Doctor Science Knows

"Grass-eaters" in Japan

2009-06-15T19:48:00.000-07:00

I probably need to stop going to Rod Dreher's so often. Sometimes he's almost one of the Reasonable Conservatives, but then stuff like this comes out. And yet, he is definitely on the up side of a really pitiful bunch -- he's a Green in many ways, just so goddamned enraging about gender issues.

In any even, poor Rod was shocked by this article about 20-something male behavior in Japan. Rod calls them "grassy-eating sissy monkeys". *HEAD. DESK* I commented:

I'll have to check with my Japan-based sources, but there's one thing you should remember, Rod: Japanese masculinity does not have the same signals or boundaries that American masculinity does. In particular, the sharp boundaries of gender roles in Japan means that men there have a much wider ranger of behavior available to them.

Think of it this way: the defined border between masculine and feminine in Japan means that a man can go right up the edge and yet still count as firmly on the masculine side. In the US, the border is comparatively broad, shifting, and ill-defined, so a man who is anxious about appearing masculine has to keep much further away from the edge. American masculinity is subtractive; I don't know Japanese culture well enough to talk about how their gender roles are evolving.

The Japanese also have a very different approach to makeup and costumes than we do in the US. Thoreau said "beware of all enterprises that require new clothes" -- the Japanese say, "what's the point of one that doesn't?" So the makeup sales (which are likely to be the most accurate part of that story) don't necessarily mean what you think in your fevered American brain.

I wonder, too, if the use of "grass-eating" or vegetarian as an insult has a religious undertone, because vegetarianism is associated with Buddhism.

But as someone whose children are older than yours -- for all your sakes, don't box yourself into thinking that clothing, hairstyle or music choices are the appropriate battlefields for their upcoming teen and young adult years. Worry less about whether they seem manly to you, more about whether they're decent human beings.

Pro-Life and Seeing Women

2009-06-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

(not). Daniel Larison, who is extremely sensible for a conservative but is still Conservative, wrote his thoughts on Tiller. I commented:

jake has IMHO nailed it:

For whatever reason, many anti-abortionists believe the woman shouldn’t be held responsible for her actions. I think it is the same kind of thinking that underlies the resistance to abortion - the subject is defenseless, at the mercy of more powerful beings, and because we have an obligation to protect and defend the weak, we also don’t hold the weak (fully) responsible for their bad actions. In essence, a woman is a permanent ward of her family, and not an autonomous actor in her life.

In other words, the central question is *not*, despite the framing, “Is a fetus a human being?” but “Is a woman a human being to the fullest extent of the law?” You don’t get to say “of course! no-one ever doubted it!” when the historical truth is that it has *often* been doubted, at great length.

I must say it’s enraging to see Scott, Richard, and Daniel discussing abortion as though their opinions must be Serious and Important, even though none of them has any skin in the game. And it’s doubly enraging to see posts like Daniel’s that do not even mention the word “women”, as though we’re invisible and inaudible even when the battlefield is our own bodies.

Until you *act* as though women are autonomous actors in our own lives, it would be foolish of me to assume that’s what you believe. You may even tell youself you fully respect me as a human being with my own agency, but when you discuss what barriers to place between me and my doctor *without even mentioning my existence* your actions — that is, your words — show that I am not solid and real in your eyes.

Dehumanization

2009-06-14T08:54:00.001-07:00

hilzoy got righteously POed at Erick Erickson of RedState, who said flat-out "leftists celebrate each and every death of each and every American solider". In the discussion, some people said Erickson (et al.) are "not human beings". My comments:

CaseyL:

It's not about hurting them, it's about hurting you. Just as in the CS Lewis quote hilzoy used, the more you let yourself think of other people as "not human" the more of yourself you cut off. There is no "get out of species free" card (and I hear the Martian citizenship residency requirement is a *bitch*).

CaseyL:

When you say "this (group, behavior, whatever) is not human", you are not telling the truth. In addition to my moral reaction, I'm a biologist, and I invariably find that the behavior people are most ready to label "inhuman", "not a human being", etc., is in fact *precisely* human. Frequently-made comparisons are insults to weasels, snakes, and things that live under rocks. There are no "vicious" wolves, because wolves have no vice -- though there may be vicious dogs, because we've made them into half-people, psychologically.

When you label someone "inhuman", you are stating "there is no way that could be me, there is no commonality between me and that behavior." If there's one thing we learned in the 20th century, it is that this is a delusion. It is *always* us, it is always pure 100% human behavior with no non-human ingredients going on.

The Iranian Election

2009-06-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald had a round-up post, including a bit on the Iranian election. My comment:

If you look at the reporting linked from DailyKos, Andrew Sullivan, Talking Points Memo, to try to evaluate what's going on in Iran, and then go to the major US MSM sites, what you'll notice is:

1. much less coverage of Iran

2. most front-page photos show only Ahmadinejad, not any street-level shots

3. fewer headline references to "disputed election"

I keep being reminded of how little time Fox News devoted to the Holocaust Museum shooting this past week. When the event doesn't fit the narrative, the MSM just doesn't cover it.

I think any kind of close vote or disputed vote in Iran doesn't fit the MSM narrative in which Iran is *collectively* a force for evil that Must Be Stopped. The people in the US and Israel that want to portray Iran as a huge threat that we couldn't blame Israel for attacking are actively resisting any signs that Iran isn't monolithically behind Ahmadinejad.

Hm. Checking back to nytimes.com, I see that they've changed their slant in the course of the morning. There's now more Iran coverage, more street-level photos, and more doubt expressed in articles linked from the front page.

Smoking Bans and Smell

2009-06-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

shaddup. I'll work tonight.

At Crooked Timber Henry reports on the effects of recent smoking bans:

When Ireland banned smoking in enclosed spaces in 2004, I would have been prepared to bet large amounts of money that the ban would be universally ignored (Irish citizens have historically had a flexible attitude to the interpretation of legal rules that don’t suit them). In particular, I would have predicted that the ban would never work in pubs. But it did – pretty well instantaneously as best as I could tell. If it hadn’t been for the Irish example, I would have bet even larger amounts that the ban would never have taken off in Italy (where storeowners are legally obliged to give you a receipt when you buy something, to make it more difficult for them to fiddle taxes, and where the general attitude to large swathes of civil and criminal law seems best characterized as a kind of amiable contempt). But again, it appears to have worked.

I haven’t seen any research on this (if someone knows of any, let me know in comments), but my best guess in the absence of good evidence would be that the success of the ban reflected instabilities in previously existing informal norms about where people could or could not smoke.

My comment:

The Irish case is very interesting, and not what I would have expected, either.

I think one reason for the norm fragility on this issue is a peculiarity of the nervous system. Speaking as a lifetime non-smoker, one of the things that annoys me most is the smell. Smell is the most adaptation-prone of the senses: that is, we "get used" to smells more quickly and thoroughly than for other types of stimuli. The consequences for smoking are:

a) smokers have no idea what it smells like, none.

b) as the number of smokers goes down, the smoke from the remaining ones is *more* annoying and obvious to non-smokers, because we're no longer adapted to moving through a constant blue-gray fog.

In the 60s and 70s, everyone smoked in eating/drinking places all the time, it was just part of how they were. By the 90s, it was much less common, and I'd feel free to leave a place if it was too smoky. Now, I can tell if my husband has talked to a smoker, by the smell clinging to his clothes; I've returned books to the library, because the previous borrower had smoked while reading them and the smell wafting up from the pags was repulsive.

So I think it's partly that a lot of people were looking for an excuse to ask people to stop smoking, but also that the fewer smokers there are in the population the more stinky they seem.

Abortion and quickening

2009-06-12T17:33:00.000-07:00

OMG, I spent too much time today in the continued discussion at Erin's post All or Nothing:
my latest:

abortion stops a beating heart

I've often wondered about this slogan -- I used to drive by a billboard displaying it. Two things went through my head every single time:

a) so does a heart transplant

b) you're saying before there's a heartbeat it's OK, then?

When your billboard makes me think these things I'm not sure it was a successful slogan.

Let's see what sources I have to hand. In A Historical Summary of Abortion from Antiquity through Legalization (1973), Excerpted from A Christian View of Abortion By John W. Klotz (Concordia):

One interesting and oft cited distinction made in the early church was that abortion in the early stages of a pregnancy was not considered wrong. The reason for this can be traced back to Aristotle who held that the soul entered the body of a male fetus at 40 days and the body of a female fetus at 80 days. He believed that at conception the individual received a vegetable soul which gradually was replaced with an animal soul and finally by a rational soul. It was only after the appearance of the rational soul that abortion was to be considered murder. Sixtus V issued a bull in 1588, Effraenatum, wiping out the 40- and 80-day rule and punishing all abortion as murder; the punishment was to be excommunication. Subsequently Gregory XIV returned to the 40- and 80-day rule. However in 1869 Pius IX returned to the sanctions of Sixtus V.

Note that he says not just "not murder", but "not wrong". From The History of Birth Control, by Kathleen London:

The majority of women before the 19th century and many in the 19th century did not consider abortion a sin. Until the early part of the [19th] century, there were no laws against abortions done in the first few months of pregnancy [in the US]. Prior to the 19th century, Protestants and Catholics held abortion permissible until ‘quickening’—the moment the fetus was believed to gain life.

