. Raising already-born children is certainly an extremely important task for society as a whole, as I’ve said. But I don’t think there is any moral obligation or social need, whether individual or collective, to bring more children into existence. This doesn’t mean no one should have children, but I don’t think that a falling birthrate is a bad thing, or that society needs to take any steps to raise the birthrate.
This doesn’t automatically mean that the state shouldn’t fund IVF or fertility treatment. In fact, as I’ll explain later, after this discussion I’ve come to agree with you that it should do so in some circumstances. But I don’t think that a desire to raise the overall birthrate is a good justification for it.
All of these are important concerns – and we have much more to do besides simply opening the borders; economic aid to developing countries, empowering women, providing access to birth control and reproductive health services, and reform of trade rules, for instance. But the status quo, in which people are deported by force (sometimes being separated from their families in the process), and denied the right to work and live where they wish to, because they have the wrong colour of passport and were born on the wrong part of the Earth’s surface, is inhumane, economically inefficient, and unsustainable. Often, even letting people take unskilled and badly-paid jobs is preferable, from their perspective, to sending them back by force. (And migrant workers who are undocumented are a great deal more exploited, in general: giving them the option to transition to legal status makes it much easier to protect their welfare.)
As it stands, a great many young, healthy, working-age people from around the world want to come to Western societies to work; at the moment, Western states are deploying substantial physical violence, in the form of border controls, deportations, immigration detention, etc., to keep them out. In this situation, it makes little sense for anyone to suggest that we need to keep the birth-rate in Western countries up in order to ensure that there are enough working-age people in the next generation. (I know you weren’t arguing that, but it’s an argument I’ve heard people make.)
This is an argument I find much harder to counter. I must admit that before this discussion, I hadn’t understood or appreciated the strength of the emotions involved for some people; it’s an emotional drive that I myself seem to lack entirely, and I committed the error of projecting my own motivations and priorities onto everyone. I gather that it’s much more critical to people’s psychological health than I’d realized, and with that in mind I’m no longer comfortable saying, as a general proposition, that fertility treatments should never be funded by the state. Rather, I’ll accept that there are cases in which being able to procreate is so critical to an individual’s mental and emotional health that funding the procedure is necessary.
So I’ve changed my view as a result of this discussion. It’s not for me to dismiss others’ emotions and psychological drives as unimportant merely because I don’t share them; mental health is as important as physical health, and everyone’s mental health is of equal importance. If being able to have children is critical to a particular person’s psychological wellbeing, then fertility treatments should be available.
Bernard, no worries, and certainly no offence!
Thanks. Even then, no doubt some element of luck was involved.
Those. Are. Spectacular.
I’ve been having this weird on-again/off-again obsession lately with many cultural elements of the Soviet Union. Especially, however, the architecture, the industrial design, and especially of the later days. Found myself reading an article on the RTG-powered lighthouses on the northern coast, and thinking, briefly, how much I’d love to see those…
… well, briefly, anyway.
But those buildings Chaubin’s chosen, man. Like the text says: it’s like some kind of bizarre cultural explosion. Like hey, what the hell, here we are on the steppes of central Asia, the empire’s becoming this bizarre, sprawling, unwieldy beast and we’re not really sure howinhell we actually got here or how much longer it is for this world… So… Umm… Let’s just build something that looks kinda like a cross between a troop-carrying starship out of a 70s sci-fi movie feature and a splayed stack of blocks of laminar limestone and stick it right… here. Yeah, why the hell not? Oh, and let’s make it fucking big, man! So that those who follow feel behind/their backs when all before is blind/The fact that we were, actually, kinda insane. And here we go…
(/I am lovin’ also the title of Chaubin’s book. Cross-orthographic puns for the win.)
Remind me to shout you a beer or 12 sometime.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Irony indeed.
(Btw, Sili: when are you going to be in NYC? I could possibly come down and meet you, timing and finances permitting. It’s not that far from Boston,* and I’ll look into the cost of train tickets.)
(*”Not that far” by American standards, of course.)
Something completely different. I’m peeved that the Taiwanese press is calling the Pirate Party “Software Piracy Party” 盜版黨… why not just 海盜黨…!!
Tory backbenchers: “Legal Aid Cuts Will Hit Women, Warns Conservative MP Anna Soubry” http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/09/19/legal-aid-cuts-will-hit-women_n_970477.html
An interesting nuance -among British conservatives, it is still possible to have a social conscience.
In GOP such protests would immediately trigger “RINO” accusations! (one of the many reasons I dislike them)
Since conservatives have the same DNA as liberals, it should be possible to find good people among their number. I can only suppose that the GOP has some internal “ministry of purges”…
Walton,
As things stand, I quite agree.
(Human depopulation is hardly an issue!)
Were things otherwise, however, that might well not be the case.
@ Rorschach
Feel free to keep teh Amy Winehouse flowing…
You can also google Zaz (the French equivalent, old school with twinges of jazz and an infectious smile in place of self-absorbed misery and a frown*).
Zaz: Je veux(with short intro), Les passants & Dans ma rue (Edith Piaf).
* An inherent part of her brilliance no doubt.
LMAO!
You think genetics is on your side I guess? Damn, I hope your daughter is perfect. Or that your powers of denial are great. Or else that kid is in for it.
…
Considering that both people in my family who adopted a child abused that child horribly, in one case treating them like a slave/servant to the later “real” kid that “miraculously” happened and in the other case using them for sex…
I don’t think the average person should adopt. But then the average person makes a crap parent too so far as I can tell.
(BTW, I wouldn’t dare subject my crazy self to a child)
I forgot to add the pope issue: the openly gay foreign minister, I think nominally a Catholic as a Rhinelander, will be overseas on official business. Wonder if that was arranged on purpose…
Rubbish. There are many crazy and unfit mothers out there, but there is no danger that you would ever be one of them. Rather, I think you’d be a great mother.
Nite.
Hmmm… I should try harder, while I’m at it, to keep from subjecting anyone else to my crazy syntax.
Swap “a child” with “my crazy self” I guess.
pelamun,
Wait… you’re a member of the Bundestag?
(I think this is the first time we’ve had a national legislator posting on Pharyngula.)
Well, fuck.
Troy Davis’s parole board denied clemency on the death penalty. Tomorrow a possibly innocent man will be put to death. Too many eyewitnesses recanted their statements to make this a full and clear realization of his crime.
This is disgusting, despicable, and makes me ashamed to be a member of the human race.
*giggles*
Translation, I think, Walton.
Sorry, that was the translation of that legislator’s quote, not a quote from me… Halina Wawzyniak is her name. Sorry should have used blockquote to make it clearer..
I’ve time and again put on quotes without translation here, I was trying to do better this time…
Regarding the quote, I don’t share the sentiment, I think it matters if he speaks or not. But OTOH since the Bundestag has already decided to invite the man (though I would need to check how this was decided specifically, I think it might have been the “Council of Elders” instead of just the Speaker), probably for the institution it is better not to boycott the speech but to show presence but at the same time try to minimize his importance (“one old man more or less”).
FUCK.
I didn’t know until I read Katherine’s post above.
The Georgia parole board are FUCKING MURDERERS. I don’t know how the fuck these people can sleep at night.
The death penalty is a fucking atrocity, and our (Anglo-American) system of criminal trials is an utter farce with no relationship to truth or justice. The entire criminal “justice” system is completely fucking broken. Davis isn’t the first innocent man murdered by the government in this country, and he won’t be the last until something is done about this horrendous fucking mess.
Walton –
If a person is unable to maintain good mental health without bearing children, are they necessarily the people who should be offered IVF?
I would argue that someone who strongly desires to bear and raise children, but whose mental health does not depend on it, would be a better candidate for State-payed IVF.
Even more depressing was the fucking applause Perry got at the debate when he was asked about Texas’ death penalty record.. Very very afraid about what’s gonna go down next year in the US…
Count this hetero in that group.
yep
The death penalty isn’t “justice”. It’s an act of war, a war waged against the people by the ruling classes.
It’s nothing new: trumped-up criminal charges were used to justify the state-sanctioned murder of socialist and anarchist activists, like Joe Hill in Utah or Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts, back in the early twentieth century. The Rosenbergs were killed by the federal government for an act of political disloyalty. It hasn’t changed. States assert their authority by using brutal spectacles of violence to control the population in the interests of the rulers. That’s what the state is. Institutionalized violence.
Fuck that shit.
Tory Davies was found guilty beyond reasonable doubt, and yet has to prove his innocence in order to not be killed by the state. That is an unjust asymmetry.
If casting doubt on his conviction isn’t sufficient to secure an appeal of the verdict, then it certainly should be grounds to resentence and prevent his immediate execution.
But then, most proponents of the death penalty are willing to
break a few eggs in order to make an omletteaccept the brutal state-sanctioned killing of innocents.Tory DaviesTroy Davies.Sloppy typo. Poor timing.
Oh, boy. Set a mormon free from the church, and he or she just may go hog wild.
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/09/19/prweb8574229.DTL
DADT ended today.
Regarding the death penalty, I used to think that as long as it was democratically backed, it would be hard to oppose. Of course Personally I’m happy that no member state in the EU has it, and aware with the many problems it has, especially in the US.
For instance, there are groups in Taiwan, that regard Western groups coming into the country and lecturing them on human rights as an act of cultural imperialism (just recently when the Schengen countries were considering whether to grant Taiwanese citizens visa-free travel, something the UK has done much earlier, the death penalty was brought up as a bargaining chip). The Taiwanese are fiercely proud of their hard-won democracy (problematic as it may be) and they didn’t fight for it so that Westerners could come in and tell them what to do. I’m not sure if you even can argue with the universality of human rights in this case as long as the US still has it (and the Supreme Court continues not to regard it as cruel punishment).
I now think just because of the irreversible error argument alone all countries should strive to abolish it, but one has to be careful when doing this kind of advocacy lest one fall into the trap of being accused of cultural imperialism. Most countries that still have it are in Asia and Africa, and they don’t like this kind of lecturing.
Here’s a Moment of Fundamentalist Mormon Madness from Pringle, South Dakota.
Source: http://www.keloland.com/News/Newsdetail6371.cfm?Id=121045
People tend to focus on the polygamist compounds in Hilldale/Colorado City on the Utah/Arizona border, but Warren Jeffs and his FLDS cult built Yearning for Zion in Texas, and are in building frenzy in South Dakota. They also have a presence near Las Vegas, in many small communities along the Nevada/Utah border, in Mexico, and in Canada.
