Month: May 2012

In the above video Pinker touches on how our understanding of democracies as peaceful has changed. Scholars now believe it may be the capitalism that really prevents war-making (see China). A recent review challenged Pinker on similar territory:

Since democratic nations reportedly don’t go to war with each other, they are said to be more peaceful than (say) military dictatorships. Pinker neglects to inform us, however, that they can form coalitions of the willing so as to export democracy through warfare, and there is negligible mention of the scale of resources absorbed by military activities in ‘peace loving’ democracies. The role powerful democratic nations play in supporting repressive regimes (through arms sales and foreign policy) is similarly obscured via an emphasis on “gentle commerce” (p.165 et al). According to Pinker, a “free market puts a premium on empathy” (p.77) because it encourages trading partners to see things through one another’s eyes, thus curtailing their violent impulses.

Previous videos of Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, here, here, here, and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

Beinart marvels at Obama's disastrous – but shrewd – approach to Afghanistan: 

As policy, Obama’s surge was a mess. But politically, it worked wonders. Had Obama opposed any surge back in 2009, when the public—and the GOP—had far more stomach for war than they do now, the political consequences might have been brutal. … Instead, Obama kicked the can down the road, delaying the public admission of defeat until now, by which point America’s failure is so obvious that barely anyone bothers to object. Essentially, he played rope-a-dope, giving Petraeus & Co. the chance to prove what one suspects Obama already believed: that counterinsurgency in Afghanistan had no chance.  

Finally, a Democrat who knows how to play the politics of national security and win.

But political victories can carry a human price. According to iCasualties, more than 1,300 Americans have died in Afghanistan since Obama took office, more than twice the number that died under George W. Bush. And since it is highly unlikely that Afghanistan’s future will be significantly different because America withdrew its combat troops in 2013 instead of 2009, one can reasonably ask: what did the United States accomplish during those four years that can possibly justify their deaths? It’s disturbing that Barack Obama doesn’t have a good answer to that question. It’s even more disturbing that politically, he doesn’t need one.

Paul Miller is less forgiving:

If Obama sincerely believed the war was either unimportant or already lost, he had a moral responsibility to the soldiers under his command to order their immediate withdrawal; or, contrarily, if he believed the war was still important and winnable (which it is), he had a responsibility to go "all in" and give the troops everything they needed for victory. He did neither, seeking to do just enough to get credit for trying while avoiding an even larger commitment that would have dominated his presidency. 

The moral component of politicking a war is acute here. But we shouldn't attribute magical foresight to the president. I see little here that is more troubling than the surge in Iraq. That too was effectively a face-saving strategy to stabilize the country enough to get out. Americans died to invade and occupy Iraq; they also died to put a nice gloss on a still-unresolved sectarian conflict. At least, in Afghanistan, we leave Karzai, for as long as he survives. In Iraq, Americans died to install one of their most formidable foes and killers, Moqtada al Sadr, in the center of the new government.

This is Obama at his coldest. Which is very, very cold.

Brian Earp savages the studies purporting to show that male genital mutliation would prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS in African countries:

The "randomized controlled clinical trials" upon which these recommendations are based represent bad science at its most dangerous: we are talking about poorly conducted experiments with dubious results presented in an outrageously misleading fashion, toward public health recommendations on a massive scale whose implementation would have the opposite of the claimed effect, with fatal consequences. Read that sentence again if you want to get the point.

Here's how the mutilation-beats-HIV crowd conducted the tests (pdf):

While the "gold standard" for medical trials is the randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, the African trials suffered [a number of serious problems] including problematic randomisation and selection bias, inadequate blinding, lack of placebo-control (male circumcision could not be concealed), inadequate equipoise, experimenter bias, attrition (673 drop-outs in female-to-male trials), not investigating male circumcision as a vector for HIV transmission, not investigating non-sexual HIV transmission, as well as lead-time bias, supportive bias (circumcised men received additional counselling sessions), participant expectation bias, and time-out discrepancy (restraint from sexual activity only by circumcised men).

And here's how they came up with that stunning conclusion that mutilating the penis reduces HIV transmission by a relative 60 percent:

Across all three female-to-male trials, of the 5,411 men subjected to male circumcision, 64 (1.18%) became HIV-positive. Among the 5,497 controls, 137 (2.49%) became HIV-positive, so the absolute decrease in HIV infection was only 1.31%, which is not statistically significant.

Go deeper into the studies he cites and links to and it seems quite clear to me that this massive campaign to rid Africa of foreskins is likely to accelerate HIV transmission rather than slow it.

You know you want one.

Another reader shares her story:

Lord have mercy, but this thread is cosmically poignant to me right now. I don’t know if you want to post another story, but I needed to write this. Thanks for the forum.