The issue was always killing, not a husband's rights, or else the act would not have been condemned had it been taken at the father's behest, which was not he case at all.Here I am relying more on my memory (it's been a long time since I read the primary sources, and the books I have to hand aren't the ones I need). In the 19thC, at least, doctors and clerics were very conflicted when husbands wanted their wives' pregnancies terminated when the wife did not. On the one hand, abortion (ew ew); on the other, undermining husbandly authority. I do not recall hearing about male authority figures advising wives to resist their husband's wishes on this issue, nor, frankly, does it seem plausible given the general emphasis on wifely submission and the extremely broad rights a husband had to his wife's body.

I do seem to recall that clerics (who tended to be more distant from the realities than doctors were) had a hard time believing that a husband truly *would* want his wife to abort -- and the situation where a wife wanted a child despite her personal danger[1] but the husband did *not* would not have been common.

The situation with unmarried couples was different, of course, and the rhetoric often stressed how aborting illegitimate pregnancy was covering up "the crime" -- the crime being illicit sex. In George Eliot's "Adam Bede", Hetty Sorrel is guilty of infanticide by abandonment, but her sentence of hanging is commuted to transportation (to Australia) when her well-born lover confesses. It's not clear how realistic this is, of course, and how much her life is spared because her boyfriend turns out to be the Squire's son. Within the novel, it's clear that Hetty's unwillingness to "name the father" is considered an aggravating circumstance.

Update #2 (multiple comments):

You don't do that when people's elderly parents die, do you, even though it is *possible* that euthanasia was involved?

My experience is that there *is* an investigation when an elderly person dies alone and unexpectedly. It's also my experience that the issue is far more likely to be suicide than euthanasia.

do you really think that when people hold strong to a moral principle, that means they are absolutely incapable of any nuance when it comes to law?

"All or nothing" is what it says.

Here's a primary source quote for you:

To the dismay of medical leaders, the public still believed that quickening marked the beginning of life. The practice of abortion persisted nationwide. "Many otherwise good and exemplary women," Dr. Joseph Taber Johnson reported in 1895, thought "that prior to quickening it is no more harm to cause the evacuation of the contents of their wombs than it is that of their bladders or their bowels."

[quoted in "When Abortion Was a Crime", from Joseph Taber Johnson, "Abortion and its Effects," American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children 33 (January 1896): 86-97]

As for how reasonable people would be in practice, here's a Boston Globe article on the abortion ban in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Chile. In those countries, poor women may find it difficult or impossible to be treated in a timely way for ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage, due to doctors' fear of prosecution. As you probably know, a D&C is both a method of abortion and frequently necessary to treat miscarriage -- doctors in public hospitals in these countries will wait as long as possible before performing one, lest they be charged with murder.

At present, do people hold inquests for every death that occurs? I was unaware of this practice.

AFAIK all "unattended deaths" are investigated, yes. I don't think they all go to the legal level of a formal inquest, but they're definitely treated as police matters.

Another citation:

While Aquinas had opposed abortion — as a form of
contraception and a sin against marriage — he had maintained that the
sin in abortion was not homicide unless the fetus was ensouled, and thus,
a human being. Aquinas had said the fetus is first endowed with a
vegetative soul, then an animal soul, and then — when its body is
developed — a rational soul. This theory of "delayed hominization" is
the most consistent thread throughout church history on abortion.

from Joseph F. Donceel, S.J., "Immediate Animation and Delayed Hominization,"
Theological Studies, vols. 1 & 2 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1970), pp. 86-88; cited here.

Rebecca:

I don't get it. How would abortions continue without any problem? How would doctors go around performing surgical abortions for a living? Attempting to self-inflict abortion is dangerous and I doubt many women would go for it.

I'm going to assume that this an honest question, and that you were born after 1960 or so. I have a post in moderation with links, but briefly: there would be a network of discrete, well-paid doctors performing safe, expensive abortions for well-to-do women. *Lots* of women who couldn't afford such doctors would try all kinds of things to induce abortion, and many, many of them would die.

When pro-choice activists say "No More Coat Hangers!" they're talking about a historical reality.

I don't get it. How would abortions continue without any problem? How would doctors go around performing surgical abortions for a living? Attempting to self-inflict abortion is dangerous and I doubt many women would go for it.

I'm going to assume that this an honest question, and that you were born after 1960 or so. Alas, this comment will go to moderation, but I hope the links will be worth it.

Some doctors would still make a living performing abortions for well-to-do women, as is the case in most of Latin America (as reported in the Boston Globe article I linked to previously). When Barry Goldwater's daughter became pregnant out-of-wedlock in 1955, he arranged a safe, though illegal, abortion for her in New York. Networks of safe, expensive, discrete abortion doctors were *everywhere* in those days, with referrals through an intense network of word-of-mouth, mostly woman-to-woman, and ads using the words like "full gynecological services" and "complete privacy and discretion". Women would go out-of-town if they could -- a "spa weekend" to "restore one's health" was a *euphemism* in my youth. I don't know what this kind of service cost in today's dollars, but I'd guess that if a legal abortion costs $400 today, a safe illegal one one would cost $1000 or more, if you follow me.

As for women who couldn't afford a good doctor, yes they did take awful risks. Here's one doctor's report:

The first month of my internship [in 1962] was spent on Ward 41, the septic obstetrics ward. Yes, it's hard to believe now, but in those days, they had one ward dedicated exclusively to septic complications of pregnancy.

About 90% of the patients were there with complications of septic abortion. The ward had about 40 beds, in addition to extra beds which lined the halls. Each day we admitted between 10-30 septic abortion patients. We had about one death a month, usually from septic shock associated with hemorrhage.

Right now, complications from illegal abortions are a leading cause of death for women of child-bearing age in South America. In Peru alone, an estimated 50,000 women a year either die or suffer serious complications after an illegal abortion. More women in Ethiopia die from complications from illegal abortions than from any other medical reason save tuberculosis, the World Health Organization reports.

Hector:

I have the impression that Rebecca thinks making abortion illegal would eliminate almost all of them, and that's what I was addressing.

Yes, making it illegal would reduce the rate -- but it would also severely *increase* the death rate for women, and abortions that did occur would be at a later stage because the finances and logistics would be more difficult.

Another cite from "When Abortion Was a Crime": The year after abortion was legalized in New York State, the maternal-mortality rate there dropped by 45 percent.

Rebecca:

It's true that I never heard first-hand of anyone using a coat hanger. I did hear first-hand stories about crochet hooks. Is that scary enough for you? You've said that "I doubt many women would go for [self-inflicted abortion]", but the historical record and what's going on in Latin America proves that many *will*. Shocking, dangerous, horrifying -- yes, but it's a *fact*.
-------

[1] How many of your great or great-great-grandmothers died in childbirth? Of my four great-grandmothers (born in various countries between 1865 and 1880), half died in or shortly after childbirth.

From the Abortion threads at Beliefnet

2009-06-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

Erin's post, All or nothing

Jon:

Pregnant women could not be legally put to death in any Christian culture (and in many non-Christian cultures), no matter how heinous their crimes; the mere suspicion of pregnancy was enough for a woman to escape the gibbet or the headsman.

This is not true. The "mere suspicion of pregnancy" was certainly not sufficient for a woman to "plead her belly" and delay an execution, she had to be examined by a midwife who would swear that she could feel the fetus move -- the "quickening", which was the common standard for when life begins regardless of the disputes of scholars. The time of perceptible quickening varies, but it's usually around 4 months.

In pre-modern times, any woman could claim to be in the first trimester and there was no reliable way to tell. In case you're wondering about women who had been imprisoned for more than 3-4 months, women who were facing execution are known to solicit sex from their jailers, in the hope that they would get pregnant in time to "plead their bellies" -- or to make such a plea plausible.

Making quickening the baseline for life has an extremely long pedigree, going back to Aristotle at least (and probably further). You'll note that the widespread belief that first-trimester abortions are OK is in line with this traditional approach. Most women were quite willing to use whatever remedies they could get to "bring on their periods", and did *not* consider this the same thing as the heinous crime of abortion.

Men (including male clerics) objected to these first-trimester remedies, but *not* usually on the grounds that it was destroying an ensouled human being. Rather, they said (truthfully) that it undermined male authority, and the husband's unquestioned right to control his wife's fertility.

I can't help noticing that the shift from "life at quickening" to "life at conception" follows a shift in when *men* can tell that a woman is pregnant, instead of taking her word for it.

at Erin's post on Abortion and civil rights (headdesk warning):

"Your Name" @3:40 has the crucial data:

the rate of unintended pregnancies among poor women (below 100% of poverty) is nearly four times that of women above 200% of poverty

In other words, poor women -- who are disproportionately non-white -- find it excessively difficult to obtain, pay for, and assert their right to use birth control.

When "pro-life" groups actively endorse effective contraception, I'll believe they mean what they say. If you say "abortion is murder" and don't promote birth control -- barrier methods at the very least -- I'll be forced to conclude that your primary motivation is to control women and our sexuality.

I have known quite a few individuals who are "pro-life" and also "pro-birth-control", and I can respect that. I know of *no* anti-abortion group which takes that stance. In reality, as you must be aware, the anti-abortion movement has consistently put up barriers between poor women and contraception. More unintended and unwanted pregancies, more abortions -- and the barriers the anti-abortion movement has constructed mean that poor women will tend to have abortions later, too, because it takes them more time to gather the money and make the arrangements. *There*'s your civil rights issue.

Hector:

I know quite a few "pro-life" individuals who take your position, and I have no major quarrel with it. What I do not know of is any significant "pro-life" organization or institution that is also pro-contraception.