This a follow-up to my post @315: This website: http://childbrides.org/dakota.html provides a convenient list of dozens of articles and a roundup of investigative reporting done on the FLDS community in South Dakota.
One sees the close connection with the Canadian FLDS colony in numerous stories about Jane Blackmore’s attempts to see her daughter, who was taken from her Canadian home at age 17 to marry a man she had never met before.
Child brides are documented. And an additional polygamist colony that I’ve not been keeping tabs on, (in Mancos, Colorado), is documented. The members of the compound drive vehicles, even semi trucks without a proper license. The leaders of the compound in South Dakota have been charged with not paying property taxes. (They were eventually forced to pay property taxes, and to repair a road they had damaged.)
My own take on the construction noise that continues through the night, night after night, is that the cult members must be preparing for The End Times.
I maded a comment, but teh system eated it. Ah, well. At least the NOMing has spared you my anecdata. :)
Briefly, the adoption process is not short, or cheap, or even necessarily productive of results; and there’s sometimes a religious filter involved, too.
–
Many times I’ve wished it were possible to have some sort of parental-competency test for prospective bio-parents.
–
pelamun,
(Blockquote fail. Let’s try that again, shall we?)
pelamun,
I disagree with this on a profound philosophical level, because I don’t believe that the majority in a given society should have a collective “right” to inflict their will on the minority. For this reason, I believe that there ought to be a core of universal human rights which are respected in all societies, irrespective of the opinions of the majority: freedom from torture, freedom from the death penalty, freedom from arbitrary detention without trial, the right to vote and to participate in politics, and so forth. Even if the great majority of my fellow citizens want to kill me, torture me, or imprison me indefinitely in a gulag without trial, they should not be free to do so: because I am an autonomous self-owning individual, and my life is not the property of the state to dispose of as it pleases.
That said, you’re absolutely right that there is a real danger of cultural imperialism and condescension in international human rights activism: it’s sometimes seen as just an extension of the European colonial project, with Western human rights activists telling supposedly-“savage” nations how to govern their own affairs in accordance with “civilized” values, in a racist and paternalistic way. That perception can be very damaging, and it’s something I wrote a blog post about recently.
About this, I’d say two things. Firstly, universal human rights, properly conceived, are not about imposing a global hegemony of “Western values”, but about setting people free to choose their own values and paths for themselves, and to participate fully in their society’s decision-making. It’s not about imposing a single set of values, but about liberating the individual from the collective. Within this, people should have, of course, the right to live by their own cultural and religious values as they see fit. (I strongly oppose measures like the banning of the burqa in France, for instance, which are simply a naked attempt to impose cultural hegemony by force on a marginalized minority group.)
It’s important to be sensitive to cultural differences, and to avoid the false and xenophobic assumption that there’s something “superior” about our own culture. After all, Western countries perpetrate horrific human rights abuses, too: the racist abuse of undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers by the state in most Western countries, for instance, and the “War on Terror” and the torture and arbitrary detention of detainees. While human rights should be universal, and human rights abuses around the world should be criticized, it’s important not to assume that our own countries can take some sort of collective moral high ground. But that shouldn’t stop us campaigning for universal human rights.
Secondly, it’s important not to confuse the self-determination of the individual, which is important and which should be upheld as a fundamental moral principle, with the self-determination of the nation-state. Nation-states are, after all, artificial constructs; there is no fundamental moral or philosophical reason why a particular group of people should have an exclusive right to “sovereignty” over a particular part of the earth’s surface, and an unfettered right to impose their will on all within their territory and to exclude others by force from moving there. The idea of state sovereignty is, most often, just a shield used by authoritarian states to justify unlimited oppression of their citizens, and to protect themselves against international criticism. This notion of “national sovereignty” has, of course, been the basis of international law and the world political order since the seventeenth century – but I see that as a bug, not a feature, and I’m glad that international law and geopolitics have been steadily moving away from unfettered “national sovereignty” and towards a doctrine of universal human rights in the decades since WWII.
Just a reminder – Amnesty International’s Troy Davis emailing campaign (now updated to take account of the board’s latest decision):
http://action.amnesty.org.uk/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1194&ea.campaign.id=12137&utm_source=email&utm_medium=update_email&utm_campaign=deathpenalty&utm_content=troy_clemency_link1
Regarding IVF – I’m still formulating my thoughts, so this will be a little stream of consciousness. I honestly have no idea where it’s going.
I work in psychosocial support, specifically dealing with the non-physical traumas and aspects of health in cancer patients, so while it’s not explicitly analogous, I can see the legitimate argument for psychological trauma over prolonged unsuccessful/failed conception. I know, intellectually, that there’s a strong instinctive drive to procreate in a large portion of the population (for obvious reasons). I know it is at least partially classist to insist that the poor do not have access to the same medical treatment as the rich, and leveraging class against reproduction is one of the most tyrranical acts I can think of (as the right to reproduce would seem to be one of the most fundamental rights).
At the same time, I’m sure everyone (or most people) remember the so-called “Octo-mom”: a woman who not only couldn’t support the children she had, but who then underwent further fertility treatments to have more children she likely can’t support. We can certainly also argue that, at some point, a drive to procreate may become an obsession or illness.
Part of me has often fantasized that there should be some kind of “qualifying exam” to be a parent, but of course there’s no way to do that which wouldn’t discriminate; I also have no idea what would be on such an exam. This whole debate harkens back to that notion, however: who should “be allowed” to bear and/or raise children? Who gets to make that determination? Is biological fitness the primary driver (e.g., if you can do it on your own, go for it)? If you can’t, to what degree is society responsible for helping you (the IVF discussion)? Should there be other criteria beyond biological capability that factor into the discussion (financial, psychological state, genetic disease, etc.)?
I think back to adoption processes, and how much more rigorous they are than standard medical review when someone is trying to get pregnant. Obviously when we’re going through the act of choosing parents we are extremely selective, but we involve no such selection when it’s done biologically or with medical help. Maybe that would be the criteria: anyone who wishes to undergo fertilization enhancement (perhaps beyond a certain point/level) needs to undergo the adoption qualification process.
I don’t know, but I think it’s impossible to have the IVF discussion without addressing the fundamental “who should be allowed” question – because, really, that’s what is being discussed even if it’s in a roundabout or polite way. My gut instinct is that everyone should be given whatever treatments or interventions that bring them up to the percent chance of the average person, but given the success rates of artificiation fertilization methods, I don’t know if that’s practical.
I think this may be a copycat Moment of Mormon Madness from this morning. As I was driving in to work today, on a local radio program (Radio From Hell, for those in the Morridor), I heard the producer talk about trying to bond with his new step-son; he’s been married a year. The topic casually turned to adoption. To which the producer expressed a wish to adopt his step-son because:
He explained that he is sealed to his wife, that is that she is eternally bound to him in their super special baby making heaven afterlife. And that she would like to be sealed to her son forever too, but her son will be shut out forever if he’s not adopted then sealed. So she’s sad and upset.
Here’s the hitch. The son is older and doesn’t want to be adopted. When asked, he very clearly says no. But his wishes about who to call his father don’t matter because it’s just fine and sniny to guilt him about tormenting his mother with grief for being separated from her child for all eternity.
Producer isn’t close to this child, and doesn’t want to adopt him because he loves him and considers him the same as if he were blood. He just wants to use religious guilt hammers to control him. Hooray!
WTF does ‘sealed’ mean in this context? It sounds creepy and scary.
Hmmmm. Is it?
Obviously there is a fundamental right not to be stopped from reproducing, but I would view that as an extension of the general right to privacy and bodily autonomy: the state should not be able to do things to one’s body without one’s consent. There’s a conceptual difference between this, though, and a positive right to have one’s reproduction assisted through medical means.
Whether or not you argue that the latter should be a fundamental right, it’s important to draw a distinction between the negative and the positive right, rather than simply talking about a general “right to reproduce”.
@ [death penalties]
Easy Links ™: Death Penalty Countries (Link:Pfft)
Walton,
1. Interesting article. As I said, I used to think that way. 10 years ago, maybe, I was a strong proponent of cultural relativism, but at some point I got fed up with that “Asian values” stuff, ultimately because I saw that in case of countries like Singapore it was just a cover for an authoritarian regime, just as you say it. And several Asian countries by now have proven that democracy is a concept that works in Asia too.
2. nation states: when studying for a foreign-policy related exam one time I read up on the development of international law (albeit very briefly) and noticed this development away from unfettered national sovereignty, the difference between the League of Nations and the United Nations is enormous, for instance. But while this is certainly good news, we should not lose track of the fact that the idea of the sovereign state is still very prevalent in China, not just pushed by its government, but also embraced by the population. I have heard many stories from Chinese how Westerners always say questions like whether Austria is part of Germany or somesuch would no longer hold any useful meaning in our Western worldview, but for many Chinese people the question if Tibet/Xinjiang/Taiwan are a part of the nation or not is. Many Chinese people acknowledge the changing worldview of the West, but would not dream of applying that to themselves. And China is 20% of the global population and the rising superpower. I’m not completely sure, but I think the wheel might be turning back here.
It’s almost General Conference time again in Salt Lake City. In order to properly indoctrinate your children, LDS leaders have come up with several “Activities for Children.”
http://lds.org/general-conference/children?locale=eng
You can play an “Apostle Matching Game” here:
http://lds.org/general-conference/children?locale=eng
Enjoy the music. /snark (The music kills brain cells.)
SQB: Mormon sealing involves a ceremony in a temple where you are bound to your spouse or children for all time. Since the best heaven involves getting your own planet to populate with spirit babies, wives have the great honor of being baby factories forever. Nice, huh?
Oh, and you know how the LDS church stopped practicing polygyny? That’s only in real life. Men can be sealed to multiple wives for forever, but it’s okay because it’s a heavenly harem. (Obviously, though polyandry is right out.)
Quite right. It is creepy and scary. You go to the temple.
Everybody wears white. There are masonic-based rituals.
Most people think of marriages when they hear “sealed in the temple,” but children can also be sealed to parents.
Parents who are mormon converts may have several children, for example, with whom they wish to have a family connection even after they die. So the whole family gets subjected to rituals that include implied and/or explicit punishment if they reveal the details of the rituals.
