“I would note that none of these guys has a beard. Masculinity issues?” – Paul Krugman, naming and shaming other economists for elementary mistakes. He was kidding. I think.
Month: May 2013
And Now Delaware
It’s official – 11 states and the District of Colombia now have marriage equality (with Minnesota on the near horizon):
During the debate before the vote, Sen. Karen Peterson (D-Stanton) came out as gay, making her the first openly LGBT state lawmaker in Delaware. “If my happiness somehow demeans or diminishes your marriage, you need to work on your marriage,” she said during floor remarks. The new law repeals the 1996 ban on marriage for same-sex couples. Same-sex couples may begin marrying in Delaware on July 1, 2013. Delaware will no longer offer civil unions, but will recognize as marriages same-sex legal unions established in other jurisdictions. Delaware-issued civil unions will automatically be converted to marriages on July 1, 2014.
The pace and proliferation of marriage equality victories these days can make yesterday’s news seem almost banal to people. As one reader put it:
I am very pleased to see little prominent mention of Delaware passing same sex marriage today on your blog or in the news media. The idea that this could be a “non-event,” or at least a routine one, is wonderful and sort of amazing given where we were even five years ago.
Indeed, the NYT gave it a minor placement on its homepage last night and the story currently has no presence. But we posted about its imminent passage yesterday morning, combined with news about Minnesota and Rhode Island. It’s still not banal for me – or for the couples who can finally know some modicum of civil equality.
Weaponized Weather
In an excerpt from his new book, Arming Mother Nature, Jacob Darwin Hamblin highlights Cold War research and rumors about it:
One of the ideas was to melt the polar ice cap by exploding nuclear weapons on it, thus raising the global sea level. The Soviets might be considering it, so the rumor went, to drown cities in the United States and Western Europe. Another idea was to change ocean currents or temperatures to interfere with an enemy’s climate and food production. [British Air Ministry scientific advisor, E. V.] Truefitt had no idea how assess an ocean-initiated climate change, but he had made a rough calculation to determine what was needed to melt the polar ice cap. He believed that it would take about a million tons of fissile material to melt enough to raise sea level by 30 feet. “This is a large amount of fissile material whichever way you look at it,” he wrote to [oceanographer George] Deacon, “and consequently my guess is that it is not the kind of project that even the Americans would embark on under the influence of Sputniks.”
(Illustration of an satellite able to “focus sunlight to melt the ice in frozen harbors or thaw frosted crops — or scorch enemy cities” from a May 25, 1958, issue of The American Weekly.)
Combating Military Rape, Ctd
The head of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention and response branch has been charged with sexual battery after groping a woman in a parking lot over the weekend. Syreeta is slack-jawed:
[I]f your “advocate” who was supposed to investigate and seek justice for the survivors becomes a predator, how can we believe that the Air Force enforces their code of conduct? How can you combat the culture of rape and sex abuse in your own house if your “chief” isn’t present enough to see how he can become [an] abuser? This isn’t irony as much as it is a tragic indicator of how seriously the Air Force takes sexual abuse, and may be complicit in a system that turns a blind eye to abuse or brands victims “crazy” to avoid addressing the epidemic of sexual assault in the military.
A day after the arrest, the Pentagon released a new report showing that the problem of sexual assault in the military has only gotten worse:
The report from the Department of Defense’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office for Fiscal Year 2012 found a 6 percent rise in reported assaults over the last year, for a total of 3,374. But much more troubling is the estimated number of sexual assault incidents that were never officially reported. In last year’s report, there were an estimated 19,000 instances, but this year the number has jumped to an unprecedented 26,000 instances of assault, leaving thousands unreported.
Ackerman uncovers another troubling document:
An Air Force brochure on sexual assault advises potential victims not to fight off their attackers.
“It may be advisable to submit [rather] than resist,” reads the brochure (.pdf), issued to airmen at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, where nearly 10,000 military and civilian personnel are assigned. “You have to make this decision based on circumstances. Be especially careful if the attacker has a weapon.” The brochure, acquired by Danger Room, issues a series of guidances on “risk reduction” for sexual assault. …
While the brochure also explains that sexual assault is not always committed by people who “don’t look like a rapist” — attackers “tend to have hyper-masculine attitudes,” it advises — it does not offer instruction to servicemembers on not committing sexual assault. Prevention is treated as the responsibility of potential victims. “Rapists look for vulnerability and then exploit it in those who: are young (naive); are new to the base, deployment, area, etc.; are emotionally unstable,” the brochure (.pdf) continues.