People who are anti-abortion and anti-contraception are IMHO making their priorities clear: contraception is worse than murder. No, I'm exaggerating: they're making it clear that they don't actually believe abortion is murder, because everyone agrees you're allowed to cut moral corners to prevent murder, much less something that's called "a Holocaust".

At Erin's Is protesting against abortion a hate crime?

"Is protesting against abortion a hate crime?"

No. Learn what words mean.

"Hate crime" is not a separate category of crime, it is an an aggravating factor in an already-defined crime. Here is a summary from David Neiwert. He's guy you need to read if you're going to be talking about this stuff. The chances are that if you don't read Neiwert you do not know what you're talking about.

Protest is NOT a hate crime. No-one is trying to define protest as a hate crime. No-one in the US is seriously trying to pass "hate speech" laws, in the sense of trying to define *currently legal* speech as "hate speech".

Shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater is a speech crime. Shouting "Fire!" in a crowded church or synagogue may well be a hate speech crime. But the point is that in the US it has to be a crime first, before it can be a hate crime.

The reason you're getting the impression that leftists are calling abortion protests "hate crimes" and "terrorism" is because abortion protesters frequently don't just protest. Some protesters -- though by no means all -- also stalk, harrass, assault, and threaten women and clinic workers. Harrassment, etc., are *already* crimes. When the goal of the harrassment, etc., is to "send a message" not just to the immediate victim but to the group or community of which she is a part, *that is a hate crime*.

ETA -- yes, Carhart is talking about a more general use of the term "hate crime". He's wrong, but I'm prepared to overlook it because he doesn't have the pro-choice organizations backing him up on this issue, and mostly because he is in legitimate fear for his life.

Anti-abortion activists might fruitfully ask themselves what they can do to make the risks to Carhart less. I'm not talking about just verbally distancing themselves from people like Tiller's assassin, I'm talking about reducing the level of physical terror Carhart, his colleagues, and his patients experience.

And yes, I am using "terror" as in "terrorism".

No, "Another Michael". Abortion clinic violence is the terrorism that *works*. It's not the body count that matters, it's the fear. Abortion-clinic violence isn't limited to murder, the murders are only the extreme tip of the harrassment, assaults, stalking, and the general climate of fear -- terror, even -- that this violence produces.

The Axioms of Online Discussion

2009-06-10T06:20:00.000-07:00

The storm over Ed Whelan's outing of publius has moved into the cleanup phase.

Actually, you *are that* bad, mr. moto. But I am responding to you not for your benefit, but because a lot of new people are visiting, and it's clear you are not alone in your ignorance and confusion.

This whole blowup arose because Ed Whelan, a pro blogger, was just as ignorant of the rules of online communication as mr. moto is. Not just the rules, the *axioms* -- the principles that were worked out back in the Usenet days, before the WWW even existed.

No plagiarism
No outing
No sockpuppets
No obtaining material benefits (money, computers, lip gloss[1]) by fraud
No stalking
No deliberate spread of malicious software or links

I think that's it.

These aren't really rules of netiquette, these are the *premises*, the axioms which online communication has been found to require. These axioms aren't about politeness, they're about making communication *possible*.

This is why bloggers both left & right joined in condemning Whelan's behavior -- it wasn't that he was "too mean", it was that he broke an axiom. It was and is shocking that someone could be a paid blogger without keeping to these axioms reflexively.

And this is why mr. moto is wrong. publius' remarks might possibly have risen to the level of "flaming", though I personally would call it at most a slight scorching. But outing is not proportional retaliation, it is *breaking the whole system*, it's taking the conflict to a radically different level.

I'm not going to go into the rationale behind each of the axioms, because that would take too long -- can anyone recommend a good link? But as with any educational process, you obey the rules first, then study why we have them.

[1]Based on an actual event, I'm not kidding

Pseuds vs anons

2009-06-10T06:15:00.000-07:00

At Rod Dreher's:

I second Ruth's emphasis on the crucial difference between anonymity and pseudonymity. I am frankly astonished by how many bloggers -- especially though by no means only on the right -- cannot seem to recognize that they are two different things. I find the number of anonymous/pseudonymous commenters who say they'd never read a pseudonymous blogger *hilarious*.

I've put up a description of actual anonymous blogging here. No such thing is occurring in the political blogosphere, so I cannot fathom why you-all don't seem to be able to keep your terms straight.

no one else is under any moral or ethical obligation to respect that pseudonymity.

It is standard netiquette -- good online manners -- to not "out" people's pseuds. One reason for this is because pseuds are the default online. Categories of people who would be prudent to use pseuds include:

1. women

2. anyone under 25

3. anyone working as a teacher who is not a tenured college professor

4. anyone who doesn't always agree with their boss

5. anyone who doesn't always agree with their clients or customers

6. anyone who doesn't always agree with their mother or father

7. anyone who is not straight

8. anyone who is divorced

9. anyone who wants to blog about personal issues

In other words, *most people*.

Saying that people "should" blog under their RL name or that it's "best" to do so is tantamount to saying, only powerful men have the right to discuss things.

Even if there were no other good reasons to respect pseuds, there's a good conservative reason: respect is the community standard. That's why so many bloggers on both right and left have joined in condemning Whelan -- so that everyone knows that there *is* a community standard.

At The Volokh conspiracy:

Count me among those befuddled by the apparent widespread confusion between "pseudonymity" and "anonymity". I am extra-befuddled by Mr. Volokh's conflation of the two, given Jonathan Alter's post here yesterday discussing their crucial differences. As he said, A pseudonym operates like a brand name, and the value of the brand is, at least in part, a function of how the pseudonymous blogger acts over time.

Actual anonymous blogging is extremely rare -- I describe one example here, mostly to illustrate how nothing current in the political blogosphere qualifies. Why, then, are so many people who are otherwise careful with language saying publius was blogging "anonymously"?

At Riehl World View:

Riehl, I am baffled by your conflation of "anonymous" and "pseudonymous", a confusion that appears to be widespread. Do you honestly not see that they are not the same thing? You aren't anonymous at all, you have a consistent pseud, just as the Federalist Papers' "publius" or "George Eliot" or "Mark Twain" did. The fact that it may be tricky to get from "Riehl" to your physical address doesn't prevent you from accumulating a reputation and building up "trust networks" with other people.

I've posted about what actual anonymous blogging looks like here:[]. What you (and publius, and most of your commenters) are doing is not what I'd call anonymous at all -- what makes you say it is?

I see now that I was confused -- "Dan Riehl" is not a pseud, but a RL name. My question remains, though: why are you referring to "pseudonymous" as "anonymous"? Do you truly think they are the same thing?

I see no practical difference in this and most cases in which a blogger chooses to remain anonymous by using a pseud

A pseud is neither anonymous nor Anonymous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)
so I actually don't know what you mean by "remain anonymous by using a pseud".

Pseuds are social identities that can gather reputation and trust. Anyone who has to detach from a pseud has to lose the trust and reputation that identity has collected. When I say this is "not anonymity" I'm not just arguing semantics, I'm saying they function in different ways.

I believe blogging under one's real name is best
-- from this it follows that the "best" blogging is that which is detached and impersonal. Blogging about one's child-rearing experiences, for instance, by your standards cannot be the "best" blogging, because it is usually unwise to blog about one's children under a real name.

At The American Scene:

I’m asking this all over, because I am baffled. You seem to be using “anonymous” to mean “pseudonymous”, though they are two very different things, especially online. The link in my sig is to a post I made about what (rare) truly anonymous blogging looks like. What we are talking about is *pseudonymity*, a consistent internet identity. Do you not know the
difference, or do you not think it matters — and if so, why not?

If we were to do a complete cost/benefit analysis of the effects of pseudonymous blogging over the past decade, I have no doubt that the result has been mostly negative (the blogosphere would be a more civil place without it).

What is certainly true is that many, many fewer people would be able to blog or comment if they always had to use their RL names. As Tony rightly pointed out above, most women (for instance) would be imprudent to do so. For the majority of people (who are mostly *not* financially and personally secure men, accountable to no-one) blogging under one's RL name would be a dangerous luxury -- your standard would make a desert and call it peace.

Outing publius

2009-06-07T13:11:00.000-07:00

The National Review's Ed Whelan, scumbucket, outed one of the Obsidian Wings bloggers.

Humans, why must you FAIL so hard?

I find the objections to pseudonymous blogging from flagrant pseuds hilarious, and will only address them by pointing and laughing.

I have encountered a number of people who use only RL names online and are uncomfortable with people who use pseuds, but this attitude is baffling to me. Pseuds have an extremely long history for fiction writers and political writers, and I see no reason the "nom de net" shouldn't be accepted seemlessly in those fields.

More generally, objecting to pseuds puts you on the losing side of a generation gap. As my children grew up and started going online, I carefully instructed them in the construction of suitable pseuds and in basic techniques of internet compartmentization. For young people in general and women in particular, pseudonymity online is a matter of basic security. Objecting to it marks you as a clueless fogey, or at least as highly privileged.

In another decade, it's possible that the "presumption of online pseud protection" will become a legal principle, as it already is within the "old-growth" parts of the Internet. I do not think we're there yet, and I don't think any suit by publius would have a legal leg to stand on.

Thanks for the explanation, Slart. I now see what you mean.

I continue to be baffled by the number of people referring to "anonymous bloggers" -- especially while using a pseudonym (LOLZ). *No-one* here is blogging anonymously, we are mostly using *pseudonyms*, which is (a) completely different and (b) part of a very, very old tradition in both politics and fiction.