That is a very peculiar case which departs from best practice to the point that it could easily constitute medical misconduct in other locales.
IVF is strictly regulated in the UK. The HFEA rules are that:
Because of this, by 2006 the multiple live birth rate had fallen to 23%, vs. 28% in 1992.
The introduction of IVF caused the national triplet birth rate to quadruple, but the changes now mean that the triplet birth rate is actually lower than prior to the introduction of IVF. (I presume that the differences in fertility drug therapies may also account for some of this difference in the national rate including IVF.)
IVF and other fertility treatments can be traumatic enough, especially given that they generally follow a long period of failed attempts at natural conception and milder interventions.
Why should would-be parents undergoing IVF be subject to demands and conditions not placed upon naturally fecund parents?
Would you really like to argue that potential IVF patients should be subject to intrusive vetting prior to conception, when there is no such license required for even the most feckless of fertile couplings?
326: just to clarify my “Austria is a part of Germany” example. Chinese people, in discussing the three Ts (Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang aka Chinese Turkestan) like to bring up examples like “what would YOU do if Bavaria declared its independence”, or Scotland or what have you. Now in most cases the Western interlocutor will say “I would say ‘Good riddance’ “, so this doesn’t work on the average Western European citizen…
<
This is exactly why Illinois did away with the death penalty earlier this year. The level of certainty that should be required in death penalty cases simply wasn’t there.
Getting a mormon “sealing” cancelled can also be a creepy and scary experience.
See: http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon359.htm
I don’t think Rev. BDC’s gonna like this Onion article.
Walton:
That’s exactly the question. Who is allowed to reproduce? Is it a fundamental right, or is it a fundamental right only for those who can do it without assistance – or is it only the attempt that is a right?
To which I still answer – I don’t know. I think the average person’s ability to reproduce should be the guiding level of “right” – e.g., medicine will bring you up to the average person’s ability if you’re below it, but still won’t guarantee anything – but that’s just a gut instinct. I don’t know that I have a rational argument for such; it just “feels” fair.
Bernard Bumner:
I’m just speculating, so please don’t assume that I think this is the best approach. Counter to your argument, though: when society is determining who should be allowed to be parents, why does it matter whether or not the offspring is genetically related to them? If a couple (or individual) is going to seek help from society to have children, why should it matter if that help is in the form of fertilization or adoption?
Of course, we can counter that and ask whether it’s appropriate or not to filter at all for adoption or fertilization, since we don’t have any such restrictions on couples who are capable of having offspring without society’s intervention. But I don’t think you can separate the two: if society is going to take the responsibility for determining who is qualified to be a parent in some situations in which it is involved, I think it only practical to take the same approach in all such situations.
But again, I don’t know. I’m just approaching this from an intellectual perspective. These are all potential arguments that need to be reviewed in the light of real-world situations where we’re dealing with people and not concepts.
More small, but significant glimmers of reason from that repository of Moments of Mormon Madness, BYU — students have resurrected the independent newspaper.
From the readers comments section:
Yeah… the whole debate, on both sides, presupposes that “national sovereignty” is important in the first place. I don’t accept that proposition. In principle, I’m entirely uninterested either way in whether Scotland declares independence. (I think it would probably be economically damaging for them if they did so, so I’m inclined to oppose it on that ground; but I’m not interested in preserving “the United Kingdom” as an end in itself.)
Likewise, I don’t think it’s worth arguing about whether Tibet is “a part of China” or “a foreign country occupied by China”. It’s an unanswerable and completely meaningless question, because it presupposes that “the nation” is a fact of nature, rather than a fictional abstraction that exists only in our collective cultural imagination (much like gods, in fact).
Rather, my concern with Tibet is over the fact that the Chinese government engages in political repression and violations of human rights in order to maintain control and suppress Tibetan nationalism. (Something which Western countries have also done at plenty of stages in their history, so, again, there is no question of “cultural superiority” here.) I’m not interested, in the abstract, in national independence; but I am interested in ensuring that everyone, whatever arbitrarily-defined part of the Earth’s surface they happen to inhabit, has access to fundamental civil and political freedoms.
Sometimes, national independence may be the best way to guarantee freedom to the population: that may be true of Tibet, and it’s certainly true of, say, Kurdistan. But in these circumstances I’m only interested in national independence as a way to improve the human rights situation, not as an end in itself. I care about individuals and individual rights, not about nations.
Lynna, this:
Directly parallels my mom’s experience as a teenager before she ran (not walked) away from the LDS church. Creepy bishop wanting her to talk about all sexual thoughts, kissing and touching with boyfriends, etc. It’s a huge EEEEWWWW inspiring system.
Stephen Fry’s Mormon encounter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzfCtGFgRSk
This 2:17-minute bit exposes the horror of the idea of “eternal families.”
Fry made the mistake of making an audience of prospective converts laugh. The mormons expelled him from the meeting.
In response to the presentation of the idea of eternal families, Fry raises his hand and asks, “What happens if you’ve been good?”
Then the missionary in charge asked him to leave.
Fry’s summary: “Jesus! It’s just the most awful destiny imaginable.”
Arrrggghhh! That’s so painful. Sorry to hear your mother had to go through that.
And just think, she was not an adult, just a teenager, and female one at that. At least she didn’t remain at the mercy of a priesthood-holding pervert with a vindictive god on his side.
Walton, I understand your position, and I wish the Chinese govt would adopt it re Taiwan, but the problem is that it isn’t gonna happen. As far as I understand International Law, it is shaped by the actors in the arena of international relations, and saying that the question of national sovereignty is irrelevant when it is paramount to the actions of one of the major players on the stage won’t help much. As China is asserting itself more, the question of national sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs will take centre stage..
I personally think that Tibet and Xinjiang are moot questions by now, faits accomplis, there is no scenario for them to become independent other than China falling apart (as has been envisioned by some, but so far the CPC has been able to keep its grip on the country). But Taiwan is different. De facto it is an independent country (fulfilling the conditions of the Montevideo Convention for example) but its legal status in the international arena is precarious to say the least. With the UN recognising it as part of China, I wouldn’t think that any sanctions would be forthcoming in case of a possible invasion (also Great Powers have always chosen to ignore certain tenets of International Law, and China might easily do so as well). Does your stance on the irrelevance of national sovereignty mean that you support Taiwan’s precarious status quo and oppose formal independence? Because the status quo seems to be the best bet for the well-being and stability of Taiwan, though in the long term it might also lead to inevitable annexation.. (Especially since Hu Jintao and I think his successor too are more patient re Taiwan than Jiang Zemin ever was, he wanted to restore national pride by righting the wrongs inflicted upon China by the Western Powers and Japan, after Hong Kong and Macao, only Taiwan remains)
Here is a licensed and Board-certified psychiatrist who will agree with me that my psychological well-being is contingent on SSRI antidepressants, marijuana, breast implants, penis-extension devices, botox, green contact lenses, a diamond stud for my incisor, a luxury automobile, a microwave oven, a bigscreen TV and/or a pony.
better start whittling away at that “wellbeing’ criterion.
Was in a meeting. The worst thing about the Troy Davis affair is that the family of the slain police officer are calling this justice served and that they can now go forward through the rest of their lives knowing Davis has been put to death.
No they won’t. The death of a possibly innocent man will not help them. The fact they can sleep at night knowing that their state government condemned a possibly innocent man to death for a crime he may not have committed is atrocious.
Sad as it is, their husband, father, brother, whatnot will not be brought back to life by killing another person. The death penalty is wrong. I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, what you’ve done. It’s wrong to put someone else’s life in the hands of emotionally unstable, mentally irrational, self-serving primates.
Yeah, I’m really glad that she and some of her siblings escaped and became happy more well adjusted people. Not all are atheists, my aunt is kinda Catholic (because she married one, naturally), but my uncle is a happy atheist and my mom is somewhere in the agnostic/deist realm.
But the other two uncles are still very much priesthood holding dudes. Our family gatherings are either secular (if held by Catholic aunt, my mom or atheist uncle) or include a Mormon prayer. I’ve opted out and just wait politely, with my arms at my sides until they’re done. They’ve been pretty good about not proselytizing, but they’ve not been so nice with their children.
My eldest uncle pressured his daughter out of becoming a military officer because it wasn’t what women are supposed to do. Being of the spunky, independent sort, she naturally decided to become a chef instead and spend six months cooking at a research base in Antarctica. She traveled a lot, became a chef for a cruise company, and settled down in Alaska where she now cooks on a luxury train line. I remember the first time my parents went to visit her; when they came back, my aunt asked when she was “coming home.” They were tactful, but privately, they said she was never fucking coming home; she’d escaped.
My youngest uncle can only be described as a Mormon Ned Flanders. I can’t even begin to articulate the horror I’ve felt at watching them value their son over their daughters.
Yes, that’s true. International law is traditionally based on the assumption of state sovereignty. New norms of international law are created in one of two ways: either through treaties concluded between states, or through the formation of “customary international law”, which is based on the observed practice of states. Not all state practices give rise to norms of customary international law; there must also be evidence of an opinio juris, which is to say that the state in question must understand its practice to be legally permitted or required. (I’m simplifying this substantially, of course, and it’s a great deal more complicated in reality.) In general, therefore, it is states that make international law, and states that are the primary subjects of the international legal system.
But since WWII, there has been a growing acceptance that there are certain human rights norms, governing relations between states and individuals, which apply everywhere on the globe. Some of these are created by treaties, like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; others are part of customary international law. Others, such as the prohibition of torture and of slavery, are regarded as “peremptory norms” or “norms of jus cogens“; there’s a lot of debate about what this means, but essentially, a norm of jus cogens is a universal norm of international law from which states cannot deviate or opt out, and which overrides any conflicting norms. Of course, this is all largely a matter of theory; international human rights law is widely ignored by states in practice, and there’s not generally much the international community can do about it when this happens.
QFT.
Actually even though it’s the Onion, it’s pretty accurate. SC has been ravaged by the leadership of a majority voting block that votes against their best interestes as a rule.
It’s hard to argue that.
And yes, Charleston has escaped much of this, that is unless you live north of the cross-town or in many of the outlying neighborhoods.
But we do have some fine restaurants.