The Dish has covered the issue extensively.
Should We Kill Cursive? Ctd
A reader continues the popular thread:
No cursive? Tell that to my dyslexic daughter. She mastered writing and decoding through cursive (using the Slingerland method [illustrated above], which is an excellent multi-sensory approach). Print reading and writing caused too much confusion precisely because so many printed letters look similar and/or a variants of each other (e.g. the typical b and d). She went form being behind in her class to not only zooming up to grade with reading and writing, but was fluent in cursive a full year+ before her classmates. Among many devices Slingerland uses a methodology of tracing the cursive letters in the air while seeing and saying them. It’s brilliant, and not just for dyslexics. Lots of research there to look at.
As for hand-eye-motor-brain coordination that is developed through handwriting and penmanship. I believe there is ample evidence of it’s benefits in learning. Being a product of that world versus pure keyboarding, which the new generation is being brought up on, I don’t have any direct experience. THAT is a fascinating question. How will our brains and motor skills develop and change when tots only use keyboards?
A reader with a different condition writes:
As a child, handwriting class was uniquely humiliating for me.
I stopped breathing shortly after I born, which damaged my cerebellum. As a result, my penmanship was an unsightly, illegible scrawl. Many times my instructors would berate me despite the fact that I could do nothing to correct the problem. I would be graded down on my assignments simply because my instructors didn’t want to read my sloppy answers, even when they were right. One classmate even saw my class notes and said to me, “Dan, I didn’t know you could write in Chinese.” I cannot.
Learning to type, although I do it clumsily and slowly, was a revelation. People could finally understand my writing, and it was easier for me to send messages that looked and read like they were the work of a professional. Writing anything by hand still fills me with dread. I even hate writing checks. I now make my living writing computer instructions, so all of the time I spent in school studying how to make perfect cursive letters seems like a waste. I envy people who write beautiful flowing letters, but feel no nostalgia towards creating anything like that myself.
The Skinny On Christie
The governor just revealed that he underwent a weight-loss procedure three months ago that wrapped a silicone band around his stomach. Marc Ambinder compares Christie’s operation to his own three years ago:
Christie chose the lap-band procedure because the open surgery, which has a slightly higher risk of death but fewer long-term complications, is more dangerous for the morbidly obese, although a good surgeon can mitigate the potential problems. Full gastric-bypass surgery is pretty much irreversible, while the gastric band can be adjusted. Bypass surgery leaves the stomach intact, but all food is digested elsewhere, which can make for some pretty interesting episodes in a restaurant. There are certain foods that I can’t eat, particularly those with high concentrations of sugar, and certain medicines, like aspirin, that will bore a hole in my intestines should I take them. Christie, in contrast, will be able to eat whatever he wants.
Ambers adds, “Perhaps he will bring to the Republican Party — as Mike Huckabee, the weight-struggling former governor of Arkansas did — a realism and sensitivity about the tragedy of obesity among younger Americans who have significant stress in their lives and few resources to combat it.”
“The First Modern Woman”
Gary Kelly considers the label for Mary Wollstonecraft:
[A]s a self-educated, militantly independent young woman, she set out to become what she called the ‘first of a new genus’, a ‘female philosopher’. Many at the time would have derided this phrase as an oxymoron, but by it
she meant a comprehensive social, cultural, and political critic, what we now call a public intellectual, representing women in particular and thereby all of the exploited and oppressed.
As a ‘female philosopher’ Wollstonecraft communicated her vision of modernity, responding to the prolonged crisis of her time, in a wide range of writing including education manuals, novels, criticism and essays, political and social polemic, historiography of the present, and political travelogue. Part of this political and cultural work required both modernizing these forms, reinventing them better to serve her vision of modernity, and inventing a new form of discourse, that of the ‘female philosopher’ rather than of the intellectual woman as some kind of ‘honorary man’. So radical was her invention, so modern, that still today many find it confused and confusing rather than ahead of its time, and perhaps ahead of ours.
Update from a reader:
You know I’m a big fan of E. O. Wilson, and when you mentioned Mary Wollstonecraft, I remembered that he quoted her in Consilience, page 268, in “Chapter 11 Ethics and Religion.” It is an arresting quote that I have pondered ever since:
Mary Wollstonecraft correctly said, of male domination but extensible to all human behavior, ‘No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness which is the good he seeks.’