Here's what an actual experiment in anonymous blogging looked like [details redacted]: a group of several hundred people with a common interest formed a community in which *every member* had admin privileges. Both posts and comments were unsigned and IP addresses were unlogged, so there was no way to connect comments and posts to each other.

I was told that the advantage was:

Because it is detached from our named selves, it allows for fluidity of identity, I think. I can be the person leaving an idiotic comment and the person chiming in against them, and then also someone taking up that comment and rehashing it further in the discussion, all while still supporting an environment where everyone is instantly comfortable with each other.

In the event, as might have been predicted, one member of the community got angry and used hir admin privileges to delete *everything*, and there was much unhappiness. What was truly surprising was that this took *3 years* (a generation in Internet time), so it probably qualified as a remarkably successful experiment.

The point of this story is to make it perfectly clear that we in the political blogosphere are *not* talking about anonymous blogging.

I will assume that anyone who persistently uses the term "anonymous" to describe pseudonymity is part of the problem. That is, people like *you* are the reason fiction and politics have a long tradition of pseuds, of which the nom de net is just the most recent version.

Cherry Pie recipe

2009-06-03T22:02:00.000-07:00

Because J asked.

The pie filling is per lastscorpion, and presumes that you're starting with one of the bags of frozen cherries we put up at cherry time (1 quart pitted cherries + 1/2 c sugar):

take a bag of frozen cherries out and dump them into a medium-large saucepan. Squeeze all the stuff out of the bag and into the pan. Thaw it, either by putting the lid on the pan and leaving it sit for a couple hours or else by stirring frequently over low heat. In a cup or a small bowl or something, combine 2 Tablespoons (maybe heaping Tablespoons, depending on how much liquid the cherries have produced) corn starch and 1/4 cup sugar and a dash of salt. Mix the dry ingredients into your pan of cherries and goo. If it's very dry looking, add a little water, but no more than 1/3 of a cup. Cook and stir over medium heat until thickened and bubbly, and then continue cooking and stirring for one or two minutes more. Take it off the heat and put the lid on and le it cool without stirring, and use it just like purchased cherry pie filling.

We add 1/2 tsp lemon zest -- the dehydrated stuff from Penzeys.

The crust is this recipe at Fine Cooking:

8 oz. (1 cup) cold unsalted butter
9 oz. (2 cups) all-purpose unbleached flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 cup cold water

Mix it up in the stand mixer or with two knives or with the pastry thingy until the largest bits of butter are still pea-sized, but most of the rest are fine.

Cut it in half, roll it out *very* quickly, put it in your 9-inch pie pan. Cover it with the other half of the dough, crimp the edge, then chill it in the fridge while you pre-heat the oven.

Pre-heat to 450, then turn it down to 350 when you put in the pie. Cook for about 50 minutes.

Star Wars in Star Trek

2009-05-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Here is the list of Star Wars references/homages/visual references friends and I have spotted in ST:Reboot, so far. Note that very few of these can be explained as due to "FX by Industrial Light & Magic"; most of these are writing and/or directorial choices. I have a theory, which is mine (as always), but I wanted to get the list up separately so people can appreciate how substantial and pervasive the SW influence is.

1. Spock watching destruction of Vulcan = Leia at the destruction of Alderaan

2. Scotty's Ewok-like friend, who I am informed is called a "clanger" in the SW-verse.

3. The snow-monster on Delta Vega, and the way it appears out of the foggy snow -- the whole SV sequence was *very* strongly reminiscent of Hoff.

4. the way SpockPrime pulls an Obi-Wan to rescue Kirk in the DV cave

5. when the doors open to the DV station, it sounds like Chewbacca.

6. When Nero confronts Kirk, he's in front of a space window that looks pretty much exactly like the Emperor's room on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi.

7. Nero and Kirk fight on a catwalk above a huge mechanical abyss, like Vader & Luke in "Empire".

8. "I am not our father" -- though this may be or also be a reference to Nimoy's books I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock

9. An actual cameo appearence by R2D2, ffs.

10. The style of Spock's "Jellyfish" ship, the engine sound reminded me of a pod racer. The jinking of Spock flying the Jellyfish ship.

11. The maze of destruction around Vulcan that the Enterprise warped into (reminded me of the asteroid field in "Empire").

12. The whole Romulan ship evoked the Death Star in design and role.

13. The mission for Kirk and Spock to beam aboard, sabatoge something, rescue Pike, and then leave evokes the similar rescue-Leia scheme in ANH.

14. The early "send detachment to the planet to sabatoge the drill" evoked the ROTJ scene of Han and Leia going down to sabatoge the shield.

15. Luke--sorry, Kirk--was suddenly a "farmboy"; I mean, Iowa, yes; farmboy, no, IMO. Kirk also raised ostensibly by his 'uncle'--whose voice was that on the car, chiding for him to come back.

16. "There's always a bigger fish" moment on DV.

Sonia Sotomayor was not an Affirmitative Action student

2009-05-07T18:49:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald has been doing a great job of holding Jeffrey Rosen and The National Review's feet to the fire, for Rosen's anonymously-sourced hit piece on Sonia Sotamayor, in which he said she is "not that smart", "[unable] to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservatives", whose good qualities are mostly that she's Puerto Rican and from poverty -- a combination that has led pretty much every blog I've seen, left or right, to connect the dots and say that what Rosen meant is that she benefited from Affirmative Action at Princeton and Yale Law.

I want to stop the right-wing meme that Sotomayor must have been an Affirmative Action admit to Princeton, intellectually second-rate but bossy. This meme is a lie: Sotomayor got into Princeton despite a restrictive quota system, and left with the highest award Princeton gives to undergraduates.

I'm highlighting and expanding on a comment that got lost in the barrage after Glenzilla's first post about Rosen's article.

Commenter "PollyPerks" noted that, based on dates and statistics alone, Sonia Sotomayor *could not* have been a "mere Affirmative Action" admit to Princeton, because she entered during the early years of Princeton co-education, when women were subject to a restrictive quota system.

I am a female member of Princeton's Class of 1978, 2 years after Sotomayor, and I have personal memory and experience to back PollyPerks up. Like Polly, I am also relying on Jerome Karabel's The Chosen, which I highly recommend and which made many things clear to me in retrospect.

I have no clear memory of meeting Sotomayor, though I certainly knew of her -- she was extremely energetic and politically active, heading the Latino student group and other campus activities. She graduated summa cum laude, a very rare distinction at Princeton, not to be acquired without both a stellar senior thesis and across-the-board As in one's major: many departments would have no summas in any given year.

Sotomayor applied to Princeton in only the 3rd year of co-education. Princeton came to co-education late even for an Ivy, and the Board of Trustees had set strict limits on how exuberantly women could rush in. In particular, the original agreement between the University administration and the Board stipulated that the number of men admitted would never decrease -- no man would risk being out-competed by a woman for a seat at Princeton. Instead, the total number of students would have to increase: we women were explicitly competing for a separate pool of seats, a rather small one at first because there wasn't enough housing for us.

(And if housing was a problem, a female friend in the Class of 1975 reminds me that bathrooms were worse. It was only several years after I entered that it was no longer common to see a bathrobe-clad woman going out of one dorm and into the doorway next door, in search of a shower.)

As Polly said, quote Karabel: only 14 percent of the female applicants were accepted, compared to 22 percent of the men. ...[T]he women who were admitted to Princeton were even more elite both academically and socially than their male classmates".

This was obvious and much-discussed by the students ourselves. We could see that pretty much every woman admitted to Princeton was abnormally bright, ambitious, and hard-working, while the male population included a certain fraction of guys who were just there because going to Princeton was what the [Family Name]s *did*.

It was those men -- the Princeton equivalents of George W. Bush -- who were the beneficiaries of "affirmative action" at Princeton, not Sonia Sotomayor. PollyPerks quotes from Karabel:

"1968-1969 was also the year Princeton began to recruit Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans and expanded its efforts to recruit more 'disadvantaged' whites" (p. 398).

In 1972, Princeton reported that the freshman class included 22 Latino students, 15 Chicano students, 27 "Oriental" students, 5 Indian students, and 113 black students, for a total of 181 "Third World students" (as Princeton then called them) out of a class of approximately 1127 (p. 399).

To compare, the number of students admitted as athletes was 310 (p. 477) and many spaces (approximately 200-250) were taken by legacies, who were admitted with significantly lower qualifications (p. 467, 478):

"Princeton ... was careful not to tamper with legacy preference. Admissions rate for alumni children never fell much below double the rate for other applicants, and in the mid-1970s preferences for legacies actually increased. In 1975, 48 percent gained admission - a rate 2.3 times higher than other applicants." (p. 478)

In working on this post, I discovered that Sotomayor not only graduated summa cum laude (which is determined by the departments), she received the M. Taylor Pyne Prize for 1976.

The Pyne Prize is the highest award Princeton gives to an undergraduate (it goes to two people per year), and is supposed to reflect both scholarship and leadership.

It is flatly impossible for a Pyne Prize recipient to be "not that smart" or to "lack intellectual weight", as Rosen's "sources" said. There may be fashions or pressures in what specific person gets the award, but it's always to someone who looks *really* smart even when they're surrounded by very smart people. Frankly, I would have to be *insane* to not assume that Sotomayor is smarter than me -- I mean, one Pyne Prize winner for my year (1978) was Eric Lander, and he's pretty much smarter than anyone.