Just had to vent. I’ve been having a tough time lately. My personal home life is of course good but I can’t bring myself to be cheerful enough to enjoy it. I honestly feel like I’m broken. Recent events have basically dashed my academic and personal ambitions and a good deal of my other dreams and goals are pretty much crushed. Some here surely, by evident of their past comments, will see it as me washing out because I was too dumb to even hope to enter any academic/scientific field, and maybe that’s the case but I’m still left directionless now. Feel sad all day and it’s like I’m just muddling through being awake until I can sleep again.
Just had to vent.
O RLY?
(emphasis mine)
:-( *hugs and sympathies*
Don’t give up. I don’t have any concrete recommendations to make because I don’t know the details of your situation, and IIRC we’re not in the same academic or professional field; but there are always more chances. Opportunities can turn up when you’re not expecting them.
Ing, none of us think anything like that. I’m sorry if I’ve been unpleasant to you in the past; I’m aware that I can come across as rude and condescending sometimes when I don’t intend to. I certainly don’t think you’re dumb. Far from it.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Career success, in our society, often has little correlation with ability. Plenty of smart and talented people don’t get the jobs and opportunities they should have, because of the ridiculous and arbitrary mess that is the modern-day labour market, and our society’s pointless and destructive obsession with competition and jumping through hoops. This is a problem of society, not a failing on the part of individuals. You are not to blame.
interestes, rhymes with testes
@Rev BDC:
Reminds me to find out if you’re in the area if I ever go to SC.
Need to find people in Vegas and Boston now.
Ing – “Some here surely, by evident of their past comments, will see it as me washing out because I was too dumb to even hope to enter any academic/scientific field”
Not me, I’ve always enjoyed your writing months before I de-lurked. You were one of the people who’s writing stimulated me and made me want to become part of this community.
Hey, Ing. My sympathies. I’ve had similar experiences and it’s crushing. If it’s any consolation to you though, while I’m an odd duck in my current career I’m also happier here than I would have imagined.
Sometimes, you’re just not going where you thought you were… but it can still be ok.
Good luck!
Fulfilling one’s academic, career, and personal ambitions and goals is no guarantee of happiness either. fwiw.
@theophontes #294
Zaz: fucking A
(non-colloquial = brilliant)
Love too. Being in a relationship, getting married, love in general…
let’s add that to the list of things that people think will make them happy but that, in reality, offer no guarantee.
All the time we spend in anguish over what we don’t have!
You will eat, by and by,
In that glorious land in the sky (way up high);
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die. (That’s a lie.)
(Written by Joe Hill, another man who was executed for a crime he probably didn’t commit.)
Ing, sorry to hear you’re feeling so down. I can sympathize. I don’t have all my shit together either, and have an idea of what you’re feeling.
@Walton #358
Did we ever tell you that we love you…
Bring that apron on.
*runs in*
ILLUMINATA!
If you read this or if anyone has her email address, I need to get in contact with you ASAP regarding Rhinebeck! oniongirlsays at google mail dot com.
*runs out*
Wut? I thought everyone knew love has no guarantee.
… ‘Kay, so it’s not Joe Hill.
Seriously, Ing, my sympathies.
Rorschach, thanks for the news up-thread about Hitchens. Glad to hear he’s still fighting the grim reaper. And it sounds like you will get to attend a Hitchens-centered event, one way or another, in the near future.
adds the Fast Fourier Transform to the list of things to immolate someday
This sucks.
slignot, I can imagine that you would not want to spent an eternity with your Ned Flanders-style uncle.
It burns me up that many of the mormon families I know value their sons more than their daughters. And that they do this routinely, daily, with little or no awareness of their prejudice.
Heading off to St. Louis to see these guys. Don’t wait up.
When we drive to Florida, we usually spend the night in South Carolina. Last time we were there, we watched a commercial for the local Toyota dealership in which they offered, in addition to all the other rebates and loan rates, a free shotgun with every purchase.
—–
I made tamales for Wife’s birthday dinner last night. Second time I’ve made them. Came out really, really good.
I had no idea Nixon could be charming.
–o–
Ah! The AMNH. I’ve heard of that, but somehow placed it in Washington (as I said: one big blob).
Sounds like I can spend the week there.
Sili:
If it wasn’t for his paranoia, authoritarianism, and scapegoating, he might have been a really good President. And I think he may have been the last liberal President (Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Wilderness Act, relations with Communist China, etc).
Not saying he wasn’t a paranoid creep who viewed voters with total disdain, but, well, hell, even Hitler was nice to his dog, right?
(My first Godwin. I’m so proud.)
Bro Og: “When we drive to Florida, we usually spend the night in South Carolina.”
Whereabouts in FL? Anywhere near the I-4 corridor? (Preferably the Tampa end of things?)
We need to have a beer (or suitable alternative beverage) sometime.
Wife’s family live in DeBary, about halfway between Orlando and Daytona. I’m usually down there during winter break (christmas to the christians, happy holidays to me) and her family takes up a lot of time. Between Merrit Island, Disney Marketplace, and eating out all over the place, time is rather (pretentious, I know) short.
Carter not liberal enough?
Well, depending on exactly when you’re here, I can almost certainly head up there. My dad lives just on the Tampa side of Orlando (near the south side of WDW).
I guess we’ll see how things shake out as we get closer to December.
From the intro to the Nixon thing:
‘Mrs. Nixon, Pat, had a tape recorder going one afternoon, and she quietly said to Mr. Nixon ‘why don’t you play a piece’ and she recorded it…’
(/Files under ‘Made for each other’.)
Well, I know he pissed off Alaska by doing what the government promised, and his linking of human rights to foreign policy helped to deligitimize the Soviet government, but between Iran and oil, he didn’t have that much of a chance to really do anything. No question he was more liberal than Nixon, but (if I recall correctly) Nixon accomplished more.
Carter was the better ex-President, though.
I’m not arguing with this point, but I wonder – how much of this is culturally ingrained. Since plenty of people seem to think that one isn’t a “real” women or a “real” family lacking children, how much of the psychological cost of not having children on certain women coming from outside pressures?
I’m genuinely mystified by the fact that there are women out there suffering psychological trauma because they can’t have kids.
That’s not to say I’m immune from getting that same pressure, of course not. Its just shocking to hear how much some women torture themselves with it. That’s heartbreaking to an intense degree.
@Lynna, I can barely stand to spend long conversations with him during Thanksgiving let alone an eternity. (Do you remember my sleepover story of being forced into a dress that didn’t fit me with no explanation? That’s this guy.) Thankfully, we’re all mortal flesh sacks, his belief in afterlife godhood notwithstanding.
His son is about to go on his mission, and we’ve been kindly invited to listen to my cousin speak at church this weekend. There’s a reception at their house afterward and I’m ambivalent about going.
Just heard a Family Research Council asshat lamenting that the military would be used to force social change. Yeah. Like that never happened before (desegregation?). Of course, these recto-cranially inverted morons would have fought Truman’s decision to desegragate the US military. With the same arguments.
One problem people keep mentioning is that gay marriage is not recognized in all states. Guess what? Neither was mixed marriage!
France’s burqa ban: women are ‘effectively under house arrest’
If anyone here doubts that the French ban on the burqa and niqab has been a complete disaster and has created more, not less, oppression of Muslim women, please read this article.
slignot:
I do remember the sleepover story.
What continues to amaze me about all such stories as yours is that the LDS Church touts their “family values” and their “family-centered” virtues even more strongly than evangelical christians … and they are among the worst when it comes to shunning family members who don’t go along with the party line.
Mormons have turned emotional blackmail into a black art. They practice. They instruct each other on techniques that work best when it comes to pressuring young men to go on a mission, pressuring young women to get married and have babies, etc. Any sort of low-down, unethical practice is fine by them, as long as it has the desired result. Church leaders not only condone this behavior, they provide parables of passive/aggressive emotional blackmail to add to the church’s storehouse of mislabeled “choose the right” guidelines.
The lack of respect for individuals is so enormous as to be a bottomless pit from which one is always dredging up yet another example of disgusting behavior.
It bugs me that they get away with this “love of family” schtick. And honesty … sheesh, don’t get me started. They lay claim to honesty as if they invented it, and yet they are incapable of true honesty. They should be called on their hypocrisy.
My brother’s new girlfriend, and ex-mormon this time, is constantly tortured emotionally by her mother, and by the rest of her family, including brothers-in-law. Her family literally gloats over every little thing that goes wrong in her life, chalking it up to her having left the path of righteousness. Fucking sick.
More random shit.
I took my 90-year-old neighbor to the doctor today. On the radio, a commercial for Clean Coal. It declared that ‘scientists say that burning coal will melt the ice in Antarctica. No Pennsylvania coal miners live in Antarctica. Let’s keep the jobs here.’
I also overheard a conversation in which two very elderly people were discussing earthquakes. They wondered why the quakes hit California when the GOP was in charge, and the Christian parts when Obama took over. A third person chimed in, explaining that the US government can control earthquakes through a super-secret trillion-dollar-a-year program called HAARP and that Obama is aiming the earthquakes at real America as part of his plan to take over the government. One of the other people said, “Bullshit. HAARP is weather research. Stop watching Fox and get a clue.” The third person huffed and moved to the other side of the waiting room.
Ing – honest to criminey, failure to get a job in academia right now is an indication of absolutely nothing. It’s a weird job market in the first place; departments are trying to audition lifelong colleagues, and there’s never a consensus on exactly what kind of person they want and what kind of specialty they want, and in the best of situations there isn’t much rhyme or reason as to how the choice gets made. Throw in the economy the way it’s been the last several years and the fact that even more people are in college trying for even fewer jobs, and it’s just a ridiculous mess. I can’t help that it does feel like a failure, but the odds are so heavily stacked against everyone trying to get a job right now that it’s no indication of anything wrong with you at all. We went through a search last year and it was heartbreaking the good people we had apply who just didn’t quite fit for one reason or another that had nothing to do with them. It’s tough to try and think outside the academic job box, but you’re qualified for a lot of different things that you might not have considered; for instance, I have a few friends who went into sales/marketing/development for scientific equipment related to the things they worked with after they got their doctorates. Others went into tech writing, or illustration, or web design – there are lots of fields who benefit from people who are technically and scientifically savvy. Heck, I read awhile ago that science majors are the ones who do best on the LSATs because we get so rigorously trained in critical thinking. It sucks not to be able to do what you want to do right now, but you’ve got some mad skillz that other fields are probably really interested in.