The referenced quote is from her work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
(Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1790-1, by John Opie)
The Profanity Treatment, Ctd
A reader writes:
In your post, you quote two paragraphs about an unconventional treatment for drug and alcohol addiction. I clicked the link, hoping to find some data on the effectiveness of the treatment, and instead discovered that the man who developed it, Charles Dederich, was a cult leader responsible for a murder attempt and repeated instances of child abuse. I was shocked. I got an entirely different impression from reading the article than I did from your quotation. If I had not clicked that link, I would have gone on believing that a method used by a cult leader to control and economically exploit his followers was, in fact, a legitimate psychological treatment.
But another reader describes how that same sort of treatment had subsequently been adopted by a legit organization:
Well, this post really struck a nerve. I was a hardcore heroin/cocaine/anything-to-get-me-high addict through my late teens into my twenties. I was in and out of rehab/detox on more occasions than I can remember (and I mean that literally – there are whole years in the ’90s that I don’t remember).
But in 1998, I checked in to a behavior modification center in San Diego called CRASH. It was truly unlike anything I had ever experienced. First, it was free, whereas every other facility I’d checked into cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars (all on my parents’ dime, and I’m still making amends for that). Second, it was primarily populated with men (it’s a men’s only facility) who were mandated by the courts. These guys were gnarly criminal types. For example, my roommate toward the end of my stay had committed homicide a few years before I met him. And third, and most importantly, it was the complete opposite of any facility I had gone to before.
Every other rehab I’d been in was 30 days or less. CRASH was, at minimum, a 90-day stay. Every other facility had a team of doctors, therapists and psychiatrists. CRASH had three drug counselors, all former addicts and graduates of CRASH. Every other facility had either a pool, a meditation garden, a gourmet buffet, a private room, a spiritual walking trail, a horseshoe pit, or some combination of these. CRASH had none of that. All it had was a stark, ugly, utilitarian building in the middle of the ghetto, with two or three men to a room.
But this was not rehab – it was behavior modification. The core of the program consisted of “giving treatment” to the other residents.
What this meant, in essence, was that twice a day, the 50 or so men would sit in a circle in hard plastic chairs in the treatment room, with their feet flat on the floor and their hands palm down on their knees (this was called being “posted up”), along with the counselor who supervised the group. The counselor would be holding “slips,” which were small pieces of off-white paper on which were the name of one of the residents and some rule they had broken, as reported by another resident.
The infractions themselves were generally fairly minor and absurd – Jim didn’t make his bed this morning, David didn’t complete his chores, Mark was talking to a girl at the AA/NA meeting. But the “treatment” that was given by other residents around these seemingly small mistakes was anything but minor or absurd. When your name and your infraction got called, it was open season. You had to sit there, posted up, while 49 other men unleashed on you for whatever you had done wrong. This was a typical exchange:
Counselor: Jason, the slip says you were four minutes late for breakfast this morning. Does anyone have anything to say to Jason about this?
Resident 1: Man, you’re always fucking late. You think that’s gonna cut it on the outside, at a job or something?
Resident 2: Job? Jason ain’t never gonna get a job. He’s a piece of shit. No one would hire him.
Resident 3: Man, Jason, YOU’RE A DISRESPECTFUL MOTHERFUCKER. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY WE WASTE OUR TIME ON YOU. WHY DON’T YOU JUST FUCKING LEAVE ALREADY.
And it would escalate from there. Everyone in the room got a chance to take a swipe, and you just had to sit there – feet flat on the floor, hands on your knees – and take it. But then, like that, they would be done with you and move on to the next slip, another guy, and now it was your turn to yell all crazy about how he didn’t clean the pubic hair off the shower wall well enough during chore time.
The punishment for violating rules was “time on the bench.” This consisted of sitting on a hard wood bench, posted up, in one-hour increments. Bench time was assigned by the counselor, and was seemingly arbitrary – this guy got an hour for oversleeping through a whole meeting, whereas that guy got four hours for being two minutes late to the same meeting. Everyone hated bench time, but looking back, I think that being alone with my thoughts an hour at a time was maybe exactly the thing I needed most.
The first day I was in CRASH, I almost walked out, because it all seemed so fucking crazy. I didn’t leave, though, because I really had nowhere else to go.
By my final day (101 days later), I was giving treatment with the best of ’em. I was shouting down armed robbers, rapists, killers, and petty thieves about putting their cigarette butts out on the ground instead of in an ashtray or not writing enough slips on other guys (yes, this was a real reason to slip someone – if they didn’t call out other residents to an acceptable degree). At the end of my stay, I felt better about my life going forward than I had in years (though I was truly scared to leave when the time came to walk out the doors alone). I was healthy and happy and had a job in a small, hip coffeeshop lined up. I felt like the men I had been in CRASH with were my family.