Now, I will admit that based on my mostly-paper-but-slightly-inside knowledge, Elena Kagan (Princeton Class of 1981) is probably in Sotomayor's league. Kagan also was summa cum laude, and received a very prestigious scholarship to study at Oxford after Princeton. From the Princeton point of view, it's all good. But also from the Princeton POV, both Sotomayor and Kagan look much more impressive than Samuel Alito (Class of 1972), who did well there but not blow-your-socks-off well.

In contrast, on paper, based solely on their academic records, Scalia and Roberts really are (or should be) at the top of the league. But then, that should also be the case for Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter. I don't know whether there's actually much correlation between undergraduate record and performance on SCOTUS. Remember, it's the absolute pinnacle of the profession, but it's also *a committee*, which means issues of personality, temperament, and social cunning can be at least as important as pure intellect.

What Karabel's book illuminated for me was how much of a dance Princeton and its ilk were negotiating in the 60s and 70s. Princeton et al. did not become co-ed and more diverse out of pure goodness of heart. A certain amount of idealism was definitely involved -- people at the colleges thought it was *right* that their educations, and by extension membership in America's ruling class, should be available to a wider range of candidates.

But they also knew that change was coming, and it was important for the new faces in the American power structure have some of the old labels: "Bottled at Princeton" or "Bottled at Harvard". The strength of the Expensive Higher Education brand, as it were, depended both on helping those who *should* succeed, and making sure that those who *would* succeed regardless (because of their inherited money and family) still passed through their gates.

Back when Alito was joining Concerned Alumni of Princeton to protest the University letting in a bunch of riff-raff, IIRC (from Karabel) Shelby Collum Davis argued that there was no point in wasting some of Princeton's future-leaders spots on women, because it was preposterous to think women were going to be future leaders. Similar arguments could have been (and probably were) made for black students, Latinas, Asians, and so forth.

As an aside, I assume Alito, who got into Princeton out of pure ability (poor, local, Catholic, Italian) and was always a bit outside the WASP social structure, wanted to make sure that the club door was slammed behind him, to maintain the cachet of the brand he had worked so hard to achieve.

Now, at last, we can really start to see how well the Expensive Higher Ed admissions staff from the 60s and 70s did their job. Their job was to make sure that when Americans, decades later, went looking for possible Supreme Court justices or even Presidents who weren't white men, the obvious candidates bore the Expensive Higher Ed brand names. Sotomayor, Kagan, and both Obamas represent not only great advances for American inclusiveness, but great successes for the Ivy League system and its role, good and bad, in the American power structure.

Updated to correct some errors and obscurities.

Also: I haven't seen a blog yet, left or right, where either the poster or the comments doesn't say something about Sotomayor being an affirmative action beneficiary. I can't believe it's coincidence that the one of her cases that has attracted most attention was about affirmative action. Glenn Greenwald's update this morning has plenty of links to how this is being played out.

And to those still wondering "but why does it have to be a *woman*? What about the best person for the job?" -- The display the male justices put on during the recent oral arguments about the strip-search case made it brutally clear that the current gender balance on SCOTUS is intolerable.

Blogcomment record: Speaking as a woman who was there

2009-05-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

Another old comment: This one I left at Inside Higher Ed, in the discussion surrounding the nomination of Samuel Alito to SCOTUS and his membership in "Concerned Alumni of Princeton", or CAP.

I entered Princeton in 1974, in the 5th year of coeducation. Obviously I did not know Mr. Alito, but like all other undergrads I was very familiar with CAP and "Prospect", which was distributed free around campus.

Though this article did not show it, "reactionary" was indeed the only word for CAP. For instance, in 1973 Shelby Cullom Davis (CAP's founder and moneybags) said, "Why should not a goal of 10-20% women and minorities be appropriate?" (quoted in Jerome Karabel's "The Chosen") -- this at a time when the freshman class was already 25% female and at least 5% non-Jewish minorities, not to mention around 10-15% Jews. They wanted Princeton to reverse course to be again overwhelmingly white and male, and "reactionary" is the word that fits.

As Mr. Strauss said, most students found CAP mockworthy: e.g. the halftime show at the 1974 Harvard game:
http://www.princeton.edu/~puband/halftimes/1974.html
(warning: sophmoric humor).

My problems with Judge Alito & CAP arise from his claim that he didn't remember what the organization stood for. Arguments over CAP went on for years in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (and I expect the next issue to be pretty exciting, too) and occasionally spilled over to the New York Times. Tigers don't forget things about Princeton, and we don't stop caring.

Far from being opposed to affirmative action, CAP was in favor of quotas. They wanted to limit the number of female & minority students at Princeton, and were in favor of "affirmative action" (though not so-called) to boost the acceptance rates for white males, especially those from boarding prep schools. Before Princeton went to sex-blind admissions (1974) our standards for female admits were much higher than for males, and CAP wanted to exacerbate that.

Blogcomment record: The Wealth of Nations, 1

2009-05-03T13:35:00.000-07:00

Steven Brust is reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. My comments on Chapter 1:

there is very little division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies

I absolutely disagree. Compared to, say, a baboon troop, there is enormous and striking division of labor in even the most “primitive” human society.

If you look in the Hunter-Gatherer Wiki thinking of chimpanzees or baboons as your baseline for “no division of labor”, what you’ll see is that in most cultures most jobs are the speciality of one sex or the other.

Because humans specialize, they are much better at both gathering and hunting than chimpanzees or baboons would be. Another way of looking at it is that a single human, trying to find food in the wilderness, is not going to be much better at it than a chimpanzee, and will probably die.

H-G groups start teaching girls and boys somewhat different sets of specialized skills at an early age, so by the time they’re adults they are, compared to other apes, specialized, highly-skilled, and co-dependent.

I think there’s a level of confusion here because agriculture is less skill-and intelligence-dependent than foraging. In modern terms, most agricultural work is unskilled labor; most foraging work is semi-skilled to skilled labor. There is no monotonic “progress” in specialization as you move from foraging societies to farming and then toward civilization (=cities), modern and post-modern.

Peter:

Yes, there are more specialists in an agricultural society. But *most* of the people are less specialized — less dextrous, in Smith’s terms — than their foraging forbears. That’s IMHO where the proletariat comes from — it’s only with agriculture that you get the possibility of large groups of unskilled and disposable adults.

Another old blogcomment record: The Rebel Flag

2009-04-28T17:53:00.000-07:00

David Neiwert of Orcinus had a post in February 2008 on Those Confederate Values and the use of the Confederate flag as a symbol. He wrote:

Why would the Confederate flag be an issue in northwestern Washington? Because it is a symbol of white supremacism for people well outside the South as well. This is why phony arguments about its meaning are only cover for the stark reality that anyone -- particularly anyone of color -- who is confronted by the flag knows all too well: The Confederate flag is meant to intimidate -- to trumpet the values of white supremacy. The "heritage" which it harkens back to is mostly rife with the charred corpses of lynched innocents.

My comments:

I must respectfully disagree. My knowledge is second-hand, based on the experiences of my husband.

He grew up in Atlanta -- so he saw plenty of Confederate Pride first-hand -- but he is also Jewish and grew up very well aware of its dark side.

It's his opinion that the Confederate-flag-on-the-pickup-truck guys do not necessarily choose that emblem as a symbol of white supremacy, but because they think of themselves as "Rebels". It's not about *State's* rights, either, it's about their personal rights not to do what other people say. That's one reason the flag goes along with the gun rack on their iconic pickup -- both are there to demonstrate individualistic cantankerousness.

So when you say the flag can *only* symbolize racism, I don't think that's true.

My husband also believes haystack is incorrect, it's not about "a deep-rooted respect for my elders" -- because the self-styled Rebels don't have much use for judges, teachers, or anyone else who tells them what to do. And they're just as willing to defy their state government as they are to defy the Feds -- it's just that defying the Feds is easier. It's a poor, petty, basically cowardly symbol of rebellion -- but that *is* an important part of what the Confederate flag symbolizes, and why those guys get so mad when people say it's all about race.

But what are they rebelling against? Let's be honest here, they are rebelling against those so called P.C. special rights that blacks have.

My native informant is of the opinion that many of them are rebelling against *everything* -- it's a generalized, free-floating rebellion, for a generalized, free-floating resentment.

Yes, the racism is there, and the sexism, and the anti-Semitism. But that's not what they're *thinking* of -- they're thinking of the Dukes of Hazzard, just good ol' boys fightin' the System, as they see it.

Now the fact that their actions & rhetoric end up supporting the System is thorougly ironic -- but they're not really ironic guys and they're piss-poor at perceiving social structures. So telling them that the flag on their pickup or on the roof of the General Lee can only be an endorsement of slavery will make them mad, and they'll also think you're stupid for not understanding them.

They think they're just Rebels. It's more of an emotional stance than a political attitude: Don't Tread on Me is another popular symbol used in pretty much the same way.

Not Celtic, exactly, as we will learn if Mrs Robinson has time to get around to the next parts of Albion's Seed.

Briefly, people from the Scots & Irish border areas of the UK came to the US backcountry. For centuries they had lived in a region swept back and forth by wars over which they had little control, and the result was a culture xenophobic, resentful, organized around family bonds and feuds, and libertarian. Borderers cling to custom and the idea of the past, but don't treat elderly people particularly well. They're culturally conservative but resent authority, especially when it gets all up in their faces.

As for the “rebellion” pose, why do these supreme individuals use the Confederate battle flag instead of the Jolly Roger?

Well, some *do* use the Jolly Roger, and others use the "Don't Tread on Me" flag.

As several people in this discussion have suggested, outside the area of the old Confederacy the Confederate flag is more likely to be a purely racist emblem. Inside, it's all mixed up with "Rebellion Without a Clue" (*well* put, Mitch) and local pride.