*hugs* for Ing.
–
Even worse, some women seem to think that they aren’t “real” women if, for valid medical reasons, they’ve had their reproductive equipment un-installed. This surprised me, back when I’d just had my hysterectomy-with-all-the-trimmings and my surgeon was (unnecessarily) trying to reassure me, post-op. Judging from his reaction to my lack of self-image/identity trouble over it, this might be a fairly common problem.
–
Oh, and good things came out of Alaska today. A trial judge ruled that discriminating against gay couples by preventing them from enjoying the same property tax benefit allowed to straight married couples violates Alaska’s Constitution by creating unequal treatment under the law.
slignot:
Those evil liberal activist judges. The nerve! Thinking that laws apply to all people, not just those of the dominant social beliefs.
You sure? Carter (charming, too) just ‘bragged’ about his batting average in his Maddow interview. Apparently he got far more of his legislation through congress than any other recent president. Perhaps he was just more quiet about it. (Not so quiet about his disdain for Evangelicalism in politics, though.)
Of course, all I remember about him is that he put solar power on the White House – and Reagan promptly tore it down again.
Ing,
I am so sorry to hear that life is giving you a harsh time. I can scarce offer any advice, it’s not like my life of fits and starts is anything to learn by, but please don’t hesitate to vent. People here care. Hugs if you want ’em.
___
Lynna,
Now that’s a response to throwing off religious shackles that I heartily approve of. I dont know about revolutionary though, it sounds pretty familiar.
Sili:
I did note ‘if I recall correctly.’ Not my specialty in history. Sorry. Please accept my apology.
Good evening
Oh dear, today I made one of my adult students cry, but I hope in a good way.
She’s one of those people who always say that they can’t do this, learn this, will never get this and are generally speaking too stupid. And it’s not because she’s fishing for compliments but because she really believes it and I kind of “exploded”.
I think that nobody in her life ever believed in her ability to learn, but if it takes me to be the first one, I’ll be that person.
But I don’t have to “believe” it, I can see the evidence of her ability. When she started she didn’t know a word of Spanish and now she knows a lot.
I think it’s a very cruel thing to do to a person, to smother their self-esteem to such an extend that they basically buy into it themselves
Ing
I’m sorry. Cyberhugs if you want them.
I think I know how you feel.
Walton
Just regarding one point:
Yes, with biological children you run the risk of them having serious issues, too, no argument there.
But then those problems are within an already established situation of love, trust and care (unless the parents are the reason for the issues in the first place, of course).
You can’t conjure up love, so what you will do and can endure for your children after 10, 15, 20 years of realtionship will be fundamentally different to what you can do for a child who’s basically a stranger to you.
pelamun
I disagree with Halina Wawzyniak. I don’t think a democratically elected member of parliament should honour an enabler of child-abuse and perpretrator of crimes against humanity with their presence.
The conservatives are foaming. What’s telling is that they are raging against the PDL, accusing them of old stalinist intolerance. It seems that you are allowed to boycott the pope if you’re a member of the green party but not if you’re a member of the Left.
(Pedant) Except that I’m pretty sure it mostly isn’t. Except sorta ‘space weather’, I guess. My understanding is it’s ionosphere research, mostly about stuff happening in the radio spectrum.
… still, the rest of that is good to hear. More people need to say ‘bullshit’ in public places more often. What with lies travelling around the world so fast, truth can at least bother to get to lacing up its shoes.
True story: I bailed out of working out of one office in part* ‘cos it turned out one of the salesthingies was a troofer, and the noise troofers make is annoying/bad for productivity in so many ways. Be nice to think I could have made more noise about his silliness, said ‘bullshit’ at least once, but I judged on balance that if I engaged him, I wouldn’t be getting shit done for potentially weeks on end, and the actual potential for changing his mind was iffy. And I was new with the company, not really thinking I wanted to get into that…
Still kinda regret that, tho’. Tho’ in fairness, I think I tend to do my ‘bullshit’ duty in meatspace elsewhere, anyway.
(*/Other reason: the salesthingies therein were noisy in general; not really compatible with my work anyway, which also made such an engagement probably a bit gratuitious… Still… I guess I kinda shirked, there.)
High Altitude Atmospheric Research Project, right? Yeah, space weather sounds about right. I wasn’t going to be the next person to shove myself, uninvited, into their conversation, so I just cheered inwardly and let it go.
Quotation marks
Embarrassingly, it’s exactly the same way in Danish …
It’s just been so long since I’ve last seen it done ‘correctly’ online, that I didn’t recognise it. I write too little prose by hand to have needed it for … close to twenty years.
Re #391, yeah, it certainly meets the ‘less wrong’ criterion, anyway.
Well, yeah. And every tool is a tool: being able to read directional signs is a tool, being able to speak clearly to other people to tell them you’re lost is a tool. And being able to a) stay calm, b) whip out your phone, c) dial up mom and dad and d) say “I can’t find you, but I’m next to a stall with a big ice cream cone on top and right across from me there’s a barn that says RABBITS” is a tool. Why wouldn’t it be? (And when they get a little older, GPS is another great tool for finding their way back to the group.)
Well, we all have to know what resources we have available to use and how to access them. As a small kid, the resource is mom and dad, but by the time they’re adults they’re going to use phones to call other people/places for all kinds of assistance and information, so I don’t understand how it’s bad for them to do it in a more limited way as kids. Back before casual phone calls, people taught their children to write little thank you notes and chatty letters to their aunties, because they would later have to write letters for all their business correspondence. It doesn’t seem that different to me.
I’m sure there are people who get their kids the latest and most expensive cellphones to keep up with the Joneses. But I’m also sure that a lot of people get their kids cellphones because cellphones are freakin’ amazingly convenient when you’re coordinating a family where everyone is out and about. I mean, some people engage in conspicuous consumption of ridiculously expensive stoves, washers and dryers, but you’re not going to catch me refusing to have any of those.
No. If you’re not yet a parent, there is no such established situation. Once one has a biological child, then the situation becomes established, likewise once one adopts a child. This adopted child somehow remains a “stranger” after 10, 15, 20 years of a relationship? For fuck’s sake, how long does it take?
You’re just assuming adopted children can’t be genuinely loved by their parents in the same way as biological children, that it would take some kind of conjuring trick for that to happen, while loving one’s own children is automatic. That may indeed be how some people think and thus affect their mental health, unfortunately, but I think it’s utter bullshit and that society has no business reinforcing it.
I would just like to support that parents do not automatically love their own children. Not everyone melts on first meeting their progeny.
Dhorvath: and I would imagine it would be more difficult to instantly love a baby born with substantial health or attachment problems. It’s easy for me to gush about “falling in love” with my healthy babies who were put into my arms right away (not into NICU) and who responded as babies “should” (snuggling and staring into my face, not screaming and arching their backs nonstop or having a blank affect). My friends who have had babies with various serious health issues would probably slap the shit out of me if I made snotty assumptions about parenting from my experience, though.
Isn’t there a lot of research to suggest that the hormones connected to bonding/loving an infant develop with exposure to that infant/time spent caring for them? And not the other way around?
Hell, one of my friends had a baby with no issues other than the fact that he just wouldn’t sleep, for no apparent reason. She got like no sleep for that first year. She had a supportive partner and everything but she still says with all seriousness that she frequently wanted to leave the baby in the woods. It took her a long time to love that kid.
There is a certain degree of that, oxytocin is linked to care of newborns and the contact it entails as well as to attachment.
Our child was like an alien invader for both of us for a long time and I still feel very estranged from how most parents speak of their children.
Definitely not. Newborns are weird, and they all look like a cross between a baby monkey and a scrunched-up avocado.
T-shirt design for wearing during pregnancy:
WARNING. ALIEN ON BOARD.
(ideally with a 3D representation of the leaping-out scene from the first Alien film :) )
My wife did that for Halloween when our child was ten weeks or so. Wriggling, drooling, and odd noises suited the chest bursting.
Pregnancy and parenthood are not required parts of life, but they’re experiences many women would like to have. Why is this more controversial than treatment for vaginismus or viagra for ED, or a whole host of other things for which we provide medical assistance? I think it’s totally fine if you don’t want to have kids. It’s fine if you don’t like being around kids. But it’s annoying to have either the desire to be pregnant or to care for kids viewed as mystifying.
Again, it is fine for people not to want to have kids. Totally acceptable. The prejudice against people who don’t produce bio-spawn is appallingly stupid, and I, for one, would prefer that the people who spawn because it’s a status symbol refrain from doing so since (a) they’re irritating, (b) they’re often bad parents, and (c)they don’t particularly seem to enjoy the job. But stop with the mystified puzzlement it’s-due-to-social-pressure thing. People are different.
The main interesting finding from my dissertation (looking at maternal experience of childhood trauma, adult attachment status, and subjective experiences of parenting young children) was that mothers with high reported child abuse who had achieved secure attachment styles in their adult relationships reported feeling less attachment/love for their children. Not that they didn’t love their kids – their parenting behaviors and stress were generally the same as non-abused mothers. But they differed from the non-abused mothers in this one area, the ability to feel attached to their kids. It was particularly interesting to me because this was a very robust post-hoc finding (with a large n, all the right statistical safeguards for post-hoc analyses and a professional statistician guiding me) and because it totally fit with my own experience of feeling like the Spawn were strangers and wondering if there was something wrong with me because I didn’t feel love for them right off the bat. (This is no longer the case, for the record.)
Thanks Mattir,
I don’t know as abuse is a term that either of us would think to apply to our upbringing, but it’s nice to know that attachment varies enough and with frequency that people study it. We enjoy our child, but sentiments like some listed on this page even are not in any way similar to our experience.
389, Gilliel
I still haven’t been able to track down exactly who invited him. Some sources say just the Speaker, who is a Catholic Conservative party member, other says that the Speaker invited him after talking to the leaders of all parties in parliament. If the latter is true, the boycott by the Leftist Party would be more than hypocritical. Also if it’s indeed the entirety of the Bundestag inviting him, a boycott would disrespect the institution as a whole (what they call “Würde des Hauses” in German). If the Speaker did that on his own though, then it was the Speaker who disrespected the House in the first place, and a boycott would probably be called for.