That was my behavior modification experience, 15 years ago now. I’m not sure CRASH even exists anymore (just googled it – it’s still there). For a couple months after I moved out, I stayed in touch with some of the guys I had become friends with in CRASH, but that faded as I found people in other recovery groups closer to my own age, with more similar interests (I was very into the indie music scene then, whereas I doubt anyone I was in CRASH with knew about Drag City and Touch and Go Records).
I’m 40 now, the father to a wonderful 13-year-old son, engaged to be married in the fall, and have a great extended family. I graduated college in 2002, and grad school in 2006. I own and operate a $50 million a year business, where I am able to employ a number of bright, amazing people. And I haven’t touched drugs since the day before I went into CRASH.
That is my behavior modification story. It’s probably too long and possibly boring, but reading that post about Synanon (and the link it went to) just overwhelmed me with memories. This is the first time I have written about my experience at CRASH, and I guess I needed the catharsis … thank you!
The Daily Wrap
Today on the Dish, Andrew posted a notice for a new Dishtern, reiterated his opposition to meddling in Syria’s civil war, and put Obama on notice regarding the release of the torture report. He explained his embrace of Keynesian economics in an era that calls for it, declared the Burekean origin of Anglo-American conservatism, and eyed the fraying edges of the Eurozone and the EU. Elswhere, Andrew spotlighted a worthwhile documentary on drag culture, agreed with Albert Camus on the true payoffs of independent journalism and kept tabs on the push for marriage equality in Minnesota.
In political news and views, we registered new evidence that Earth has never been hotter as Josh Fox listed some red state reasons to oppose fracking. We noted Obama’s principle that Dwight makes right, separated the Syrian rebels’ hippies and jihadis, and Hamza Mohamed filed from Somalia, the world’s dodgiest country for correspondents. Victor Davis Hanson earned a Malkin Award nod for his Benghazi hyperbole, Tim Verstynene poked and prodded at Obama’s BRAIN program, and Salman Rushdie took a shapshot of global censorship in 2013. Later we followed the grim story of Amanda Berry, who fled her kidnapper of ten years and met the federal employees protesting sequestration in the Face of the Day.
In assorted coverage, we questioned the literary value and legacy of The Great Gatsby, took a tutorial in the languages of Game of Thrones, and Berlatsky sensed the overlap between male and female fiction. We connected the dots between mental health and HIV, let readers ask Sue Halpern anything, and Matthew Battles traced the moment that gave us the term “computer bug.” Readers reflected on the imperfect glory of country singer George Jones and observed the perils of unintentional pop plagiarism.
Edward McClelland investigated the shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, the first plastic handgun emerged from its 3-D printer, and we learned that happy tweets come on vacation. We revealed this week’s VFYW contest, Jon Rauch took apart the myth of gay “choice,” and we sampled smogged and non-smogged Beijing in the VFYW before enjoying a bite-sized share of Malick for the MHB.
–B.J.
Primetime Tongues
A fun fact about one of the most popular shows on TV:
More than 5m people now hear a few words in Dothraki or Valyrian, the fabricated languages spoken in the television series “Game of Thrones”, each week—more than the number who hear Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic combined.
How fictional languages mimic real one:
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, were influenced by Finnish and Welsh, two languages that Tolkien loved. Navi includes popping-like sounds found in Georgian and Amharic, but few English ones, to enhance its foreignness. Estonian’s negative verb system inspired Dothraki’s. Inventors also insert systematic irregularities into the language by imagining how it might have evolved over hundreds of years. They decide which words should exist and which should not: Dothraki has no word for toilet, for example, but (being the language of horse-riding warriors) more than 20 for horse.
For those really interested, Denise Martin is sorry to report that everyone is mispronouncing “Khaleesi”:
But don’t feel bad. On the HBO show, her smitten man-servant Jorah has been saying it incorrectly as well; the more accurate pronunciation should be “KHAH-lay-see,” not “ka-LEE-see.” That’s according to David J. Peterson, the language creator responsible for all of the Dothraki and Valyrian dialogue spoken on the show, and he’s driven mad every time he hears it. “Ugh. God. That’s not how it’s supposed to sound,” said Peterson. “The vowel change bugs me.” As the architect of the language’s grammar and pronunciation rules, he’s the only one who can correct it with authority, but he lost the battle to correct the pronunciation on the show early on. “The producers decided they liked the other way better. They probably thought most people were pronouncing it that way anyway, which is true.”
The Dish 