It sounds like Doctor Science is saying that the “rebels’” adoption is as ignorant of the meaning behind the symbol as that of other “rebels” who buy scrawled circle-A gear at Hot Topic.

Pretty much. There's a stronger element of pride in one's own ignorance, of willfully ignoring what might make you feel bad about yourself or your ancestors.

The thing is, I predict that in November there are going to be a surprising number of guys who will drive to their polling place in a truck with a Confederate flag decal -- and vote for Obama. And they will do this with no particular sense of dissonance, even if it makes *my* head explode thinking about it.

Obama appeals to these guys, because he makes them feel good about being American -- he makes them feel hopeful, he makes them feel like they can walk away from the past. That feeling is more important to them than the color of his skin.

Libertarianism and philosophy: some old comments

2008-12-10T20:59:00.000-08:00

Way back in June 06 there was a very long debate on Obsidian Wings that strongly influenced my thinking on a number of issues. I just realized I never posted my comments here, so I'm doing it now.

Back then hilzoy, a moral philosopher, was weighing in on a left blogostan debate about Libertarians: Can we offer them someonething to de-Republicanize them?

Libertarians And The Democratic Party: Part 1

I came to play:
-----------------------

In my observation, libertarians are people who don't believe that humans are social animals. They do not want to care about other people and they do not want other people to care about them. This at least is more honest than conservatives, who want to be cared for without being caring.

Presumably, she believes this not because she wants poor people to have untreated illnesses; I imagine that if libertarians could cure all poor people's illnesses by waving a magic wand, they would.

It's not exactly that they want poor people to have untreated illnesses, it's that they don't believe anyone should expect something (like medicine) they haven't earned, preferably in the marketplace. They certainly don't believe in magic wands -- you can't get something for nothing, everyone's got to stand on their own two feet, and if all they have is stumps, well, libertarians never told you life is *fair*, did they? So if poor people have to die to prove that life is unfair, that's just reality, not the fault of libertarians.
---------------------------------
later in the thread, I wrote:
---------------------
Gary:

It's quite possible that I *am* confusing libertarians (in general) with Randroids, because all the people I knew in my formative years who called themselves "libertarian" were, in fact, Randroids.

I am basing my opinions about libertarians not on the Libertarian Party nor even the Cato Institute, but on conversations I've had with self-identified libertarians over the years. And on Heinlein.
---------------------------------
The discussion rolled over to a part II, to discuss libertarian ideas about justice and property.:
Libertarians And Democrats: Part 2. I wrote:
-----------------
Heaven knows how long this discussion will be by the time I get my entry typed in.

Putting on my Evolutionary Biologist Hat, I say:

The "state of nature" for Homo sapiens is social. We are social animals, so our state of nature is one where we live, forage, and raise our young with other members of our species. The philosopher's state of nature is not just a theoretical construct, but untrue: it is an attempt to describe human nature in a way that is not our nature.

When I use a word, it means just what I want it to mean, and so when I say "state of nature" I mean: small groups of hunter-gatherers, related by blood and marriage, moving around a lot and interacting with other small groups from time to time. That is the human state of nature.

I agree completely with Hilzoy that Nozick and Hayek are mistaken in postulating that their concept of property is in some way the most basic, logical, or fundamental. On the contrary, it is highly derived and specialized, dependent on a particular set of social & historical constructs.

Now you see why in the other thread I described libertarians as "people who don't believe humans are social animals".

In the human state of nature we can expect ideas about property not to be based on a simple principle (such as the "labor theory of value") but on a system in which the concept "ours" is at least as important as "mine" -- because we are social animals.

Hilzoy kills the antelope and Mona comes to take it. In the human state of nature, *everything* depends on the relationship between Hilzoy and Mona.

If they are part of the same family unit, the antelope may belong to both of them regardless of who killed it, and Hilzoy may be considered immoral or thievish if she doesn't give Mona at least half.

If Mona is Hilzoy's mother or grandmother, it may be Mona's obligation to take the antelope from Hilzoy for redistribution, and Hilzoy might be a thief if she tries to hang onto it.

Or the antelope may be thought of as belonging to a goddess, and now that it is dead Hilzoy has the right to use certain parts of it, but others must be given away or burned.

None of Nozick & Hayek's views of property are found in nature.

1. you can own pretty much anything

If you look at any basic ethnography overview (the one I grabbed first is Indians of North America by Harold Driver) you see that in most societies what can be owned by individuals is restricted: tools and ordinary clothes are the most common individual property. Houses, different kinds of land, different kinds of food, ceremonial or fancy clothes and chattels, the right to farm, hunt or gather in a particular place, even songs and other incorporeal property -- all these things are usually owned by groups, anywhere from a couple to a whole tribe of tribes.

2. you can give or sell what you own at will

This is almost never the case. Even if the chattel is one you own directly, you may not have the right to sell it, exchange it, or allow others to use it. Frequently, a group will own land and have the exclusive right to use it, but not to give it away: it's basically entailed, and *must* be inherited.

3. you are entitled to all the proceeds of any voluntary transaction you enter into.

This situation doesn't correspond to much that happens in the human state of nature, but when it does the individual who makes the transaction almost never gets to keep all the proceeds.

Here's an example of modern property that is held in a way typical of the human state of nature, but doesn't correspond at all to Nozick & Hayek's views:

"My" wedding dress was made by my grandmother's sister for my grandmother's wedding. A generation later, it was worn by my aunt, and then by my mother, at their weddings. Still later, I wore it at my wedding. It is currently in storage, waiting for my daughters to grow up.

Who does this dress belong to? I wore it most recently, so N&H might say it's mine. But if you think I or anyone else in the family can give it away or sell it "at will", you're psychotically mistaken. The dress is the collective property of all the women in my family line, both living and dead. Everyone gets to use it, but no-one gets to sell it, and delicate negotiations would be required if someone else wanted to use it, e.g. a woman who married in to the family.

This dress is property, but it is about *relationships*, and property rights are really about what sorts of human relationships you think are most likely and important.
-------------
still later:
------------
My goodness, what a thinky bunch.

Jonas:

We are not merely on different pages, but seem to be reading from different books, so I'm not sure it's worth either of our times to try to understand each other better right now, especially given the stunning length of the comments here.

In general, as I think about this so very thought-provoking post and discussion, it emphasizes for me how absolutely critical it is to avoid leaping to postulates.

Nozick's postulates are deeply libertarian, so he's bound to come up with some pretty libertarian conclusions. He (and other libertarians) talk about radically individual humans, who enter only into voluntary associations, who mostly deal with strangers, for whom property is completely alienable in exchange for completely fungible money.

I'm arguing that none of these conditions are met by humans in a human state of nature (who are born into extended families, who encounter few strangers, who possess very little in the way of stuff, and who have no money at all). Because the human state of nature lasted far, far longer than our libertarian present day, thought experiments based on that state are likely to given results that fit our unconscious emotional needs, they will feel "right".

My gut reaction to Hilzoy's discussion of the "patterned view" of justice versus the "process view" is to go all Jewish-prophet-y and say, "Justice will come when you pay less attention to your damned stuff, and more to other people!"

Example: the story of Solomon and the two mothers with one baby (1 Kings 3:16-28). The evidence does not permit the King to judge which is the mother, so he says he'll do the "fair" thing and chop it in half. One mother says, "OK, that's fair", and the other says "No, give the baby to her, just don't hurt it!" By this Solomon knows that the protesting mother is the "real" one, and deserves the baby.

Solomon's threat is the threat of fairness; Solomon's justice is that he restores right human relationships. "Property justice" is not measured by a pattern -- of uniformity or otherwise -- *or* by a fair process which must logically produce fair results. "Property justice" occurs only when it supports just human relationships. It doesn't matter how fair the process, if a beggar starves while a rich man feasts *this is not justice*, because justice is about having the right human relationships.

Libertarians are extremely principled people, but my own philosophy is closer to "persons before principles" (quote from the works of Lois McMaster Bujold).

Political Branding: Family and/or Party

2008-12-03T18:23:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald posted about Nepotistic succession in the political class. GG said that this kind of near-hereditary political problem is a new and growing trend in the US; several of us wondered if that is true, in historical perspective. I wrote:

I agree that there's definitely room for a book and/or PhD thesis about political nepotism in American history. I went to Wikipedia's lists of Governors for New Jersey and Connecticut, two states (a) I've lived in (b) that go back to the beginning. Just eyeballing the lists of names (and not doing the statistics that someone really ought to do), it seems to me that there was more nepotism before the Civil War and then again after WWII.

My preliminary hypothesis would be that the intervening period was a time when political parties were extremely strong, stronger than they are now. When party is a strong identifying brand, family or name doesn't have to be -- and may even work against one. [just spent time trying to track down the pretty good book about turn-of-the-19th-century party politics I read in the spring, failed. bah.]

Preliminary prediction: nepotistic succession will be rarer in Parliamentary systems than in the US. Prelimary test: List of recent Prime Ministers of the UK, where you have to go back to Harold Wilson to find a P.M. from a political family. By comparison with the comparable period of US Presidents, the UK PM list also comes from a wider range of class backgrounds and a *much* wider range of educational backgrounds.

Very preliminary conclusion: we need either stronger parties (fewer independents, for instance), better nepotism, or some other way for rising politicians to acquire an identifiable brand.