Well to this day, the nice politicians from the CSU especially keep insisting that the Leftist Party is as extremist a party as the NPD. Just listen to what Mr Dobrindt has to say every time there is a discussion round of the secretaries-general.
For everyone out there, it is important to know that attachment theory is an actual respectable field of inquiry, and is not by any weird stretch of the imagination the same thing as either attachment therapy (of the Evergreen re-attachment therapy oops-the-kid-died case) or attachment parenting (practiced by annoying anti-vax homeopathic mothers who wear their kids in slings and never teach them to go to sleep on their own).
I did an attachment theory dissertation. I do not crush small children to death, prattle on about slings and baby-wearing, and give side-eye to people who teach their kid to go to sleep in their own bed at some point before they get drivers licenses.
So, I run an SSA group and I want to have a discussion about elevator gate (which of course happened over the summer while we school wasn’t in session, so we haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet) Most of the people will never have heard of the incident at all, and I am afraid that I do not yet know how many of the many new people will be total MRAs. I need to put together a presentation of the history of the issue and I need help doing that- the best articles and posts, etc. So what I’m asking is for the horde to help me find these articles, posts, and best (and worst!) comments.
We looked into that contact parenting thing and it seemed to come with a higher rate of infant mortality. For some reason that put us off.
Oh, Japan. You so silly.
–o–
No worries, Brother ((())). I’m sure you know better than I. I’m just repeating jokes from Doonesbury (I think).
Sili,
Link and I are not getting on very well.
We did the family bed thing until the kids were about 6-7 months old, having consulted with our pediatrician who suggested that with appropriate blankets (i.e. none for the kids) and no parental intoxication, we’d be fine and I’d get more sleep. Then we taught them to go to sleep in their own cribs – took 2-3 days and saved our sanity. At least until they were old enough to get their own beds, when they began sneaking into our room in the middle of the night – at that point we developed the rule “you can sleep in our bed IF you go to sleep in your own room AND manage not to wake Mommy or Daddy up when you come in.” They got quite stealthy, which is probably a useful skill overall.
Too lively for Testa, Dhomvath, OR?
–o–
TAP Portugal has dropped to the bottom of the pile, but they just substitute a 12+ hour layover in Lisboa in place of Madrid.
I speak neither language (save perhaps “bom dia” – thank you, Franka), so neither tickle my fancy.
Jessica Valenti wrote a very moving article about trying to love her baby.
Ing, Carlie had some great points, I’ve seen the same in my Uni and in my school at the Uni. It’s not a personal rejection. I also understand that that is not all that’s going on in your life.
++++++++++++
Carlie, paragraphs are your friend, that block of text … was a bit hard to wade thru. (You’re welcome to give me a hearty ‘fuck you’;-)
++++++++++++
IRT to ‘smart phones’: My friends have them and it really cuts down on barguments, which may or may not be a good thing;-)
I personally have a dumb phone, a Virgin Mobile/LG/Sprint $10 flip phone. It sends and receives vox/text (tho who could text on that tiny ABC keyboard is beyond my thumbskills) and I think maybe internet access.
It does more than I need it to. It should be good enough for a 10 year old’s uses. As long as they stay off my lawn.
++++++++++++
I need a bit o’ help here; My GoogleFu is deficient on tax rates. e.g. I *think* that the top 1-10% make 90% of the money so they should pay 90% of the taxes (that’s an exaggeration, but not far off). And all I can find is that the rich pay most of the taxes and we should cut their tax rates even more.
+++++++++++++
A question for our cunning linguists: In the last 2 days I have used sentence constructions that included “had had” and “that that”. Maybe I’m just bad at English, but does that type of sentence construction occur in most other languages?
+++++++++++++
In other news: Santorum has petitioned Google to change their results of their algorithm so his name is not associated with butt sex. He’s frothing at the mouth about this and saying it would never happen to Joe Biden.
I envision hundreds of thousands of conservatives who were not aware of this meaning suddenly being squicked out. Tee hee.
Maybe we should tell him about the Streisand Effect … ummm, no.
Mattir,
No shit.
(The love you have for your offspring is no less evident than the pride and joy you evince when you write about them)
Haley’s Comet, I still haven’t regained much respect for Grog Leaden, but credit where credit is due — he put up a rather good summary early on in the piece here.
(More than enough material with which to get started)
I see what you did there.
If he’s frothing at the mouth, it ain’t santorum.
Well, his name comes (most likely) from German for ‘two’, so maybe we could promote his name as a synonym for a committed couple, husbands who don’t trade in their wives for mistresses, and happily stay together? Or would that be too boring?
I’m about to hit the road, but after the last few threads I’ve had time to follow and comment on, I’m really starting to wonder something. Based on my attempts to talk to SC (Salty Current), either ze or I is a brick wall. Is it me? I know I’m opinionated and stubborn, so it’s highly possible.
The Sailor,
I’m hardly a linguist, but offhand I can think of two spanish phrase fragments that would translate to such:
“habia tenido” → “had had”
“que eso” → “that that”
I don’t know why people think attachment parenting necessitates never letting go of kids — clinging to a 5-year-old the same way one would cling to a 5-month-old. The point is supposed to be to meet their CHANGING needs as they GROW. Of course, the crunchies are kind of notorious for going overboard on every damn thing, so …
What (other than a painful exercise) is a crunchie?
Re. kids.
A conversation with a nine-year-old
9yo: What if the house goes on fire?
Me: The house isn’t going to go on fire. We rewired it so it won’t go on fire.
9y: But what if a rock comes through the house and lands [indicates a low-wattage lamp in the corner] there?
Me: Well we have the box in your room that has all the circuit
breakers that will stop that being a problem. If a wire gets shorted, then the current goes [raise hand — whooooa] and the switch goes “urk” and it will cut off the electricity. Now, please, go brush your teeth.
9y: [Brushing teeth] You know, I actually tried using all the knives in the kitchen, even the blue one [a Japanese techno super-sharp knife] on my fingers and it was fine but then I got the blade from the blender and cut myself a bit on my finger but it’s like there are people who are colour-coded and they all have the colours they’re supposed to respond to and when the electricity gets too much the people — they’re colour-coded so they know which wire to cut — they use the blender blades to cut the wires so that the electricity gets cut off. Is that how it works?
*Boggle*
[Later]
Me: Yes, there’s a circuit in the block that plugs into the
distribution board that detects when too much electricity is going through it and goes “poing” and turns it off.
9y: Oh, it’s a fuse board?
Me: Yes, it’s a fuse board.
9y: Oh. Why didn’t you say so?
*facepalm*
Brother Og: the hippie types. (Of which I was one, full disclosure, for quite a while — and I think a lot of people would probably still describe me as having hippie tendencies.)
kristinc:
Ah. As in granola hugging, tree crunching hippies? Makes sense.
slignot, SC made a comment in the schiziod thread about not commenting on TET anymore. When asked about it, xe didn’t reply. I was curious, but when one deflects a question I generally don’t follow up.
If it’s your fault, curse you! (just kidding, I have no idea what’s going on.)
John, it’s the pleasure in the feeling of love that’s changed, not the actual behavior. It’s great to be able to feel that, and it’s horrifying that childhood abuse can fuck that ability up bigtime.
Also, we went to a live taping of a public radio program today, discussing “the teenage brain,” featuring a couple of neuro-developmental researchers and the author of the cover story in October’s National Geographic magazine. Glib evo-psych explanations with little consideration of cultural variation in what a peer group cohort is and how that might change neurological development and behavior. Massively aggravating. On the other hand, SonSpawn got up and asked a question on air about what lack of sleep does to risk-taking behavior. Answer – 45% of teens show EEG signs of significant sleep deprivation, and lack of sleep makes risk assessment worse, so it’s a bit of a perfect storm of badness.
just a quick stop by,
our host and others might like:
http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs50/f/2009/262/c/c/Pirate_Octopus_by_Cacodaemonia.jpg
Hope the link works.
414
“had had” and “that that” are quite different constructions.
Polyfunctionality of function words is something that can be found in many languages.
In “had had” we have a homonymy between a past tense finite “form and nonfinite perfect participle. It looks like among Germanic languages this homonymy is unique to German, see for instance here: http://www.ielanguages.com/germanic_have.html
“that” can either be
– a complementiser,
– a relative pronoun,
– a demonstrative
This is quite common in other Germanic languages as well, as in German for instance, only with a difference in spelling for the complementiser vs. the other two uses…
416
Biden is most likely not a German name. According to a geneaology website
(http://www.houseofnames.com/biden-family-crest)
As is often their wont, ex-mormons are discussing what the fuck is up with the LDS Church and Boy Scouts.
One ex-mormon posted this nice summary (“marment” stands in for “mormon”):
more here: http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,299740
OK. I’ve missed a *lot* of TET. Moving and getting settled can do that to you. (Along with no longer being able to read TET at work…just too much to catch up on in the evenings)
Re: IVF: in New Jersey, fully insured groups greater than 50 people have to support 4 IVF cycles for their members. While I support infertility treatments, this requirement really upped the price of insurance for many groups who either dropped NJ insurance companies, or became a self-funded group, so they could elect to not offer that. Here in NJ, one IVF cycle runs about 10-15K. Granted, not all women need them. But they still raise the price of insurance. I know way too many people who either a)had the child(ren) they always wanted through IVF, or, b) spent thousands of dollars without success. Getting pregnant isn’t the only issue. Maintaining a pregnancy for 9 months is also an issue. Most of the good IVF groups here (and I recommend the good ones to friends, who DID have children through IVF), follow safe guidelines so that we don’t have an “Octomommy” issue. So I don’t know how I really feel about it. Is it good to spend that kind of money on getting pregnant when you don’t really cover the children that may be born? I don’t know.
I don’t know what Medicaid covers in NJ so I can’t speak to that. I am NOT anti-infertility treatment. But I don’t know where a line should be drawn. NJ has arbitrarily drawn some lines – under the age of 35, had to attempt pregnancy without protection for 1 year or more, or documented *involuntary* infertility (not covered for those who have had permanent sterilization procedures done previously). IIRC – and I haven’t done infertility auths in 8 years now – donor eggs are covered to a certain extent, but not surrogate mothers. It’s a pretty broad swath. Of course, it DOES have a religious exemption clause – if infertility treatments are against the religious teachings of your employer, (i.e. Catholic hospitals), they don’t have to cover them, no matter what type of insurance they offer.