Last Monday, six days after I voted against the amendment in North Carolina that would protect the sanctity of marriage by stomping on the rights of gay couples, I told my husband that as much as it saddened me, we needed to divorce. We’ve been married for nearly 25 years and have two great teenagers, but I found out seven years ago that he was gay. We have worked mightily to reach some sort of an accord that would keep our marriage and our family intact. But I just can’t do it anymore.

I knew he would never pull the plug on our marriage, so fierce is his guilt over what he’s done to me. Over the past seven years, I have passed through all seven stages of grieving that Kubler-Ross outlines, because I was in mourning for the life I thought I had and the future that I thought we would have. It’s taken this long for me to let go.

As soon as I told him that the end was here, the emotion in second place to our sadness was relief … for both of us. The day we had both been dreading but knew deep down had to come was finally here. We will tell our children the whole truth once school is over. We feel they are old enough to understand now, and it is important that they know why we are separating so the cycle of secrets can stop.

When we got married, he was sure that he had put "those" feelings behind him for good, relieved that he wouldn’t be disappointing his parents. He was optimistic about having it all: the wife, the family, the career – things he didn’t feel he could have had if he’d chosen to be openly gay in the late 1980s. So he pushed it all away until he couldn’t deny it any longer and he left enough breadcrumbs for me to figure it out.

And it is all just so sad. I have to part ways with the person that I thought I would grow old with, who knows me better than any human on earth, who laughed out loud with utter joy when our daughter was born, who read each Harry Potter book aloud to our son until he was old enough to read them himself. I’m not mad at him anymore. I’m just so very sad.

A son's perspective:

My mother started to have doubts about my father being gay 10 years into their marriage of 20. When my family moved to Canada in 2000, my parents split, saying they just couldn't get along anymore. A year later, my mother was bringing my sister to my father's place one night only to find my father kissing a young Asian man in front of the house. Both my mother and sister reacted very strongly, both in disgust.

My mother will never forgive my father, which I understand. She told me this terrible statement after it came out that my father is gay: "Your father never fucked me for 20 years and I thought it was my fault". For her, he stole her womanhood; he stole the possibility of making love and being loved by a man who desired her. That's what hurt me the most.

Previous stories here and here.

John Edwin Mason retches:

[I]t's possible that nobody at the company knew that Belgium's King Leopold and his minions were responsible for one of the most brutal and all-encompassing forced labor systems that the world has ever known. It's possible.  But how, then, would we account for the ad's tag line:  The Horror? That tag line tells us that whoever designed this ad knew about the crimes of the Congo.  Knew that Joseph Conrad had written about them in his great novella Heart of Darkness.  Knew that Conrad had put the words "The horror!  The horror!" into the mouth of his character Mr. Kurtz, the colonial agent who decorated his outpost with the severed heads of his African victims.

Turn left:

Corn mazes are designed to trick participants, and studies have shown that most humans will naturally, when confronted with a fork in the road, turn right; the hour I spent last night testing this on satellite images of corn and hedge mazes absolutely proves that clever maze-makers love to play on your instincts. (Side note: I’ve heard that that turning-left tip is also a good strategy for avoiding long lines at amusement parks.)

Update from a reader:

An even easier way to escape a corn maze: Just keep a hand on one wall. Doesn't matter which one, just pick left or right when you enter and then follow the path that keeping a hand on that wall leads you along. Unless the maze was created by a sophisticated designer, this trick will always eventually lead you to the exit. Here's a nice brief illustration.

A British company is auctioning off a vial of Reagan's blood – it was apparently "collected" after he was shot by John Hinckley in 1981. David Graham isn't fazed by the appetite for a "true medieval-style relic": 

The still-young United States — deprived of the bones, blood, and fading locks of centuries-old saints, as well as a state church to celebrate them — has long made a habit of fetishizing relics from our late presidents instead. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, a famous photograph of the bloodstained sheets in Washington's Peterson House where he had lain entered popular circulation, and artifacts were distributed. The bed in which he died is now in the Chicago History Museum. A stained pillow ended up in the Peterson House, and a chair went to the Henry Ford Museum.

(Image from the auction website)

Requires cultural change:

While rules and penalties can and do deter wrongdoing, broader social changes do a lot more. In the 1960s, drunk driving and littering were winked at even amongst the "respectable" classes: public education campaigns, new laws, and cultural shifts that resulted made both of them socially unacceptable and, as a result, the roads are safer and public places cleaner than they were. The same thing needs to happen with prison rape. Until it does, however, the extraordinary prevalence of sexual abuse in prison will remain a great moral failing of modern America.