Economicsts' mistakes

2008-12-02T05:16:00.000-08:00

Brad DeLong posted Why I Was Wrong. In the comments, I said:

I basically agree with Barry. The people who caused this mess appear to have been *flawlessly* rational actors: they have been personally enriched to a truly astounding (one might say "obscene") degree without taking any personal risk or suffering any personal consequences.

When Brad says, for instance, that he didn't expect:

"(3) the discovery that banks and mortgage companies had made no provision for how the loans they made would be renegotiated or serviced in the event of a housing-price downturn."

and

"(8) the failure of highly-leveraged financial institutions to have backup plans for recapitalization in place in the case of a major financial crisis"

I submit that he was wrong because he was expecting those organizations to act like single entities, for the people within them to work (generally speaking) for the good of the institution. Instead, to Barry and me it looks as though the most powerful people in those organizations were acting as libertarian individuals, concerned only with their own ends -- which is exactly the philosophy they claimed to admire. And it certainly seems to have worked for them, so why were you surprised?

When Alan Greenspan said "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms." I didn't believe him. How could The Compleat Randian *not* expect individuals to be looking after their personal interests first?

But the fact that Brad, whom I think is less likely to prevaricate than Greenspan, says the same thing leads me to believe that maybe Greenspan was telling the truth. You-all believed on the one hand that people are and should be rational, self-interested, selfish and greedy actors -- but you also believed the people *you* know personally, the smart and the wealthy and the powerful and the well-connected, aren't "like that".

mike: The "fat cats" are not losing compared to everybody else. In relative terms, they're still on top. In absolute terms, they're even more secure: they don't face unemployment, homelessness, loss of medical coverage; their children will not be eligible for reduced-price school lunches. They suffer no direct personal suffering.

"because of the egos and attitudes of the main participants, and as such it was not predictable"

My argument is that the ego and attitudes of the main players were *entirely* predictable, especially given that economics is about predicting human behavior. The collapse of Lehman specifically might be contingent, but that institutions without enough insider support would fail was completely foreseeable.

Is there a "Religious Left"?

2008-12-02T05:14:00.000-08:00

Tony Jones of beliefnet, responding to Jeff Sharlet, asks Is There a Religious Left? I wrote:

As "Your name"* demonstrates, the answer to Tony's question is "Yes".

Back in November 2004, Jeff Sharlet confessed it quite clearly, talking about questions he and Peter Manseau were asked while discussing Killing the Buddha:

"What’s the common denominator of American faith? What is it that most of us share?"

We lied every time. We offered up sincere but misleading tributes to freedom of speech as the American devotion. We avoided the answer that had made itself as plain as the two-lane roads we drove on: The greatest common denominator of American belief is anti-homosexuality."

I will extend that to say that opposition to women's free choice of abortion is a cross-denominational metric of the "religious right".

What these two tenets -- anti-homosexuality and anti-choice -- have in common is opposition to anything other than traditional sex roles. So:

The "religious right" is anyone who believes that the most important function of religion is to support traditional sex roles.

The "religious left" is anyone who believes that the most important function of religion is *anything else*.

Anything. If opposition to abortion and/or gay marriage is not your first-tier, make-or-break religious issue, you're on the religious left. That's all it takes. So in a way, yeah, you could say there's no "religious left", because they have no unifying principle except not thinking the patriarchy is all that. The only way the religious left could be unified is by coming out (pun intended) as anti-patriarchal.

*the homophobic troll who had made the comment before mine on the blog.

A Traditional Turkey Day

2008-11-27T11:28:00.000-08:00

As a public service, here are the recipes for My Traditional Turkey Dinner: Herb-Brined Turkey, Chestnut-Rice-Rye Stuffing, Roasted-Garlic Gravy, and Two-Cranberry Sauce with Grand Marnier.

In order of preparation:

1. Stock

6 lb turkey parts such as backs, necks, wings, drumsticks, or thighs
3 medium yellow onions, left unpeeled, then trimmedand halved
3 celery ribs*, cut into 2-inch lengths
3 carrots, quartered
6 fresh parsley stems (without leaves)
1 Turkish or 1/2 California bay leaf
10 black peppercorns
5 qt cold water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Preheat oven to 500°F, put rack on lowest level. Roast turkey parts in large ungreased roasting pan, starting skin sides down and turning once, until golden brown, 30 to 45 minutes. Transfer to stockpot with tongs, then roast vegetables in fat rendered from turkey, onions cut sides down first, stirring halfway through roasting, until golden, 10 to 20 minutes total, and then add vegetables to pot. Deglaze roasting pan with 2 cups water. Pour pan juices into stockpot with rest of water and remaining ingredients and bring to a boil over high heat, skimming froth as necessary. Reduce heat and gently simmer, partially covered, 3 hours.

Remove pot from heat and cool stock to room temperature, uncovered, about 1 hour. Pour stock through a large fine-mesh sieve into a large bowl and discard solids. Measure stock: If there is more than 10 cups, boil in cleaned pot until reduced; if there is less, add water.

Cool stock and remove fat.

2. Brine:

12-16 lb turkey
3/4-1 1/2 c salt
3 gals water
1/2 cup whole black peppercorns
1/3 cup fresh thyme sprigs
1/3 cup fresh marjoram sprigs
1/3 cup fresh sage sprigs
12 Turkish bay leaves

Clean turkey, cut off tail and reserve, along with neck. Feed rest of giblets to cat if he cares for them.

Put a turkey-sized oven bag in a large cooler, then place the turkey in the bag. Pour in the brine and seal tightly. Place ice over and around turkey, close the lid tightly, and let it brine 8 to 10 hours, adding ice periodically to keep temperature at 40° or below.

3. Stuffing

2 cups rice (brown or white)
bay leaf
fresh or dried thyme
fresh or dried sage
1/4 c. unsalted butter
3 medium onions, chopped medium
3 stalks celery plus all the leafy bits from the bunch of celery*, chopped
3 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
1 14-oz jar cooked peeled chestnuts (or boil or roast your own, but these are *well* worth the money)
1 big round Knackebrod wheel (or equivalent in other rye crackers), about 4 oz.
white wine

Cook the rice with the bay leaf, 3-4 sprigs of thyme, and 3-4 big leaves of sage.

Melt the butter in a frying pan and saute the onions and celery until the onions are translucent.

Put the rice in a big mixing bowl (or your largest salad bowl) and add the onions & celery with their butter and the eggs. Crumble in the chestnuts and Knackebrod. Crumble in thyme & sage to taste. Mix together with the hands. Taste the stuffing and add pepper if you like, but not salt -- it will get salt from the brined turkey. Moisten with white wine until it hold together nicely.

4. Turkey

Turkey, above
Stock, above
Stuffing, above
1/4 c unsalted butter, softened
1/4 cup mixed herbs, chopped: thyme, sage, parsley, winter savory
8 large cloves garlic, unpeeled
white wine
1/4 c. flour

Preheat oven to 425°F. Mash herbs into the butter.

Take the turkey out of the brine and wipe off the herbs. Wipe out the inside with paper towels, but don't obsess over getting out all the herbs & pepper. Dry off the outside with paper towels as best you can.

Loosen the skin over the breast with your hands and smear herb butter inside. Wipe your buttery hands off all over the turkey. Tuck the legs into their holder, tie or tuck up the wings. Stuff the small (head end) hollow and tuck or sew the skin flap over it. Stuff the large hollow (tail end).

Put turkey on rack over roasting pan, put in oven on lowest level, and immediately turn the oven down to 350°F. Put the remaining stuffing in a casserole and lay the neck & tail on top. Set it aside to cook after the turkey is out of the oven (because you only have one small oven).

Roast the turkey 30-45 minutes, pour a cup of stock over. Roast 30 minutes, pour over another cup of stock. After another 30 minutes, baste turkey with pan drippings. Continue to baste at 1/2 hour intervals until done.

When you figure you have maybe 30-45 minutes left (depending on size of turkey), lightly oil the garlic, wrap it all up in aluminum foil, and put it in the oven next to the turkey.

When the thermometer says the turkey is done, take turkey, pan and garlic out of the oven. Pour a cup of stock into the casserole dish of extra stuffing, put it in the oven, and turn the oven up to about 400°F. Put the turkey on the carving board to cool down. At some point while you're making the gravy you'll need to turn the neck & tail over so their greasy tastiness gets into the stuffing.

Pour off the drippings from the pan into a measuring cup so the grease rises to the top. Deglaze the pan (=heat up with liquid to scrape up tasty bits) with 1/2 c white wine or whatever you need.

Squeeze the roasted garlics out of their skins into a medium saucepan. Add 1/4 c. flour and 1/4 c grease (from the drippings) and mash the garlic into the flour and grease over medium-high heat. After everything is nicely blended, mix in the wine & deglazed goodies from the roasting pan. Pour or scoop the extra grease out of the cup of drippings, and slowly add them to the pan. When the mixture thickens up, add two cups of turkey stock. Let it thicken, then add another 2 cups. Thicken again, another 2 cups stock. Taste for salt & pepper.

Make someone else carve the turkey.

Take the stuffing that comes out of the turkey and add it to the stuffing in the casserole, or put them together in a large bowl, mixing the two lots of stuffing together for uniform tastiness.

For extra credit:

A. My cranberry sauce

2 bags of fresh cranberries, picked over
1 bag dried cranberries
orange juice
2 cinnamon sticks
4 whole cloves
4 whole allspice
about 1/4 c brown sugar
1-2 tablespoons Grand Marnier (or other orange liqueur)

Put the fresh and dried cranberries in large saucepan, add orange juice to barely cover (amount will depend on how many cranberries were bad). Add spices (reduce amount if lots of the cranberries were duds) and brown sugar. Cook over medium-high heat until most of the fresh crans have burst -- about 15 minutes. Taste, and add more sugar if necessary. Take sauce off heat, put into bowl, and add Grand Marnier to taste. Chill.