Re: smart phones. I had a Droid for a few years, rarely used the internet because the screen didn’t react well. Now have an iPhone and do go on the internet a bit more, but still rare. (More than when I could access stuff at work, though). I do like my iPhone but I’m not “Apps” crazy so don’t have very many.
As far as loving Walton – well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it? (And, Walton, I still have your copy of Tolkien’s biography and will bring it up to Rhinebeck since I don’t think I will get to Hahvahd before then).
New computer so don’t know if the avatar will show up. Hope I signed right and it does…
OK. The avatar showed up and I realize I rambled. Blame it on the glass of wine.
Just heard a Biggest Loser commercial on Pandora. Want to punch laptop screen in now.
A Bidenhänder is a German two-handed sword, ‘biden’ is an archaic spellin of beiden and hander (which is self-explanatory). I was unaware of the Saxon component. (sometimes a military history background can create blinders.) Sorry.
Please feel free to punctuate this sentence:
John while Jim had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.
In other news, we’ve decided on a new puppy (another miniature poodle – W.U. is dog-allergic), which we will be picking up in just a few weeks, from a farmer down near Charlottesville (well, actually, almost due north of there, up against the Blue Ridge). Makes for a nice day trip.
And remember, “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo”.
And in other news, I continue to be thread bankrupt while working on thinking about working on getting a job-n-stuff.
pelamun, thanks. I knew it had to relate to polysemy, but you’re clarified the specifics.
John, that’s helpful, but those are still 2 different words.
++++++++++++
changeable moniker, what a confusing and rewarding time you must be going thru. I got the knives and blender reference thing I think. I blame it on too damn many movies he’s watched.
One thing I took from my childhood was that the things a parent is concerned about aren’t what the child is meaning to communicate. They feel like we do, but they don’t think like we do.
BTW, I totally get the whole alien thing. The first time I saw a baby kick and could see that footprint on the tummy it gave me a whole new meaning of squick. Jeebus, that was mind bending.
I didn’t actually know that when women felt the baby kick, that alien wanted the hell out of there and was willing to destroy anything in its path.
I wouldn’t make a very good father.
I remember from my childhood, having specific concerns (in general and in various particular situations) that well-meaning adults didn’t address. These memories seem to have served me well when I talk to my kids. A lot of adults are surprised at the things I choose to explain to them, and it seems weird to me that more adults don’t remember what they feared or wondered about as kids.
The Sailor, yeah, basically what Pelamun wrote.
(Polysemy — a given term may have multiple meanings; i.e.
)
You’re looking at three different ‘words’ each using the same ‘term’. Which is why it looks odd.
(Note English is Germanic, while Spanish is Romantic)
—
cannabinaceae, you gotta be kidding me.
(Send me some cannabis over the USB, and I might be able to essay your little exercise! :) )
I’ve noticed an interesting problem. At work, my computer (xp sp3, ie7), shows the gravatars. My iMac at home (OSX 10.7.1) doesn’t. Safari shows placeholders, Firefox shows nothing. Anybody else notice that, and have a cure?
On the other hand, Pie in the Sky was a rather amusing BritMystery.
Imagine my mother’s horror upon realizing that she had just carried and given birth to… a stranger.
Interesting, apparently Bidenhänder is used in German, the Wikipedia article does not seem to use “Beidhänder” at all. I’m puzzled about where the “Biden” is from, it might be Low German, or it might be archaic, though I don’t remember right now when the High German vowel shift i->ei occurred.
Just one more thing: using an element such as “Biden” for a name just runs counter to the principles of German onomastics, so that’s why I was skeptical. The etymology proposed by that website makes much more sense, in context of sword-making you’d expect names such as Schwertmacher, and not so much names after specific types of swords, and even if so, you would have to explain the omission of the “-hander” element.
pelamun:
It does sound like an odd name. Two? Who they hell uses ‘Two’ as their family name?
The only reason I went there is that that (see, I do it, too) sparked a link in my mind to the German two-handed sword tossed it in without worring about the actual eymology. After all, I was trying to make a poor joke.
John Morales, the differences between homonymy (different words that sound the same) and polysemy (one word with different meanings) can be subtle, and especially in the case of function words, often pointless, as certain function words might share the same word origin (like all three thats), but might now be regarded as quite different words synchronically. So call it homonymy or polysemy, I don’t think it matters that much.
John, I wrote 435 before I read pelamun.
Sailor,
No, that’s actual knives in the kitchen. We run a “here’s stuff; don’t touch” household, rather than trying to prevent every unfortunate eventuality. (The *incredibly* big proper-chef knife excepted.)
FWIW, said kid, once, aged 4, stole the car keys, climbed out of the living room window and set off to drive to freedom. No particular reason, it was a bright snowy day and he just wanted to go. He was thwarted by central locking. Every now and then he asks how one drives a car. I say, “it’s complicated”.
We also now have locks on the windows. ;)
Which, when mixed with peppers, onion, black-eyed peas and sausage makes a good batch of Hoppin’ John.
Oh. Wait. That would be hominy. Never mind.
I don’t think there is a homonymy for hominy?
I mean there is one principle of German onomastics, that of “joke and nick names”, so someone who had a particularly funny ancestor might have the family name “Lustig”. So if there was anything involving “Two” that would indeed be a great story, but it needs to be plausible, that’s why I went to check it out :)
It’s instructive to look at bank in an English dictionary.
(Overloaded is understatement)
—
pelamun, it’s so nice to have a regular here who is a linguist! :)
What you did there with homonymy, was almost a haplogy, which in itself is an example for itself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplology
SCNR
Bro Og, you makes me grits my teeth some times. I want to laugh, but that would be wrong. ***chortles*** instead.
Anything interesting on the train/firefighting front?
No.
Thanks, John :), though the traffic here is so voluminous I never know how to keep up with it, so I don’t know if I can be counted as a regular…
“Bank” reminds me of Semantics 101 I took years ago… Etymologically speaking you could argue that it is two words, thus homonymy, as the bank as in monetary institution is derived from the Italian banco, and the bank as in sandbank (or bench, as in the German case) is of different origin.
But synchronically speaking if the speakers of English (or German) feel it is now one word with different shades of meaning, then you could argue for polysemy as well, as you’d have to look at language as a system as it is at a given point in time, and not how it developed through time (unless you’re doing historical linguistics, of course)…
Pelamun, are you indulging in haplogetics? :)
slignot:
Yes.
(And it’s creepy of you to post that here.)
Could be worse. Could be playing around with haplogenetics. And we know just how much trouble that’ll cause.
Of course, that would make a Christer a haploidapologist. Which is just getting weird.
And I was aiming for ‘hapoloidgenetapologist,’ not haploidapologist. Sorry.
I think I many need to head for bed.
[free association]
For anyone who loves words, I heartily recommend The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem.
(Apart from his neologisms, as I recall (it’s been many years), there was a conceit where future technologies could be predicted by the coinage of new words. I’d love to have been able to read his work as other than translations)
@Nerd: I run Firefox on an iMac and I see the gravatars. Don’t know why you don’t…
And I’ve had WAY too much wine to understand the haploid discussion in its entirety so that will have to wait till morning.
:p I try, but there is a combination of: a)I have it deeply ingrained in my head not to start a new paragraph until I have a new topic, as I was taught in 4th grade, and b)I tend towards really long sentences. Both of those work against me having short paragraphs.
Illuminata! Rhinebeck! :-) :-) :-)
Ing, may I ask more precisely what’s going on? I have trouble imagining you as too dumb for anything… *hug* *chocolate*
*grabbing Algernon by the shoulders*
*gazing firmly into her eyes*
Do not – ever – blame yourself for idiocy inherent in a system.
*hug*
NUNC EST BIBENDUM!!!
Only on teh intarwebz, where quotation marks are usually not formatted at all. (And never mind typewriters.)
Oh yes! It was quite the international embarrassment when that CDU member coined that term.
I deliberately didn’t explain it because I wanted to wait till Jadehawk had seen it. She hates it when people explain jokes. :-]
:-) :-) :-)
*sigh* :-)
*blink* Huh. I never thought there might be an ontogenetic component to it.
I only understand 海 “sea”, but I get the sudden urge to…
…copy and paste from Wikipedia!
海盜党，像太阳，
照到哪里哪里亮。
||:哪里有了海盜党，
呼尔嗨哟，哪里人民得解放！！！:||
Surely that can be improved by substituting a few poetic metaphors? I mean, it’s way beyond my vocabulary, but is for instance people’s 得 dé liberated or are perhaps rather their bellies slit open?
In any case, we definitely have to mess with the pronunciation of 尔. *giggle*
:-) :-) :-)
:-) :-) :-)
:-) :-) :-)
…erm… I understand that your point is that patriotism is going extinct in most of Europe, and that the EU has taken away plenty of national sovereignty already, but… did you have to godwin this example? :-S
Cheer them on! (As long as they aren’t stupid enough to use their current borders, with all those Franks and Swabians in them. But I’m sure they wouldn’t be, unlike Quebec.)
– insert Freistaat Kärnten joke here –
…I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Ned Flanders has two sons and no daughters. *horror*
That’s where the Smithsonian Institution = US National Museum is.
Quelle surprise.
*vuvuzela*
Even when they’re perfectly healthy and were born on term, it usually takes them a few days or weeks to start to look really cute.
In German, you can get der, der der, die, die die and das, das das, the masculine, feminine and neuter versions of “that which the”. Historically, that’s polysemy between (in this order) demonstrative pronoun, relative pronoun and article.
ROTFL!
Guess why! :-D :-D :-D
*going back to ROTFL*
X-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
That would be “both” (beide), not “two” (zwei).
Romance. :-)
In most places it showed up in writing in the 14th/15th century, as part of the change from Middle to New High German. People keep saying it happened earlier in pronunciation, though.
In southern Austria, says Wikipedia, it was completed at the latest in the 12th century (shortly after the beginning of Middle High German – so much for “New High German diphthongization”); in the southwestern (Alemannic) and the northern (Low German) dialects, it has never happened.
Independently, it has occurred in Dutch and in English; but the Dutch result is still spelled ij (the Renaissance style for ii), and the English spelling system simply denies it along with the entire rest of the Great Vowel Shift.
Redupliduplication! ;-)
Again, I apologize. My milhistory ‘education’ coming through. I have never seen Bidenhänder translated as ‘both handed,’ only ‘two handed.’ Sorry.