The herb brining comes from this Epicurious recipe, the herb butter from this one, the stuffing was invented by my mother (who finds traditional bread stuffings too gluey and greasy), the gravy and cranberry sauce are basically my own inventions -- insofar as anything in a traditional meal counts as any one person's invention.

*this year I used the tops from celeriac (part of our CSA farm share), instead of celery.

False accusations of rape

2008-11-25T20:26:00.000-08:00

At Shakesville, Sunless Nick posted the definitive reply to people who say false accusation of rape is as big a problem as rape. My comment, in reply to another commenter (not Nick):

I think being accused of rape when one is innocent is as bad as being raped

I think *not*. Let's put it this way, of what other crime would you say something similar?

"Being accused of murder when one is innocent is as bad as being murdered."

"Being accused of beating someone to a bloody pulp when one is innocent is as bad as being beaten to a bloody pulp."

"Being accused of kidnapping when one is innocent is as bad as being kidnapped."

"Being accused of theft when one is innocent is as bad as being robbed."

"Being accused of plagiarism when one is innocent is as bad as being plagiarized."

The last one starts to come close to what you're talking about -- but notice that for plagiarism and the accusation, neither side is actually physically hurt: both the crime and the false accusation are about issues of repute and honor. Rape is a *physical assault* -- of course it's worse than a false accusation. The only possible reason to say that a false accusation is "as bad as rape" is if you take a really old-fashioned patriarchal approach, and say that the crime of rape is really against the honor and property value belonging to the raped woman's owner (husband, father, brother). In that case, rape *is* much more like theft or plagiarism: an attack on something that belongs to you, but not a direct attack on your person, the body where your self lives.

To equate rape and false accusation like that makes the actual woman and her actual suffering unimportant, and makes it seem as though she is not a real person, not as real as a man.

Books to understand America

2008-11-25T20:20:00.000-08:00

ari at Edge of the American West put up his list of history books that would allow an interested but non-expert reader to "understand America". My comments:

Albion’s Seed is a book I’ve given as a present several times, always to great effect. I absolutely think it belongs on the list, because its social history gives the context — the bones, as it were — for the political history on the rest of the list. For me, American Slavery, American Freedom can be subsumed into Albion’s Seed — that is, ASAP fleshes out a subset of the ideas in AS.

And for giving real context to your context, I think you also need to include 1491.

And if you’re looking for a book to open the door to discuss issues about women, the frontier, land use, industrialization, and education (to name a few), there is no source better IMHO than Laura Ingalls Wilder. If you have to pick just one volume, it should probably be either Little House on the Prairie or The Long Winter.

I am not kidding.

teofilo, the mandate is “10 books to help an interested but non-expert reader to *understand America*.” I think for that purpose I would drop the Gordon Wood, which is, as ari said, over-focused. I don’t know if there’s a Revolution-through-Constitution equivalent of McPherson.

If we’re including fiction — which I certainly would — I don’t see how Moby Dick gives an enormous amount of “understanding America”; Huck Finn is the lynchpin. I’m racking my brains, but I can’t think of a fiction about 20th-century America that is as pivotal and illuminating. The defining works of 20th-century culture are on film, IMHO.

SEK:

The reason I favor Huck Finn as opposed to Moby Dick for this purpose is that both landscape and characters are so varied yet characteristically American, and the ending of the book, though IMHO a literary failure, is a failure of an extremely American type. I think MD is a better *novel*, but HF is more helpful in understanding what we are and where we come from, what kind of people America has tended to grow up and what kind of stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

Also, SEK, in what way does Moby Dick contain a “larger sociological cast” than Huck Finn? The thing that jumps out at me is that Moby Dick contains neither women nor children: it is 100% guy with no non-guy elements, so calling it sociologically large strikes me as, well, wrong.

Not that there probably isn’t a paper to be written on “Huck/Jim and/or Ishmael/Queequeg: the Interracial Bromance of American Literature”, if Eve Sedgwick didn’t write it already.

War crimes and reconciliation

2008-11-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald interviewed Scott Horton about his Harper's article on how to prosecute Bush Admin war crimes. My comments:

"Get over it", they tell me.

Recently I've posted about my hope for war crimes trials in several different fora, and every time someone pops up to tell me to "get over it".

I have a question, for those whose memory is clearer than mine.

Back in the 90s, did Democrats use the retort "Get over it!" a lot, to Republicans who were talking about Clinton's sex life, etc.? Or did this start within the 8 years, and if so, when and why? I have the vague sense that I first encountered it as a catchphrase used to dismiss misgivings about Bush v. Gore, but I may be wrong.

First the national trauma, *then* the reconciliation

South Africa could have a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" because they had already had decades of national conflict and trauma. Post-WWII Germany could have de-Nazification because their country had been bombed to flinders.

The United States has not collectively *earned* Truth and Reconciliation, because most people in this country simply don't feel bad enough about what's gone on under Bush/Cheney. Obama showed no hints of righteous wrath during the campaign, which was undoubtably politically prudent -- there's no way an *angry* black man could have won this election.

Americans are very resistant to feeling bad about ourselves, but what about when we *should*? How do we get to the point of truth and (maybe) an eventual reconciliation, unless a large proportion (even a majority) of Americans are willing to say, "this was evil and it was done in our name." I gave up hope on that account in November 2004.

Fetal rights, category errors, and the Invisible Woman

2008-11-16T20:05:00.000-08:00

At Crooked Timber, John Holbo linked to a post about category errors and whether fetuses are human. In the ensuing discussion, I wrote:

Aulus:
But I think the arguments raised in this post all apply perfectly well to the purely personal, moral question, “should I abort this pregnancy?”

It is my impression that of the participants in this (local) discussion only Katherine, aimai, and I could ever theoretically ask this question.

What the rest of you (presumed) guys are asking is, “should I permit this woman to abort this pregnancy?” By making the question, “when is the fetus a human person?” you-all are gliding over the true issue, which is: “when is the woman a person?”

Don’t tell me “of course the woman is a person!” There is no “of course” about it—we women have not (historically, traditionally, conservatively) had the full rights of “real”, male human persons. We might not have the right to own property, drive a car, initiate a divorce, vote, run for office, be a doctor, have legal custody of our own children … it has depended on circumstance. A cynical woman would not assume, a realistic woman should not assume, that she has will automatically be granted all the rights a man may assume.

In particular, I don’t think any of you male-type persons here have been told that your body does not belong to you. If your sibling needed a bone marrow donation to treat their cancer, for instance, you would not be legally obliged to give it. You would not expect to be shackled to a bed for weeks or months if necessary, to keep someone else alive—even someone you should love (whether you do or not). You would certainly not expect total strangers to come up to you and give their opinions about whether you are drinking too much coffee, or smoking, or to stroke parts of your body and discuss your medical condition, lifestyle choices, etc.

It’s possible I’m the only one in this discussion here who’s actually *been* in that position, who’s borne children and who knows what it’s like to have my body be considered public property, to a certain degree. Fortunately for your male-type people, the worst offenders (by far) are women of the grandmotherly demographic, and I can kind of understand where they’re coming from—though it is certainly not a place know to most philosophers, so I suggest you back off. Unless you can talk about things like “episiotomies” without turning a hair.

A zygote will.

No, Julian, a zygote *might*, but it usually doesn’t. To get a human being requires both a considerable amount of luck *and* months of cooperation from a woman. You don’t get to decide that the zygote—not coincidentally, the only part of the process requiring a male—is the important bit, and then force the woman’s far more substantial contribution whether she likes it or not. Not to mention blaming her for all the factors known as “luck”, which in the normal course of events doom more than half of all zygotes anyway.

jcs:

I was going for an overcurrent of anger, actually. I’m not angry because you can’t bear children, I’m angry because, once again, a bunch of men are sitting around talking about what women should do with our bodies and our lives. As echidne of the snakes said after the final Presidential debate:

It is always extremely distasteful to watch two men discuss what should be done about abortion. Always, never mind what they say.

*Always*, dudes.

Do really believe this is a legitimate analogy? I mean I am pro-choice, so you do not need to convince me, but do you really think the two situations are comparable?

Organ donation and pregnancy? Yes.

In both cases, I’m giving up use of part of my body for the benefit of another person. In both cases, the consequences for me are at minimun painful, may include permanent changes to my body, and may be life-threatening.

Differences include that organ donation doesn’t generally take 9 months of increasing physical risk and constraint, doesn’t normally involve a 20-year commitment thereafter, and is hardly ever done more than once in a donor’s life.

In what way do you see them as *not* comparable situations?

jcs:
Should I understand your position to be that no man has any business ever discussing the notions of personhood and rights as those terms may pertain to a fetus?

He has no business discussing them without even noticing the woman. He has no business talking about fetal rights without mentioning that what makes fetal rights different is that they are literally embedded in another person’s rights. To discuss fetal rights without talking about women is to make women invisible, to erase us as persons, to make us The Women Men Don’t See.

I’m not so much angry at you personally, jcs, as at the way John H. could start this discussion and you-all could take it down to comment #14 before Katherine (surprise, surprise—NOT) mentions that there is a woman in the issue. At least you, jcs, seem aware that perhaps you *should* notice the woman, instead of some of the other commenters who just glide right over her, nothing to see here, move along.