David,
I suspected you’d pick up on that. :)
(Yeah, I used it thus (having dithered about it) for its symmetry to ‘Germanic’, while knowing it was not correct)
—
(I love Pharyngula!)
Triskelethecat, your response makes me think my anti-vandal protection on my anti-virus might have blacklisted gravatar. Time to delete some URLs.
Hey, Brother O, much of what I learnt about ancient weapons was from research for D&D purposes. (!)
(I make a leg to you as I exhibit the bastard sword)
John M:
Not that it wasn’t useful for D&D (well, actually AD&D (though I do still have the original 5 books)), but it really did come through military history.
Nerd @464, here is the source for your gravatar in that comment:
(You might want to check what domains you’re blocking, whether through your hosts file or otherwise)
Wow, just got DM’ed :D!!
v
海 hai3: sea
盜 dao4: rob
版 ban3: version
黨 dang3: party
So they’re reducing the party name to the original demand of making software completely free, which at least in the case of the Berlin PP was not really an issue at all. So I think they should just use the term 海盜 “pirate”.
I’ve actually found Austria and Germany as a nice analogue to China and Taiwan. Austria and Germany used to be both “German” (though Austria was for large periods of times central to the Empire while Taiwan was always a backwater to the Qing), but Austrians developed a distinct identity after Nazism, as did the Taiwanese after 228. Of course, as for all comparisons, there are elements that are different, but it’s much better than the US Civil War example Chinese people like to bring up, or West and East Germany.
Brother O, since you’re more informed on the topic than I, can you confirm my belief that—other than siege weapons—the history of weaponry is pretty much a monotonically increasing sequence pretty much anywhere you look?
German Bank has been loaned into my dialect twice independently; first as “bench”, then as “bank”. How can I tell? Easy: like in English, and unlike in Standard German, the first has undergone a vowel shift, the second hasn’t.
~:-| Why? She’s asking you an innocuous question and doesn’t have your e-mail address. What else can she do?
And without knowing what the actual topic was, I must say the fact that she asks – as opposed to simply assuming that you are the brick wall and complaining about it – shows that she holds you in high esteem.
So Bank in your dialect would probably then constitute two different lexemes!
Yep, my anti-vandal protection took out haitch-tee-tee-pee-slash-slash-0.gravatar/avatar/, which then was unfindable by the browsers due to blockage. I’m sure it will reappear, but I’ll also try to whitelist it.
First, I had to look up ‘monotonically incresaing sequence.’
Second, I had to understand ‘monotonically incresaing sequence.’
My gut reaction is yes, but then I keep thinking of exceptions — catapaults in the trenches during WWI and mining under defenses in the US Civil War and WWI both come to mind immediately. I’ll have to think about this.
Appreciate that, Brother O.
(Note I do make a distinction between tactics and weaponry &msash; the bayonet (an improvised spear which can be a dagger) comes to mind)
My apartment got broken into while my husband was at work today. I’m not even in that state right now. I think I’m in shock. I’m so mad I haven’t been able to stop crying since I found out about 3.5 hours ago. I don’t even know how to react. The door was kicked in so perfectly the cops told my husband that it was a professional hit–he’d never seen a cop kick a door in that successfully.
Fuck just fuck………….
Rawnaeris, argh. I don’t think you’re in any way over-reacting.
(I suspect the violation of your home is the worst thing, nevermind your losses (I hope you’re insured!))
Also, keep in mind that projectile weapons, movement weapons, edged weapons and impact weapons all evolved at different rates and, sometimes, an advance in one weapon system or type forced regression of one weapon system or type. For instance, the development of plate armour reduced the effectiveness of edged weapons and led to an increased reliance on projectile weapons (crossbows, longbows, and early firearms).
Damn. Now I’m going to be tyring to trace this for the next month or two.
No, David. She didn’t ask me a question at all. She posted about me and asked other people a question with no indication that I’m even reading the thread. What else can she do? Continue the exchanges with me to which she referred. Or just decide that we don’t see things the same way and move on.
Rawnaeris:
Be safe. That’s really frightening.
Did you linguistitics forget bank is also a verb and an adjective?
@John Morales yes we’re insured, but it’s recent, and so I have no idea how complete their list of our things was/is.
I haven’t even gotten to see it yet, but I fear the worst because they were breaking some of the electronics they couldn’t carry. They threw the Wii into the wall to smash it, but took the Xbox. They took both TVs but left our monitors. They took the laptop but left the full-size tower desktop(that one may have just been to heavy for a quick get-away.)
There’s just no logic to it at all…
And I’ll probably be hanging around a fair bit tonight. I’ll try and catch up on what the actual conversations are. Since I can’t even be there with my husband tonight, I’m finding even the concept of sleep to be quite elusive…
Ugh. I had wine tonight and probably shouldn’t say anything, but yeah.
Slignot, the thing is what are you looking for? Info on SC?
From who?
I’ve been doing the opposite. My meatspace life is busy. I can’t put time into online activities right now and I’m not even sure if my having done so in the past is all that healthy for me.
Anyway, the point is that we’re all here under our own individual limitations. What can we do? I’ve been in painful social situations on this thread and it’s hurt a lot. I have sympathy there… but I also understand that there’s not much anyone else can say.
Well, either way. I don’t know what any of this is about or what prompted it. So what can I do but stay the fuck out of it!?
Still, I have to say on SC’s behalf that bringing something up here with no context and more or less *about* SC than *to* SC just strikes me more as gossip.
Man, rise above that!!!
G’night, folks.
Thanks, Algernon.
Hope you’re doing well.
Gee, several other disappearances were explained by my cleaning out of the blocked URLs that did port scans back to the end of August. It even blocked Sciborgs until I whitelisted it. Talk about panic time…
Rawnaeris, re the insurance: I suggest you don’t just rely on the police report, but try to document things best as you can soon as you can (take photos etc) after the fact.
—
Anyway, the insurance issues are for later.
For now, I hope you and your husband comfort each other as you come to terms with this offence and its implications. And I especially hope you don’t think you’re somehow to blame for not being careful enough.
Rawnaeris, I’m sorry to hear that. Sympathies and best wishes.
By the way, I know this is probably a bad time, but did you get my email the other day regarding law school? If not, can you repost your email address at some point? (Sorry if I got the address wrong.)
Rawnaeris, my sympathies.
It sucks.
We had a guy break in while we were there. My BF went insane with primal rage and started a fight that went out of the window the bedroom intruder (yes, he came in through my bedroom window just like the song) came in.
I was there, and to be honest we had nothing to steal. It… didn’t bother me and I can’t justify that except that maybe I had reached a point where I just didn’t care. I keep thinking that I should think about what might have happened if I’d been alone, but then… I probably would have been raped or killed so uh… what is there to think about?
But it tore my poor BF apart: the intrusion, the potential assault, the fact that the cops didn’t care at all.
I don’t know what was stolen or lost, but I’m sorry you had that happen. It’s nasty:(
Rawnaeris, *hugs/chocolate/booze/bacon*. You’re not over-reacting; shock is perfectly normal, under the circumstances.
*morehugs*
–
Sorry to hear that, Rawnaeris.
oh yeah, Rawnaeris, if you have insurance it’s completely separate from the cops.
Take pics and document!
We didn’t have any so it didn’t matter, but if you do it will really be to your benefit even if the police report is scanty.
SC, I can’t dispute you other than to say that I reckon slignot posted here because it was OOT there.
—
I take this opportunity to address her comment:
1. False dichotomy, poor characterisation. IMO.
(And SC is of the female gender, FWIW)
2. I think the perception is yours, yeah.
3. You’re both opinionated and stubborn (I think that’s to what you metaphorically refer as a “brick wall”); the question is how determine when opinions (as opposed to facts) are wrong.
@John, No I don’t blame us. They had to have cased us. I’m on business travel this week, so I wasn’t home. Which, come to think of it, is probably a good thing, as I do have a home-based office. If was truly a professional hit, my not being home may have prevented harm from coming to me. My husband was at work. The deadbolt was latched, and we have a dog. There’s not a whole lot more we could do in an apartment of the type we live in.
Our maintenance man has said he’s going to not only fix our door but reinforce it to make it as close to impossible to break into as he can. The apartment manager came over to check on my husband, too.
Husband is taking photos tonight. I’m flying home on the first flight out tomorrow, and my Dad and I are going to take over photos/cleanup while Husband goes to class.
After that, then we get to fight with insurance. The police report can’t help much past the obvious wreckage anyway.
Now that I’ve had a bit of a chance to calm down, I’m really just glad our dog is ok. Husband says Dog is skittish, but doesn’t seem to have been harmed in anyway. Dog is smart enough that I think he probably hid.
[TMI]
Algernon, strangely, and for the first time, I dreamt about “you” last night.
(You were this reputedly weird person who had a bedroom in a shared house I happened to be visiting and who was not-to-be-disturbed; when I was briefly shown your room by one of the house’s occupants (it was dark and you were asleep) I was struck that it featured a fountain jury-rigged into the floor, whose stream reached the roof; what I could see of you in your bed showed a weird hair-style featuring many many little tufts of hair each bound and rosaceously spilling out. We hastily closed the door when it seemed you might wake up)
—
My subconscious is weird, huh?
@Everyone else who posted as I was composing that last wall of text:
Thanks. This is why I love it here. *Hugs* to all of you.
@ Walton; Yes I got your email, and thanks for it. About the time you sent it, I got slammed with a wall of work. I’ll probably respond to you a little later tonight.
Your subconscious has an eerily accurate grasp of me, perhaps. Too bad you didn’t stick around ;)
FWIW though I wear my hair straight as it doesn’t take a curl even with a hot iron, I would really *love* a fountain in my room.
I’m also very ok to disturb, uh, from *my* end.
Very glad to hear that.
***
The strange thing is that the thread she’s talking about primarily is the Michele Bachmann one. My comments there made it absolutely clear that I’m “of the female gender” :), so she can’t have been reading them too closely.
OK, I’m off again.
John: Wow. You have much more creative dreams than I do. Sounds like it could be a scene from a sort of surrealist post-modern art-house film version of Sleeping Beauty, perhaps? :-/
Algernon:
Indeed. My subconscious is either cowardly or insufficiently imaginative!
(And thanks for not being offended!)